118: Who will I be without skin picking???

The version of you that is free from chronic skin picking, hair pulling, or nail biting is one that feels confident, creative, compassionate, and calm.

These are not just pretty words; this is who you are at your core (as research has discovered)!

Now the question is, how do we connect more to this part of ourselves?
And how does picking, pulling, and biting both hold you back and help you get there?

This is where we turn our greatest struggle into our greatest teacher, and we don't do it through guesswork but through using well-researched therapeutic models (that actually help).

Listen in to learn:

• A powerful therapeutic model for chronic picking, pulling and biting that isn't CBT or HRT. 
• How to turn picking/pulling/biting into a tool for healing
• Who you are at your core (as research has discovered) 
• How to connect to these incredible core qualities in a tangible and practical way

Resources:

No Bad Parts by Richard Schwarz (book)

Clarity: Focusing on the 8C's of Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy

IFS Website

💌Share your story - Book your FREE BFPA* Support Call with me

🌟Download your FREE Guide to Stop Skin Picking Using Somatics

📝FREE Holistic Skin Picking & Hair Pulling Assessment - Join the waitlist

🎯Join the 7-Day Skin Picking Recovery Challenge

🙋‍♀️Send me a message here

My name is Raffaela Marie. I'm a holistic BFRB coach who has healed from 15 years of chronic skin picking myself and dedicated my life to helping driven women do the same. Through my podcast, free resources, and programs, I teach strategies to overcome urges, build emotional safety, and expand into authenticity. My approach goes beyond quick fixes, focusing on root causes and long-term recovery.

Transcript

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When you've been struggling with something for so long, it becomes a part of your routine. It becomes a really familiar go-to coping mechanism. It becomes a way we understand ourselves. It even can become a part of our identity. But this is where the problem lies. When we become identified with a problem, this is a massive roadblock to us actually working through the problem. Because the problem becomes a part of who we are. It's like me saying, I'm a human. I was born a human. I can't at any time just stop being a human. So if I say I'm a skin picker and it has become a part of my identity, then truly trying to stop being that can almost feel impossible because it is part of who you are. It's like we want freedom from this struggle, but another part of us seems to be resisting it. So how can we stop identifying with this problem that we've been living with for so long? How can we stop keeping ourselves trapped in the cycle that we so badly want to break? And I am so, so excited to share this episode with you because there is actually a very well-researched therapeutic model called IFS or Internal Family Systems. And it completely explains what is going on inside your brain. Why does one part of you want freedom, but another part of you just wants to stay stuck in the problem? How can we unblend ourselves from the identity of being a skin picker or a hair puller or a nail biter so that we can actually start to move forward? That is what we're going to explore in this episode. You are going to learn what internal family system is, how that applies to your struggle with chronic skin picking, hair pulling, or nail biting. And then at the end, I'm going to give you a little exercise for you to start separating your identity from this problem so that you can heal. You are listening to episode 118 of Beyond Skin Picking and Hair Pulling. My name is Raphaela Marie. I'm your host. I've healed from 15 years of chronic skin peeking through addressing the root cause and treating it like an addiction. And I share absolutely everything I know with you on this podcast. So if you are here because you want to get to the root cause of why you struggle with these behaviors, then you're in the right place. If you want to feel uplifted and inspired, if you want to find hope, you are in the right place. And if you are wanting to take even another step further, I want to invite you to share your story with me. This is an opportunity for you to feel truly deeply seen, heard, and understood, which is actually really hard to come by with this problem because so many people misunderstand it. So you will feel deeply seen, heard, and understood by someone who actually gets what it is that you're going through. Not only that, but I will share with you my insight into the root cause of why you struggle, the way you struggle, and guidance on the next steps you can take to move forward. I've already had so many of these conversations with many of your wonderful listeners, and it's just so amazing to meet you and talk to you and to hear your story. So if you want to share your story with me, go ahead and click on the link in the show notes. IFS Internal Family Systems is a well-researched therapeutic model that allows us to understand what's happening in our mind, why we have these opposing parts, why we battle with ourselves and argue with ourselves, and how we can better handle them and work with them so that we can, rather than trying to strong arm ourselves and force ourselves and use willpower to push ourselves to be a better version of us, we can actually start to work in collaboration with our own mind. This builds confidence, self-worth, self-esteem, self-trust, and it allows us to start accessing a greater sense of fulfillment and joy for who we are and the life that we are living. IFS was created by American psychotherapist, family therapist, and author Richard Schwartz. He developed it in the 1980s. And since then, it has become one of the most widely recognized approaches to healing trauma. Plus, it's also becoming more and more recognized in helping people to heal addictions, helping us to address the underlying causes. And this is actually something that I am working with, working through with my group coaching clients, as well as my one-on-one clients. This is a big part of the work that I do with them, is learning the language of our parts, learning how to connect with them, learning how to understand why it is that a part of me really wants freedom from skimpicking, heppling, or nail biting, and another part of me really fucking doesn't. It can be such, it can really send us on a spin of what is wrong with me. And it can make us feel broken. And this therapeutic approach, this therapeutic model, helps us to understand ourselves, stop blaming ourselves, build more understanding and compassion, and actually start to heal. So before we dive into how this applies to skin picking, hair pulling, and nail biting, I want to just give you a brief introduction into what IFS actually is. And essentially what Richard Schwartz found through his research, through his work, is that humans have what's called a fragmented psychology. We are not just one unified consciousness. We have many different parts of us. We have a fragmented conscious consciousness. This is what allows us to talk to ourselves in our own head. This is what allows us to argue with ourselves, to have these internal battles, this push and pull, this tug of war. Because if we were just a single consciousness, then we would never have those internal conflicts or battles. If we decided we wanted to do something, all of us would be on board with that and we would just do the thing. But because we have a fragmented psychology, there can be one part of you that says, yeah, I really want to go in that half marathon. I feel motivated for that. And another part of you that likes to relax and sit on the lounge and read books and eat cake says, I don't want to do that. That sounds horrible. And it's because of this fragmented psychology that we can at times be at war with ourselves. Now, your different parts, this is the really interesting thing. And the the really cool thing about this work is that it's not whether you believe in it or not. This isn't woo-woo stuff, and I'm not against woo-woo. Anyone who's listening who is into woo-woo, I'm not against it. But you don't need to be super spiritual or into woo-woo stuff for this to work or make sense. It is simply how we have learned the human brain organizes itself. And we all have a myriad of different parts, and each of these parts has their own beliefs, their own way of finding a solution to a problem. They have their own emotions, their own thoughts. And when we are what's called enmeshed with this part, we think the thoughts, feel the feelings, and also act in a way that this part thinks is appropriate. This is why when we get really triggered, that we can sometimes do things and they say things that we're not proud of, or that doesn't really feel like us. Or it can be why you can see someone really triggered and you think, whoa, that person is acting weird. That person is acting like a child. And it's simply because that part of you has taken control of the bus. It's taken the wheel. You are no new you, your core self is no longer driving the bus. This part of you is. Now, what we want to understand is this is really important, is that we have many parts that are wounded. And these are the parts that get triggered. These are the parts of us that feel the need to people please, that feel the need to self-abandon, that feel the need to overwork, overachieve. These are the parts that feel the need to judge other people, to push other people away, shut people out, or to fawn and try and get the approval of someone who maybe doesn't deserve to be that close to us. They're the parts of us that are afraid of our own voice, afraid of speaking up, of setting boundaries, of saying no. And what's important to realize is that these are all just parts of you. There may be a part of you that is afraid to speak up. And this might be the loudest part for you, the most dominant part that has the most control. But there is another part of you that has a voice and wants to use it, that has opinions and wants to share them, that knows when to say no and wants to say no. So we might ask ourselves, well, why then do I have these parts that seem to get in my way? And I want to try and keep this as simple as possible. But essentially, these parts that get triggered and try and control or avoid or prevent or snap, they are what we call protector parts. They're trying to protect you. What are they trying to protect you from? They're trying to protect you from painful experiences you have felt in the past, specifically that you have felt and been left alone with. This is a very famous quote from Garbo Mate, who is a well-benowned physician and has done an incredible amount of work and research into trauma and addiction. He says, trauma is not what happens to you, it's what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you. What this means is that it's not the event that creates the trauma. It's being left alone with the emotions that the event brings up inside of us. And there is big T trauma and little T trauma. Big T trauma are those big events. They're the kind of things that everyone associates with trauma. Little T trauma is developmental trauma. They're things, they're needs that were not met. So you had a need to be seen, to be heard, to be understood, to be accepted, to be loved for who you are. And we've all experienced moments where we sh where we were shut down or dismissed, or even experienced harsh comments or judgment or criticisms. And these create these create little moments of hurt. Now, a really good example is actually divorce. A lot of parents get divorced. A lot of children experience their parents going through a divorce. And we have a tendency to minimize this and dismiss it and say, well, it's normal. It happens to so many people. But for a child, that's actually a really traumatic experience. Or it can be a really traumatic experience because there will be a lot of emotions that are coming up for a child whose parents are divorcing. There can be a lot of sadness, anger, fear, confusion. Maybe they're going to start blaming themselves, like maybe I should have tried harder. Maybe it's my fault that this is happening. And it's not necessarily the divorce that creates the trauma, but it's being left alone with those emotions that does. If the parents are going through a divorce, but if they're able to be emotionally attuned to the child and help them to process what's happening and help them to feel the sadness, feel the anger, to reassure that child that it's not your fault, to give that child a sense of safety and connection despite the chaos that is currently happening inside their life, that really helps a child to process. And so it's unlikely for there to be much or any trauma carried on from that event. Now, many of us didn't have parents who were emotionally attuned to us. And that's simply because they weren't emotionally attuned to themselves. If they couldn't handle their own emotions, if they didn't know how to understand and process their own emotions, they really couldn't have done that for you. Children cannot process their own emotions. They need to borrow the regulated nervous system of an adult to help them do that. And again, most of us didn't have that. And so it's the being left alone with it that creates the pain. That is also what creates a part. Because when we are sitting in the pain and we're feeling like it's all my fault, I'm a bad person, I caused this to happen. I feel this deep, this intense anger, I feel this deep sadness, I feel this loneliness, and I don't know what to do with those emotions. I mean, you know how intense emotions can be as an adult. I mean, think of the last time you got deeply triggered. It's intense, man. And a child experiences that. They don't even have the brain capacity to process it on their own. We do as adults, we just haven't really learned the skills. Children don't have any of that. And so a child is experiencing that intensity of emotion, but they're alone with it. And so a part of their mind goes, wow, you're not handling this. You're not okay. I'm gonna step in and help you and keep you safe from these feelings. I know how to make you feel a bit better. Let's people please to get attention, or let's rebel and be loud to get attention. Because essentially what creates safety for a child is connection. And attention means they get connection. Attention means they get they feel safe. So whatever your mind finds gets you the most attention, that's what you're going to latch on to. That's why, for example, my brother was definitely more the rebel. He was a lot louder, he fought back. He got a lot of attention. I, on the other hand, he'd already kind of taken that role in the family. So I, on the other hand, took the role of being the good girl, the perfectionist, the sweet, quiet one. I didn't rock the boat. I just kind of flew under the radar. And that was how I got attention by being good. And I just listed a bunch of parts right there. A part of me came up to protect me to be the good girl. Say, well, you can't ever rebel. You can't speak out, you can't be loud, you can't fight back, you gotta be a good girl. You gotta overachieve. That's another way, another part that comes in that's there to try and protect me from having to feel the emotions that I didn't know how to process. And essentially we carry these parts with us and they manipulate and control our lives in a way so that we can try and avoid ever having to feel the pain that we felt back then. And this is why, especially when it comes to personal development, we might know, oh, I know logically that it would be good for me to reach out for support. It would be good for me to join a support group. It would be good for me to get out of the house more. And there's a part of you that wants to do that, but then there's another part that says being vulnerable is dangerous. Being vulnerable might leave you open to feeling the pain that you felt back in the past. So I'm gonna make you feel really exhausted all the time. I'm gonna make you feel like you're not worth that connection. I'm going to criticize you so that you don't do those things. And I hope this is making sense because this is this is such a big topic. And I want to condense this down just to share with you the most important aspects of understanding the way that your brain works, essentially. And so what we want to know is that these parts that we struggle with, they're all just trying to protect us. They're not doing it generally in the most healthy ways. But at one stage in your life, they were very functional because you experienced dysfunction. And regardless of whether it was greatly dysfunctional or just a little bit dysfunctional, it was your way of navigating that. It's the way that your parts learnt to navigate that and keep you as safe as possible to give you as much comfort as you possibly could have in that situation. And they're still running the show. They haven't yet realized that you're actually grown up and you're no longer stuck in that space anymore. This is where a lot of inner child healing comes in. Another thing I want to share with you, and this is a really key part to recognize, is that through Richard Schwartz's work, and I believe he worked with criminals, he worked with people with severe mental health issues, he worked with a wide array of people. What he found is that through doing this work and connecting to parts, there would always be this healing part that would show up in every single person at some stage. And this is what he found was what we can call the core self, or the authentic self, or the enlightened self, or the adult self, as I like to call it. This is who we are at our and the way he identified this adult self, this core self, is through the eight C's. Our adult self has these qualities. Who you are at your core. You are confident, courageous, calm, curious, connected. You have clarity, you're creative, and you're curious. This is who you are at your core. And the great news is that you don't have to believe it that it's true for that to be true. Because we have learned through this research that this is simply what exists inside every human being. And it doesn't matter whether you believe in it or not. And this core part of you, this is the part that heals. That is why in so many of these episodes, I ask you to get curious. Because curiosity opens the door to understanding, which opens the door to building compassion for ourselves. And compassion heals. Compassion is love. And we can't perform compassion. We feel it. It's a felt experience, it's a softening, a warmth, and a wave of understanding that comes over us. But we stop judging and start understanding and start listening. That is the experience we want to have with ourselves. That is the experience that helps us to heal from chronic skin picking, hair pulling, or nail biting. So now, how does IFS relate to these problems? There is a part of you that uses chronic skin picking as a way to soothe, as a way to comfort, as a way to get a break or relief or release or to escape. Because at some stage, you didn't have anyone to help you have that experience in real life. And so you sort it out somewhere else. A part of you learnt that, okay, I need, I need comfort right now, but I don't know where to get that. And I don't know how to get that. So I'm gonna find it in something else. I need to escape because all this is just too much right now. It's too scary, it's too big, and I'm too confused. So I need to find a way to escape. And there's going to be a part of you that takes on that responsibility of helping you to escape, of helping you to soothe yourself and find comfort, even if it's not real, deep, true comfort or safety or escape, even if it's just a pseudo-sense is better than nothing. This part of me that looks for escape, it not only found that through chronic skin picking, but it also found that through books. I used to stay up till 3 a.m. reading. When I started to get obsessed with books in that way was also about the round around about the age where I started to become depressed. And the evening times were really hard. I didn't like going to sleep. But if I read my books until 2 or 3 a.m. in the morning, I'd be so numbed out and exhausted that I would just fall asleep and I wouldn't feel too much. Another way that I found to escape was through my imagination. And in all honesty, I think my imagination was probably the first place I learned to escape. I used to imagine myself in so many different scenarios, so many different worlds. And it was just sometimes, most of the time, my imagination was just a way better place to be than reality. And the reason why I learned how to escape in these ways is because a part of me learned, okay, I know how to protect you. It's my responsibility to help you to escape. That's my way of protecting you. And it found different ways to do that throughout my life. It found that through my my imagination, through books, through skin picking, through alcohol and drugs at one stage, through sex, through food. Food was a huge one. Wow. I had a real bad binge eating problem for a long time. Now, as I'm talking about this, I'm sure it's clicking and you're having a lot of understanding. And maybe you're even feeling compassion. You're thinking, wow, I so get that. I so understand why you would do those things. Maybe you're even feeling a bit more understanding for yourself. That, if you're feeling any kind of softening, any kind of release or compassion or understanding coming up, that right there is your core self. That is the part of you that heals. That is who you are at your core. That is your adult self that is able to reparent your inner child. Your inner child are essentially all these different parts inside of you that learned to protect you. Now, the reason why we are able to feel that softening, that understanding, compassion is because we are no longer identifying with the problem. We are seeing it for what it really is. We're understanding more. Because when we are identified with the problem, when I was really stuck in chronic skin picking, I used to judge myself so bad. And I used to feel like it was part of who I was, and I used to feel broken and lost, and just I was so ashamed that how could I not have control of myself? And that's because I was fully identified with that part. That part of me was a part of my identity. And when a part of us that we struggle with becomes a part of our identity, we judge the crap out of it. And we're not judging the crap out of the part, we're actually judging the crap out of ourselves. And we're not curious. We don't want to get to know it. We don't want to build a relationship with that part of us. We just want it gone. And one of, I've shared this many times, one of the biggest breakthroughs I had in my healing journey was the moment when I was spiraling after a really bad relapse. And I really asked myself, what is going on? I really thought, like, no, seriously, why can I not control myself? And it was that curiosity, me accessing my core self. And I didn't do it in this big moment of, oh, I know I'm accessing my core self. I had no idea what I was doing. I didn't know about this stuff at that time. I just got curious because at this core part of you, that curiosity is a core part of you. It exists within you. You don't have to, I don't know, dance around in a circle at the full moon and drink ayahuasca to connect to it. It's just there. It's always there. And we connect to it spontaneously quite often, actually. But it was that moment of curiosity that gave me an insight and understanding of, oh, man, I really struggle with anxiety. And chronic skin picking helps me to deal with that. Oh, no wonder I can't just stop. I don't know how to deal with the anxiety without the skin picking. So what am I supposed to do if I don't pick my skin? I don't fucking know. So that gave me just a wave of understanding. And maybe I didn't have deep compassion for myself in that moment, but I did feel a softening of, oh, I stopped blaming myself just a little bit. I stopped judging myself a little bit. And it also allowed me to see the way forward. It allowed me to stop identifying so much with the part of me that picks up my skin and realize that, oh, there's actually a reason for this. A really good reason. And that's the thing with all the parts of us that struggle, with all the parts of us that we wish we could just get rid of. There's actually a really good reason for them to be there. And if we allow ourselves to get curious, we can start to understand. And that part will stop being such a big part of your identity. And then we can start to heal. Then you can start answering the question: who will I be without this? That question won't scare you anymore. So now I wonder if you have more of an understanding of yourself, of how your brain works. And if you want to understand more, there is a book called No Bad Parts by Richard Schwartz. That is an incredible book. Plus, there is another book that's just come out called All of You, How to Heal Your Wounded Parts, Release Shame and End the War Within by Matthew Lavaz. That's another really good book. And Matthew Lavars does a really, really good job of just so, so simply explaining these things in a way that is incredibly easy to understand. So I highly recommend those two books. I will leave the links for them in the c in the in the show notes. But I also want to leave you with something that you can actually do to help you to stop identifying so much with these parts and to start getting curious. And this is something we've been focusing on in my group coaching program for the past two or three months. It's just, it's incredibly, it's so simple, but it's so life-changing. And it's something that I do with every single one of my one-on-one clients. But your language has power. Your words have power. And so I want to invite you from this day forward to no longer say, I'm a skin picker. I pick my skin. I can't stop picking my skin. And instead say, a part of me picks my skin. A part of me can't stop picking my skin. A part of me uses skin picking to self-soothe. And even encourage you even in a moment, it might feel weird in a moment where you're where you're alone. Try saying it out loud. Try saying, do the switch, go, I am a skin picker. I can't stop picking my skin. And then switch it and say, a part of me can't stop picking my skin. A part of me is a skin picker. And just notice how that feels. Notice if there's a shift. And allow yourself to get curious for what is actually going on. When you have a bad session, really give yourself a second to get curious and go, what is actually going on here? Why did I need this now? What do I actually need right now? How might I have been neglecting myself for the past week or even months? Is there anything that I'm trying to avoid? Is there anything that I should do that I haven't been doing? Maybe there's a conversation that needs to be had that you've been trying not to think about. Maybe you haven't been allowing yourself to slow down or giving yourself the rest you need or nurturing yourself in a way that you really deserve. When we start to use curiosity, we start to see this behavior that we struggle with actually as a teacher. And it helps us to heal and grow, helps us to stop identifying so much with our problems and start to see that there is so much more to you than this behavior. There is so much more to you. It is just one part. And it's not just me saying that because it sounds good, science backs it up. Internal Family Systems, a very, very well-researched therapeutic model, backs up what I'm saying. It is simply the truth. And if you want more support in doing this kind of work, I am here for you. Just send me a message and we can have a chat what it might look like for me to support you further. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure you hit like and subscribe. Leave a comment down below. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Thank you so much for hanging out with me, and I really look forward to seeing you next week and the next episode of Beyond Skin Picking and Hair Pulling.