Cutting can be very confusing from the outside. We’ve talked about how your stress-response systems can become overly reactive, how anyone experiencing inescapable and unavoidable trauma will dissociate—and how, if the pattern of this trauma is prolonged or extreme, the dissociative systems become sensitized: overactive and overly reactive. Remember that dissociation releases opioids (enkephalins and endorphins), your own painkillers. If a person without a sensitized dissociative response cuts themselves, their body releases a little bit of these opioids so that they can tolerate the cut; the
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