Dawn's Self-Cutting, WHY??

I

InLoveWithBuffy

Faith will be my faith
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When Dawn heared that she is The Key, why she self-cutted herself with a knife? I know that when i used to cut myself it made me feel litle bit better, but why Dawn did this? Why she felt so bad for being The Key? Can someone explain this?
 
D
DrusillaRox
I've put a post similar to what im going to say, so i'll say in reputation, she was really hurt that she was not real and she couldnt understand that pain, so she trandferred and gave herself real pain
Same here, but whereas with us it was depressive, Dawn had just learned she wasn't real and mentally was unable to really deal with it, she did what she thought would prove it, do something that a "real person" would be harmed by, and she was.

She thought if she could see blood it would mean she was real, like the old joke, if you think you're asleep pinch yourself, it'll only hurt if you're awake.
 
I don't think it was to make herself feel better as much as it was to try and prove to herself and the others that she was real. If she bleeds like any other person when she is cut, then she must be human. Don't think it convinced her though. It also helped establish the "Summer's blood" thing.
 
November
November
[No message]
Airam
Airam
Aww, i've got the smartest adoptive parent around :)
Well, Buffy's already dealt with being the chosen one, so I don't think she would have been quite so freaked. She would have felt even more isolated though, and I doubt she would have coped with the events of "The Body".
 
Five by Five said:
I don't think it was to make herself feel better as much as it was to try and prove to herself and the others that she was real. If she bleeds like any other person when she is cut, then she must be human. Don't think it convinced her though. It also helped establish the "Summer's blood" thing.
Click to expand...

And maybe the whole cutting thing was like a refence to that Dawn is really a teen aged girl, not a the mysterious energy=Teh Key
 
I thought the whole thing was just to prove she was "real".
It's been a long time since I was a teen, but I imagine that if someone told me I was a mystical "key" and all my memories were made up, I'd kinda wanna cut myself to see if I bled and if I did, to show everyone I was as real as they were.

I've never BEEN a cutter, but I thought the mentality around it was to FEEL. That the people who do it don't feel like they're real like everyone else and think the pain and the blood makes them more a "part" of everyone else.
This really makes no difference, except for that is what they SAY about people who are cutters. So, if the writers heard this, they well could have taken that and realized it fit for Dawn quite well, at the moment and kind of tossed it in.

I've always liked Buffy for just this reason. Kind of addressing the same things normal "teen" shows do but not shoving it down your throat. It's one of the reasons I really liked Willow's magic addiction. It was the same lesson and yet SO much more fun than another "main character on diet pills" or something like that.
 
Kemy
Kemy
Yeah Joss obviously wanted it to double as an allagory to teenage self harm issues.
Dlou444 said:
I've always liked Buffy for just this reason. Kind of addressing the same things normal "teen" shows do but not shoving it down your throat. It's one of the reasons I really liked Willow's magic addiction. It was the same lesson and yet SO much more fun than another "main character on diet pills" or something like that.
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I always thought that Willow's magic addiction was referral to Teen Girls Getting Drunk or drug addiction....
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Edit:
[br][/br]
Metaphor, that was the word I was looking for! thanks Kemy for using that word
 
Kemy
Kemy
It was a metaphor for drug addiction
Airam
Airam
yes the magicrack
Hey those diet pills are UPPERS! Are diet pills not drugs?
If not, my parents really scared me off EVERYTHING didn't they?
BRAVO MOM AND DAD!
 
Yeah, I think Dawn did the cutting to prove she was real. Spike just told her the monks had sent 'mystical energy' in the form of a sister, essentially wiping out Dawn's entire existence by this revelation. Cutting herself told her she was there she existed. When Buffy and Joyce run over to Dawn she says to them 'Is this blood? I'm not a key, I can't be a key' because the blood proves she was human.

Lots of 'cutters' (I put that in inverted commas because I hate that term and the term 'self-harmers'; it's too categorized) claim that was the same reason they did it. To prove they were still here, real despite what they were going through. Within a Buffy context this reason was just an entire other level. It was both a literal message and a metaphorical one I think, which was nice. Well not nice as in nice-nice...oh you know what I mean.
 
L
Lou
LOL! Yes, that warm fuzzy feeling that comes from teenagers slicing themselves open! AHHHH! JK...I know what you mean! ;)
Self harm is not always about feeling it is also about control.

When everything is falling apart around you someone who does self harm may do it to have some control over themselves!

If that makes sense!
 
November
November
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crabby patty said:
Self harm is not always about feeling it is also about control.

When everything is falling apart around you someone who does self harm may do it to have some control over themselves!

If that makes sense!
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I've heard that same reasoning for anorexia, bulimia . . . just about any self-destructive behavior. You can't control your life, but you can control what you put into your body--so you put nothing in there. Or you force it to leave. Or you control your physical pain by cutting. It makes sense, though it's not psychologically healthy.
 
I've heard from my best friend that when she cuts herself, she tries to forget something and pay attention to the pain. What if Dawn tried to forget that she was The Key?
 
KEVIN: So I heard you, like, had a freak-out and cut yourself.
DAWN: Uh, no, not even. It was a whole ... it was so not...
KEVIN: I've felt like that before. Things get so crazed, you know, you just feel like you wanna do something ... extreme.
DAWN: Yeah. I just ... I had a lot of intense stuff going on. A lot of people don't understand that. Pain.
(The Body)

I think little Kevin here kinda gets it right.

Dawn was hurting. That's the explanation.
When you hurt like that, you don't get it. Because the pain is so vivid and yet, no open wound, no broken bone. You cannot deal with the pain because it's unknown, it's new, it's like nothing you've seen or heard of before. It just questions your own life, your own being, which is just the exact same thing Dawn is dealing with. So, in order to make the pain into something you can deal with, you have to locate it, and therefore to place it somewhere. So you hurt yourself physically so you know where it hurts, and so you can see it, really feel it and have an explanation for it, understand it.

I also believe it's about control, as some of you said. Dawn's life was just totally unraveling, nothing she had lived was real, man, she wasn't even real ! That's the feeling teens can get. They're not as good, they're not as strong, so they're not as alive, not as "here" as the others are. And they cannot control it. So they try to control it, or at least to control something. It's a quest for answers, for control in your life, and for somehow purity.

That's it, I believe. It's about misplacing your anger, your focus, your hunger for control and understanding, just so you can have the brief feeling of satisfaction when you feel like you've got it. But in fact, well, you really haven't.

I totally agree with you, Blondie Bear. Food disorders are to be put in the same category... And it takes a lot of self-control and will to be able to put oneself out of this...

Okay that post was just so depressing, I'm sorry.
 
Well there is the whole idea that she was so upset at the fact she wasn't an 'original' person and was created, so took a knife to her skin. As Spike has said, 'blood is life' so she was spilling some to show her own life

So her brain is telling her that she is a human being, a real person, and on the other hand she knows she was created. It must have been so difficult to contemplate!

And on the other hand, it's an adolescent thing to self harm, and expressed an avenue of 'teen angst'
 
I
InLoveWithBuffy
i hate that "teen angst" word because most of people don't know the story behind of why someone is cutting him/herself
i knew plenty of people who self harmed as a teenager and plus i gotta agree with the theme of blood (even had to be angels back in becoming part 2)
 
It's not really a question of why self-injurers do it, but why Dawn did it. I self-injure (currently in recovery) but I can't say Dawn did it for the same reasons I do it. Each person that self-injures has a unique reason. I think Dawn's reasoning was, as many have said, to feel "real," to validate the pain. I think she needed proof that she was real, not a lie, not a ball of mystical energy, but a person with thoughts and feelings and blood. And perhaps, as Kevin said, she wanted to do something extreme so that her mom and sister would take notice of her pain. Sort of a "screw you for keeping this from me" in a sense.
 
Maybe its just Dawn wanting attention... lol jokes. I agree with what you guys said about her wanting to prove not only to herself, but to the others, that she was a human and had the same biological build up as everyone else, therefore making herself be seen as 'real'.
 
U
untouched
i agree with the wanting attention lol but yeah, she wanted to prove herself and everyone around her she was real
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