Now, Tamela reports that she has gone six months without cutting herself. She says the intervention itself helped change her. "I had no idea how many people supported me and loved me, because I had no value of myself so I couldn't see the love in other people," she says. "And when I was confronted by my family and friends, I was blown away about how much I impacted their lives and how much I meant to them."
Tamela reflected on her history of violent self-mutilation. She says that, though she had experimented with cutting when she was younger, she began doing it more frequently when she began seeing her now ex-boyfriend, Rod. "My value, my self-esteem just went the lowest that it's ever been, and I didn't know what to do with all these feelings," she says. "I was feeling so intense I didn't know how to express that."
The psychological treatment Tamela received after her intervention has allowed her to deal with her feelings about her molestation, which have alleviated her desire to cut herself. "I lost a lot of respect for men, you know, just because after I got molested, I had relationships that didn't mean anything," she says. "They were just purely sexual or purely for attention. So I would seek out guys that would give me that kind of attention. So the men that I saw, of course I had little respect for them and the way they acted."
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