My father was more understanding. He, too, was a bit shocked initially, but he recovered quickly, and was supportive and encouraging.

My parents put filters on all their computers and devices at that point, which I was happy about — at least when I didn’t feel the urge to go online and see bad stuff. When I did feel the urge, it was frustrating. Even with the filters in place, I could, technically, find ways to get to the sites I wanted, but most of the time, it wasn’t worth the effort. And with the principal waiting for my text every night, I found myself refraining more often than not.

Each night, I updated the principal on how many consecutive days I had been clean. I made it to 90 days. Then I slipped. I didn’t text the principal for a few days, so she texted me. “Chedvah, I didn’t hear from you. What’s going on?”

I went back to zero and started counting again. It was like counting sefirah: one day, then two, then three. The principal got her nightly texts again. I managed to stay clean for a full year. But during that time, I picked up a new, ugly habit.

Shortly after I swore off the Internet, Sari, a girl in my class whose parents had recently divorced, showed me some red gashes on her leg. “How did that happen to you?” I asked her in horror.

“I cut myself,” she said proudly. And she described to me how she had done it.

The next time my mother yelled at me, I went up to the bathroom and cut myself, the way Sari had described. It felt good to make marks on my body. Sometimes, I cut when I was just having a bad day, but the deeper cuts all happened immediately after my mother screamed at me.

After a week, when I had amassed an impressive collection of well-hidden cuts on my legs and arms, I went back to Sari and showed them to her.

“That’s crazy!” she exclaimed. “You have to tell someone about this!”

“Who should I tell?” I asked.

“What about Miss Saltz?”

Miss Saltz was the young woman in charge of the school’s extracurricular activities. I agreed with Sari that she was someone I could talk to.

When I showed Miss Saltz the cuts, she reacted with concern, but she did not reprimand me or make me feel judged. “Any time you feel like cutting yourself, I want you to call me,” she said, and gave me her number. She also made it clear to me that she would have to tell the principal about this.

The principal called me out of class a few days later, and I knew why. “We’d like you to get help,” she said.

She referred me to an organization that helps troubled teens, and I was paired with a mentor who met with me every week and kept in touch by phone and text in between meetings.

Several months later, I started fantasizing about killing myself. Each time my mother yelled at me, the suicidal thoughts would come into my mind. I just want to get away from this.

When I mentioned to my mentor that I wasn’t interested in living anymore, she became very alarmed. The organization notified my parents and set me up with a therapist.

I wanted to get out of therapy as quickly as possible, and I figured that the best way to do that was to tell the therapist everything right at the beginning, rather than have her squeeze it out of me bit by bit. So I gave her the whole nine yards. The Internet problem. The cutting. My mother’s screaming.

To my surprise, it was the screaming that the therapist found most disturbing. “That is not okay,” she said.

This was an eye-opener for me, because I had long come to accept the screaming as normal. Sure, my mother’s words seared my heart anew each time, but such was life.

The therapist helped me understand that my mother’s screaming had nothing to do with me. “When your mom screams, it’s because she has a problem,” she emphasized. “You can feel bad for her, but you don’t have to feel bad about yourself.”

Through cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), she taught me how to challenge my own thoughts and come to a more balanced view of myself and the world. If, for instance, I was struggling on a test and started thinking, I can’t cope with this, I’m a total failure, I would replace that thought with, Right now I’m feeling stressed out because of the test, but there are lot of things I’m succeeding at.

Rather than automatically internalizing my mother’s hurtful words, I learned to adopt a mature, outside perspective when she was screaming at me and tell myself that what she is saying is not about me. The therapist also gave me techniques to physically calm myself during and after my mother’s tirades, which made me feel less of an urge to cut myself.

It turned out that my real problem wasn’t the Internet schmutz, or the cutting. Those were only symptoms. The problem was that I was in deep, intense pain — and that pain was caused by my mother’s screaming. I had turned to the Internet as an escape from the pain, and then, when that escape valve was closed off, I found a new one: cutting and self-harm.

Early on in the therapy process, my mentor suggested that I go for therapy together with my mother.

“No way,” I said. It would have been sooooo awkward to go for therapy with my mom. Plus, I couldn’t imagine shaming her that way. She was an accomplished professional and a respected member of the community — I had to protect that image!

But in the months that followed, I kept tossing the idea about in my mind. I was working, with my own therapist, on letting go of the resentment and anger I harbored toward my mother and replacing it with compassion. Now, I wanted a better relationship with my mother. I wanted her love, and I wanted her to know how much it hurt me when she screamed at me. Eventually, I decided I did want my mother to come with me for therapy. I couldn’t bring myself to ask her directly, though, so I asked my mentor to do it.

In our community, there is still plenty of stigma attached to therapy, so I was amazed that my mother agreed — and even more amazed by the revelations that came out during our joint therapy sessions. My mentor recommended that I continue seeing my own therapist alone, and that my mother and I should go together to a different therapist who specialized in family counseling.

Our first session together was beyond awkward. My mother, who’s usually extremely poised and confident, looked scared stiff. Not trusting myself, I brought along a letter I had written before the session, and I read from the paper without lifting my eyes.

There was a lot of crying in that first session, as my mother began to understand how her words had affected me. Thankfully, the subsequent sessions became less emotionally fraught and more comfortable.

Over several months, the therapist helped my mother understand how painful her words were to me. And she helped me understand that my mother’s screaming and harsh words weren’t intended to hurt me.

I discovered that my mother, who hailed from a different country, had grown up in a culture where people expressed themselves with exaggerated harshness — and didn’t take such expressions overly seriously. Apparently, “I want to pull out your lungs” was simply a saying translated from her native language. It didn’t mean that she actually wanted to kill me, as I had understood as a young child. All it meant was that she was annoyed. She had also heard her own mother lashing out dramatically when provoked, and she was simply repeating the pattern.

Like mother, like daughter.

It was hard for my mother to recognize and admit that she had been the primary cause of my acting out over the years — from my misbehavior as a young child in elementary school, to my Internet addiction, to my self-harm behaviors and suicidal thoughts. But admit it she did.

“I had no idea how much pain I was causing you with my screaming,” my mother told me tearfully. She apologized to me, sincerely and repeatedly, and pledged to put an end to the verbal abuse.

I have to hand it to my mother, because ever since we started therapy together three months ago, she has stopped screaming at me, cold turkey. Sometimes, I see her literally biting her lip in an effort to hold back the vituperation that in the past would have rolled off her tongue unfettered. Here and there, she’ll still scold me for leaving a mess or staying out too late, but it’s just regular motherly criticism, not abuse. Most of the time, we are working on building a good mother-daughter relationship.

I am finishing high school this year, and I think I can say that my Internet problem is a thing of the past; I recently texted my principal that I’m up to day 400. I haven’t cut myself in almost as long, and I haven’t had suicidal thoughts in months.

I don’t know where I’d be today without the people who truly cared: my principal, Miss Saltz, the school social worker, my mentor, and some close friends who treated me normally through it all and didn’t judge or disown me no matter what I was doing. I only wish I had been able to approach people for help when I was much younger, before I resorted to unhealthy behaviors.

Besides acquiring new communication skills, my mother is also working through the issues in her own upbringing that became the seeds of her screaming habit. There will probably be ups and downs ahead, but we are both committed to the process of growth and prepared to do the work that will get us there, with Hashem’s help.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha Issue 657)