2008 - Communication Across the Curriculum (CAC)

D o c u m e n t e d E s s a y
were comfortable talking about their experiences. All of the
information was collected from spring 2005 to spring 2006 when
researchers interviewed the group of people chosen. They asked
about the conditions of their experience, explaining the incident
in detail and answering some questions, and then looking back
on the importance of what occurred. They then went into deep
conversation with each person and let them share whatever else
they wanted to talk about or what they felt was significant for
the researchers to have knowledge of. They audio-taped some
of the conversations and then went back and compared each
of them to evaluate and examine everything talked about. As
they looked through each of the interviews they began to see
similarities in each student’s experience.
All of the people had family issues and many of them learned
how to “cut” themselves because of their friends or people at
school referring it to them as a solution to their problems. At
the beginning most of them were scared to create that first cut
and finally just did it without thinking. Some of them said that
they did it to get everything out of their system, for instance
when they became angry, instead of yelling or inflicting pain on
others they would take it out on themselves. Others used it as a
controlling factor when they felt that they were not in control of
anything else in their lives. One of the boys said that when he
cut himself and saw the blood it took him into his own little world
full of puddles of blood. He was happier there. It became a way
of living, helping them avoid their problems, crying, and showing
any type of emotion. Everything was great until people started
finding out about their way of coping with life. People would
start telling them how terrible it was and their parents/friends
would yell at them to stop. The yelling accomplished nothing, it
made them feel worse and desire to harm themselves more to
forget about it. Part of the reason for kids doing this was to get
attention, positive attention from somebody who cared about
them and would talk to them instead of badger them about how
awful they were for doing such a thing.
The result of this experiment was that all of these people just
needed someone to talk to who cared about them and listened
to what they had to say. They all had problems that they did not
know how to deal with or properly handle. Instead of talking to
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