I knew straight away, as soon as it happened.

I had let people down. My coach Óscar Tabárez, “El Maestro”, was in a bad way in the dressing room. I couldn’t look at my team-mates. I didn’t know how I could say sorry to them. I couldn’t look at the Maestro. He told me that journalists had asked him about the incident, and he’d told them that he hadn’t seen anything. My team-mates were trying to tell me that maybe the situation was not so bad. But I didn’t want to hear a single word of it. Two more days would pass before I had to leave Brazil, but in my head I was already gone.

I was at training the next day, still in this unconscious state of denial. Just as we finished the session, the Maestro called me over. He had news: “This is the worst thing that I have ever had to tell a player.” At that moment, I thought maybe the ban would be 10, 15 or even 20 games, but then he said, “Nine matches.” That didn’t seem any worse than I had feared. But he wasn’t finished: “And you can’t set foot in any stadium. You have to leave now. You can’t be anywhere near the squad.”

I wanted to stay and support my team-mates. You could see that emotionally the team had died. They were sunk. Even if I was not playing, I wanted to try to make up for things in some small way. But the team manager, Eduardo Belza, had been informed that I had to leave the squad as soon as possible. They treated me worse than a criminal. You can punish a player, you can ban a player from playing, but can you prohibit him from being alongside his team-mates? The only reason I didn’t cry was that I was standing there in front of the coach when he told me the news.

Had the ban stopped at nine Uruguay matches, I would have understood it. But banning me from playing for Liverpool, when my bans in England never prevented me from playing for Uruguay? Banning me from all stadiums worldwide? Telling me I couldn’t go to work? Stopping me from even jogging around the perimeter of a football pitch? It still seems incredible to me that, until the Court of Arbitration for Sport decreed otherwise, Fifa’s power actually went that far.

Luis Suárez holding his teeth after biting Giorgio Chiellini at this year’s World Cup. Photograph: Andrew Boyers/Action Images

They had never banned a player like that before for breaking someone’s leg or smashing someone’s nose across his face, as Mauro Tassotti did to Luis Enrique at the 1994 World Cup. They made a big thing of saying the incident had happened “before the eyes of the world”. Zinedine Zidane headbutted Marco Materazzi in a World Cup final in 2006 and got a three-match ban.

I was an easy target, maybe. But there was something important I had to face up to: I had made myself an easy target. I made the mistake. It was my fault. This was the third time it had happened. I needed help.

After my 10-match ban in 2013 for biting Branislav Ivanovic, I had questioned the double standards and how the fact that no one actually gets hurt is never taken into consideration. The damage to the player is incomparable with that suffered by a horrendous challenge. Sometimes English football takes pride in having the lowest yellow-card count in Europe, but of course it will have if you can take someone’s leg off and still not be booked. When they can say it is the league with the fewest career-threatening tackles, then it will be something to be proud of.

I know biting appals a lot of people, but it’s relatively harmless. Or at least it was in the incidents I was involved in. When Ivanovic rolled up his sleeve to show the referee the mark at Anfield, there was virtually nothing there. None of the bites has been like Mike Tyson on Evander Holyfield’s ear. But none of this makes it right.

When I got home and saw the television pictures of my bite on PSV Eindhoven midfielder Otman Bakkal in 2010, I cried. I had just become a father to a young daughter, Delfina, and the thought that she would grow up to see that I had done this upset me more than anything else. When my wife Sofi saw the footage, she said to me, “What on Earth were you thinking?” I had to start trying to answer that question for myself.

The adrenaline levels in a game can be so high; the pulse is racing and sometimes the brain doesn’t keep up. The pressure mounts and there is no release valve. In 2010, I was frustrated because we were drawing what was a very important game, and we were on a bad run. I wanted to do everything right that day, and it felt as though I was doing everything wrong. The pent-up frustration and feeling that it was my fault reached a point where I couldn’t contain it any more.

With Ivanovic in 2013, we had to beat Chelsea still to have any chance of making it into the Champions League. I was having a terrible game. I gave away a stupid penalty with a handball and I could feel everything slipping through our fingers. I could feel myself getting wound up.

Moments before the Chiellini bite, I had a great chance to put us 1-0 up. If I had scored that goal, if Buffon hadn’t made the save, then I would not have done anything. But I missed the chance.

Uruguay fans wait for their hero at the airport in Montevideo. Photograph: Imago/Barcroft Media

When the heart has stopped racing after the game, it’s easy to look back and say, “How could you be so stupid? There were 20 minutes left.” But out on the pitch with the adrenaline pumping and the tension mounting, you’re not even really aware of how long is left. You don’t know anything. All I could think was: “I didn’t score. We’re out of the World Cup.”

There are some players who in that position would have said, “Well, we’re out, but I scored two great goals against England. I’m the star.” I could have asked to be taken off: “My knee is hurting again, I scored two in the last game, I did my best.” But I wanted more.

The fear of failure clouds everything for me – even the blatantly obvious fact that I have at least 20,000 pairs of eyes on me; it is not as if I am not going to be seen. Logic doesn’t come into it.

Equally illogical is that it should be a bite. There was a moment in a game against Chile in 2013 when a player grabbed me between the legs and I reacted by punching him. I didn’t get banned for that. That’s considered a normal, acceptable response. When I called Ivanovic after the 2013 incident, he told me that the police had come to see him and asked if he wanted to press charges, and thankfully he had said no. I’m grateful to him, because the circus could have gone on for a lot longer. Punch someone and it’s forgotten, there is no circus. So why do I take the most self-destructive route?

The problem is that this switching off also happens when I do something brilliant on the pitch and, of course, I don’t want to lose that. I’ve scored goals and later struggled to understand how exactly I managed to score them. There is something about the way I play that is unconscious, for better or worse. I want to release the tension and the pressure, but I don’t want to lose the spontaneity in my game, much less the intensity of my style of play.

Liverpool sent a sports psychologist to see me in Barcelona after the Ivanovic incident, and we spent two hours talking about what was going through my head at the time. He said I could see him again, but I resisted. Part of it was the concern that this treatment would make me too calm on the pitch. What if the next time the ball goes past me, I just let it go instead of chasing it? I’m the player who will kill himself just to prevent a throw-in in the 90th minute. To a certain extent, it’s also normal that a striker is irritable and on edge. For those 90 minutes on the pitch, life is irritating. I get irritated when a defender pushes up against me from behind. I get irritated when I miss chances. If my first few touches are off, then I think to myself, “What’s wrong with you today?” And I know that the first time a player clashes with me, there’s a risk I’ll react.

Suárez playing for Barcelona in August. Photograph: Rex

Defenders know that, too. In the Premier League, when I played against someone like Philippe Senderos at Fulham when Martin Jol was their manager, I knew the drill. About five minutes into the game, Senderos would step on the back of my ankle when the ball had gone. “Ah, sorry,” he would say.

I just thought, “Yeah, Jol has told you what I’m like and has told you to do that.”

It seems strange to say it after a third incident, but I have improved, I am calmer. When I was a kid, I got sent off for headbutting a referee: I ran 50m to argue a decision, I was shown a red card and I headbutted him. I’m really not proud of that.

I didn’t want to talk to anyone after the Chiellini bite, though – back in Montevideo with the shutters down, depressed and not wanting to digest what had really happened, I was watching the press conference on the television when Tabárez announced that, in support of me, he was resigning his post on the Fifa Strategic Committee. Ever since the Italy game, I had felt depressed. I was in shock, numb. The sadness overwhelmed me. I watched him and the tears started rolling down my face. I couldn’t believe what he was doing for me. To see how much he loved me, to see what was happening, what the consequences of what I had done were, was soul-destroying.

Sofi and I went away to the countryside to talk about everything, and I finally began to accept what I needed to do. She was annoyed with herself for not having been firmer with me before. She said to me, “So now are you going to listen to me?” This time it felt like there was no alternative, and I took the initiative.

I did the research and I found the right people. If I had been at Liverpool, then maybe I would have gone back to the people I had spoken to there, or if I had already been settled in at Barcelona, I would have looked within the club, but I was almost between clubs, so I went out myself and found the right people to help me. It still feels like something very private, but I feel that they are helping me to understand that I don’t have to hold things in; and that I don’t have to feel such a huge weight of responsibility when I’m on the pitch.

I’m already learning how to deal with these build-ups of pressure. I have always preferred to keep things to myself, rather than sharing them with anyone, but I am learning that if you let it go, you feel better for it. Don’t keep it all bottled up inside; don’t take it all on alone.

• This is an edited extract from Crossing The Line: My Story, by Luis Suárez, published next week by Headline at £20. To order a copy for £15, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.