Turning Scars Into Art Can Be Strangely Therapeutic

On the day of her scarification, Amory Reed stepped outside the tattoo and piercing parlor Pens & Needles, in downtown Colorado Springs, for a cigarette. Reed was waiting for her artist to finish the stencil, from which a large lion's face would be etched into her belly.

This short wait was the end of a long one; she'd been dreaming about doing this for years. After three children, a hysterectomy, and a couple of emergency abdominal surgeries, her stomach was "not at all attractive anymore," and she wanted to make something beautiful from it. "Instead of looking at my body and hating it, we would turn it into art," she decided. The stencil incorporated her scars and stretch marks.

Reed smoked on the Weber Street sidewalk with her shirt tucked up and her stomach exposed, since it had already been cleaned for the procedure. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the parlor's resident photographer start taking photos of her. "I'm just trying to pretend he's not there because my belly's hanging out and I'm feeling very self-conscious," she tells me. "I'm thinking, 'Oh god, why are you taking my picture?'" Then she heard him say, "Man. I just love how you give no fucks. You are so empowered."

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As a teenager, Reed coped with depression by cutting herself. Self-harm was a way to relieve intense emotions. "People think, 'You're just hurting yourself, why would you do this to yourself?', not understanding that it's not about the scars. It's about the release," she says.

When she got her scarification, which required five hours of scalpelling, "that emotional release was still there, ten-fold." It felt light and freeing, she says, like an intense meditation. In Reed's mind, scarification is "just a different form to get that release, one that's a little more accepted and a little bit more visually appealing to the masses."

Kari Wold, who's now a practicing psychologist in Kansas, found something similar in her master's research on self-harm. While people with a history of self-harm weren't more likely to have tattoos and piercings than the control group, they were more likely to identify negative emotion regulation as a reason for getting them. "People self-harm to relieve emotional distress," Wold explained. That's also why some people tattoo, pierce, and scar their bodies.

But aside from the temporary release, self-harm is "a way to work through things," Reed says. (One study found that 92 percent of patients said their self-harming was linked to previous life experiences, such as abuse, bullying, family stress, or illness in the family.) Likewise, Reed's scarification helped her work through emotions "in the back of my mind, because it gets you into that state of flow where your mind can just kind of let go of those things."

According to Yochai Ataria, a neurobiology post-doc at the Weizmann Institute of Science, body modification can be "a way of attacking traumatic memories." By objectifying and projecting the trauma onto one's own body, one can assert control over it. As one piercee put it twenty years ago, "I'm getting pierced to reclaim my body. I've been used and abused. My body was taken by another without my consent. Now, by the ritual of piercing, I claim my body as my own. I heal my wounds."

Lawrence Rubin, a tattooed psychologist and professor at St. Thomas University in Florida, describes body modification as a series of personal choices: "I choose when the pain starts. I choose where the pain centers. I choose when the pain stops. I choose the design. I chose the scar pattern. I choose the implantation."

His son Zachary, who's 23 and has 17 tattoos, says he has different tattoos for different reasons: Some are stupid, some are artistic, and a couple are rebellion tattoos from when his dad told him he couldn't get one.

When Zachary gets tattoos, he doesn't think about anything except how awesome it is. It's just, "Sit down. I'm doing this, and no one else can do anything about it. I'm doing it to my own body, and I like what I'm doing to my body." Interestingly, research suggests that individuals who are moderately or heavily tattooed are more confident after getting one. Zachary's latest tattoo honors a new religion he found, whose gods demand self-reliance. "You don't depend on them to help you through life," he explains.

But sometimes, his dad thinks, tattoos are just "some stupid fucking thing you do that never comes off." Rubin put his own most recent tattoo idea on hold in part because his wife detests them. Instead, he got a sports car.

Reed says her scarification was "everything I dreamed." When she looks at herself naked in the mirror now, she no longer resents her body. "I'm like, 'Oh,'" she says to me with soft, sweet surprise. "'It's beautiful.'" Read This Next: The People Who Make You Look Good Are Suffering