Guest Post: Reflections of a Skin Picker

I am a skin picker. I have been ever since I was little. In fact, I can’t really remember a time when I didn’t. I am now 60.

A couple of years ago I came across an article on Wikipedia on Skin picking disorder, but for some reason I didn’t follow it up. It was actually quite recently, when listening to a Neuro Scientist who was a ‘sufferer ’on Woman’s Hour talk about Tric, that it began to sink in.

I suffer from a disorder. Call it a behaviour if you like. It is not a bad habit. It is possibly something you are born with, like having a gammy leg, but what is certain is that it is NOT MY FAULT. I am not a disgusting person. I am not a monster. I am being triggered by something to do this. This neuro scientist talked a lot about shame and how it adds fuel to the fire of the behaviour.

I plucked up my courage and spoke about my skin picking to a dear friend. I hadn’t realised how much shame I carried, and how toxic it is. How it, as much as the behaviour, affects so many aspects of my life, my relationships, my sense of who I am. Toxic! And so to talk openly to someone else about it for the first time was so liberating and started a process of wanting to understand more and find out more.

I started reading. Academic articles talked about Impulse Control Disorder and Impaired Stress response and I began to think that if BFRB’s are a disorder of this kind, then it doesn’t matter how hard I try, it is not going to go away. I am not going to ‘recover’! I can only hope that I find strategies to help me manage.

I found the language used in some of the self-help books rather misleading and at times irritating. Even something as simple as the word ‘decide’ – like you have a choice, and that you haven’t been trying for years. That suddenly you wake up one morning and go ‘Right! Today I will stop’! Because will power and self-control are completely impotent in the face of impulses that you can’t resist.

‘Awareness’ is another difficult word. Virginia Woolf talking about understanding the Self said that ‘it was like turning the light up quickly enough to see what the darkness looks like’. How can I be more aware of something that I am not aware of?

What doesn’t seem to be understood by the Behaviouralists, is that there is a plus side to BFRB’s. It gets toned down in terms of the language to ‘soothing’. But I experience it at times as immensely pleasurable as well as feeling life-saving. Writers Odlaug and Grant suggest that skin picking is more like an addiction than a compulsion.

Reading Stephen Porges on Polyvagal Theory, he describes an automatic nervous system that is influenced by the central nervous system. I read a sentence that said ‘If the parent has grown up with trauma or impairment, the child cannot develop a STRESS-RESISTANT adult nervous system’. They are non resilient. My mother was also a skin picker, an alcoholic and a brute. That aside it is suggested that this non resilience means that when you are faced with stress or fear, instead of coping with it by a fight or flight response, you shut down, you freeze.

Oh, do I know that feeling! My picking provides not only relief, but a deep down soothing. So to suggest replacing the behaviour with a fiddle toy is not really going to hack it. These are very, very strong impulses that possibly are a reaction to a deeply imbedded need in the body. Squeezing a ball is not enough.

Also CHANGE is always fearful because it requires us to give something up. So, what would I give up if I ‘stop’. Pleasure. Safety. Control. Coping.

The plusses have to outweigh the minuses on some level or the behaviour would stop because there would be no need for it.

That trance state, the soothing other place, the ‘orgasm’, zoned out, timeless dream world. It feels like your breathing changes and things stop. Deep quiet, numbness, calm. Its almost like a re-set. Like when you ask your computer to do too many things at the same time and the hourglass appears. Time out to process/recover.

Apparently, it is possible to strengthen the nervous system using ‘Pendulum exercises’, where you intentionally more out of relaxation in to light stress and back again. This oscillation can train the nervous system to relax quicker. More to research about his.

Bizarrely, BODY focussed repetitive behaviours emphasize external acts and yet the impulse and the reaction to the impulse is deeply internal. It answers a deeply ingrained desire/need for quiet.

I heard the phrase ‘restless hands’, hands without rest. But maybe because the body is focussed on the hands, the mind can go elsewhere. A distraction that allows the mind to focus?

This is my way of coping with what it feels like (fretful, anxious, jangly) to live with the lack of resilience. I create my own way of coping with ‘stress’, because my system can’t do it any other way.

A couple of months down the line I have made some interesting discoveries. I wear gloves at certain times to reduce the automatic movements. I have put ‘post it’s’ up (luckily I live alone, so I don’t have to explain) to remind me and try to be more aware. I went to my doctor and explained the disorder (to a blank face) and asked for a cream to reduce the itching, which is a big trigger for me. As well as learning more about it and talking to people, I seem to be managing better.

The more honest I am with others, the more honest I can be with myself. If I am accepted and heard and not rejected as disgusting, I can start to shift the shame.

My last big pick has taught me something very interesting. Whilst picking I was more aware than before of the mesmerising quality, the calming, like seeing an old comforting friend, standing dazed and transported, not present, turned off. Then I realised how anxious I had been feeling building up to that point. And so my search continues…..