Your Secret
If you pick at your skin or pull at your hair compulsively you might not even know that this has a name.
Excoriation Disorder is the name given to uncontrollable skin picking and persistent hair pulling is known as Trichotillomania. These affect 2 - 5% of the population, so you are certainly not alone.
There are many similar behaviours, some with impossibly long names that sound complicated. They’re quite common though, and are called Body Focused Repetitive Behaviors (or BFRB’s).
I wonder if you recognise any of these:
Trichotemnomania (compulsive hair cutting)
Onychophagia (nail biting)
Dermatophagia (skin biting)
Rhinotillexomania (nose picking)
Trichophagia (the urge to eat or ingest hair)
Onychotillomania (the need to pick at or tear off one’s nails)
So, you have a body focused repetitive behaviour.
Perhaps you’ve lived with it for a long time, thinking that you were the only one and that it was impossible for anyone to understand the hold it has on you and what you’re going through.
You experience it as compulsive and irresistible, you hate it and yet it feels good.
It’s not something that you want to be doing but you feel powerless to control it. You find that it’s taking up a lot of time and causing physical harm to areas of your body that you then have to camouflage or conceal. So you’ve screwed up your courage and gone to the doctor’s only to be met by misunderstanding and lack of information and maybe even been sent home with a prescription for a topical ointment or told to get some fidget toys.
Perhaps you’ve even been told that it was your fault and that you should ‘Just stop.’
Now you just feel hopeless.
So, bit by bit, you’ve found you’re living a life full of secrecy and shame.
You work hard to cover up the damage you do to yourself, to hide the raw skin or the bald spots. Maybe you’ve started to believe that, if the extent of your BFRB were to be discovered, those around you would find you disgusting or weird. You find yourself scared that you’d threaten the relationships that are important to you if your secret ever came out.
Maybe those relationships are already strained by the many failed attempts you’ve made to control your BFRB in the past.
You’ve become used to this emotional pain, feeling forced to live your life in more and more isolation, feeling ‘less than’, ‘other’, always on the outside of things. You see the everyday lives of your friends with happy swimming parties, windy days, intimate relationships and carefree selfies. Maybe these are things you avoid. It seems so far away from the way you’re experiencing your life.
So you feel locked in a cycle of secrecy, isolated and full of shame, unsure of where to turn.
So you do what we all do, take that first step and turn to Google…and after following many threads, likely come up for air feeling more confused and misunderstood than ever before. Even worse, maybe now you think you have a complicated mental illness.
Some time passes and you go through a few more years where you pick and you pull, sometimes more, sometimes less. You begin to find yourself wanting to find a solution. You know there’s never going to be the perfect moment to start. Change is uncomfortable and scary, it feels like hard work but you know in your heart of hearts that your BFRB is not just going to go away on its own.
But it is absolutely possible to get the help you need.
You’re not broken, you’re not wrong and you’re not alone. It may feel like your BFRB has formed you but it does not define you, and that’s why you’re finally here.
I’m so glad you made it.
I hope you feel strong enough to drop me a line and get the help and support that you need.