Jennifer Kramer’s Advice: “Don’t Give Up Hope”

Jennifer

By age 14 Jennifer had been hospitalized five times and made several suicide attempts. She cut and burned herself to distract from her internal pain. She burst a blood vessel in her eye from laxative-induced vomiting. Death had to be better than life. Life just didn’t seem worth the trouble.

Today, life is quite different for Jennifer Kramer. She’s a farm mother of four children. She helps to run the family’s sorghum business, the largest sorghum producer in the United States. She’s active in her church. And she mentors a child at Orchard Place…the place that gave her hope and life back to her.

Jennifer doesn’t know what triggered her depression or the long cycle of self-mutilation that nearly took her life. Her parents divorced when she was five. Her three siblings went to live with their dad and she stayed with her mother. Living in a small town, she was often alone as her mother commuted back and forth to her job in Des Moines. She did all right in school and had several friends. But she deeply hurt inside, and so she physically hurt herself to hide the mental pain.

After being hospitalized in an adult psychiatric unit and attempting suicide several times, Jennifer was finally referred to Orchard Place in January 1992. Even then, she tried to continue her cycle of cutting herself, often making multiple attempts in a single day. She remembers being under one-on-one surveillance after she tried to hurt herself with anything she could get her hands on, including staples, thumb tacks, glass, and paper clips.

Jennifer’s last attempt at suicide occurred in May 1992. She required stitches for the deep gouges she’d cut into her skin with glass from a picture frame. She hurt herself so badly that she thought she’d die. She vowed never to do it again. The counselors at Orchard Place gave her the skills and knowledge to succeed.

By January of 1993 Jennifer was able to go to school off campus. She enrolled at Lincoln High School, played on the golf team and graduated that spring. She returned home and lived with her parents temporarily. Soon after, Jennifer met John, her husband to be, at a church outing. They married in February 1996.

More than 15 years after her discharge from Orchard Place, Jennifer still has a coping skills chart that a counselor at Kenyon House developed to help her cope on a daily basis. “Every day of the month was listed on the chart. I checked off the number of urges I had to hurt myself each day, as well as the strength of that urge—weak, medium, strong, etc. I noted on the chart the coping skill I used to deal with each impulse and kept a daily record for about 4 months. The chart helped me to decide what coping options worked the best for me when I experienced different impulses to hurt myself. It’s fascinating to go back and review it and see the progress I made. I attribute a lot of my success to that simple chart. It was a life-saver.”

Today, Jennifer enjoys life. Her work with her family’s seven-generation sorghum business is fulfilling and rewarding. Its success garnered the attention of feature writers with Country Woman magazine last fall which published a story about Jennifer and the business. Jennifer golfs with one of her former counselors and speaks at staff training meetings at Orchard Place, helping new staff understand the self-hurting behaviors that consumed several years of her life. And recently Jennifer began mentoring a 15-year-old girl troubled with the same self-abuse issues that plagued her at that age.

Jennifer reflects on the year and a half she lived at Orchard Place Campus. “Orchard Place saved my life. Looking back, I’m glad I got the help I needed. I would’ve committed suicide either purposely or accidentally without it.” And her advice to the children of Orchard Place? “Tell the kids never to give up hope.”