Dr. Jody Dempsey

Images of Me Dr. Jody Dempsey

'Cutting' is a term most would associate with activities such as chopping vegetables or skipping school. . For Molly Mitchell, and for thousands of other emotionally tortured kids, it means finding a sharp object and drawing it across the skin on your arms, or legs, or stomach until the blood seeps out in the little rivulets that purge the pain within. At least for a little while. Molly, sixteen and struggling with the process of growing up, is trying to find her identity in a world complicated by divorce, social alienation, and a girl-toxic culture. She has been handicapped in her journey by the divorce of her parents, and she vacillates with feelings ranging from anger to alienation. She is estranged from a father she feels abandoned her, and distant from a mother self-absorbed by her own pain. Molly has a difficult time deciding if her high school is a safe haven or a threat, and she longs to find something to believe in and, more importantly, someone to believe in her. And at night, when the hurt is too much, Molly takes a razor between her thumb and fingers and pulls it across her flesh, over and over, weaving a bizarre quilt of emotional despair, scars on the outside to distract from the wounds within. Confronted with the mounting pressures adolescents face today, Molly has resorted to the self-mutilation that is an increasingly common and perverse coping mechanism for an alarming number of our youth. These obstacles increasingly surround her until one fateful night when her fragile life falls apart. She finds herself transported to a new world where she begins to understand and confront the demons in her life, rather than to deflect and dull the external pain with self-induced, internal pain. She gets to know herself when she comes to know other teens twisting in the winds of life and learns to trust in them and then in herself. She and her family also begin the painful but necessary process of peeling away the complex layers of hurt that have festered among