119: How to deal with the scars & damage from picking, pulling & biting

Understandably, the scars that we create through chronic skin picking, hair pulling and nail biting are not something that we feel good about.

The bald patches, thinning, hyperpigmentation, and dwindling nail beds can trigger feelings of shame, self-judgment, or even unlovability. 

The problem is, these are also the same emotions that fuel picking, pulling, and biting! It becomes a self-sustaining cycle.

When we learn how to move through these emotions, we are actively helping ourselves reduce the need for them while unburdening ourselves of their emotional weight.

But how do you navigate this in a way that allows you to move through and release rather than feel stuck? Is that even possible as long as the scars and damage remain?

It is, and I'm going to share with you how.

🚩Fair warning, though, this episode contains no fluffy, toxic positivity. This is about embracing the truth and grounding yourself into reality. Which can sometimes, initially, be an unpleasant experience.

🙏It's an odd thing to say because it will probably drive some people away from listening to this episode. If that's the case, those people are most likely not ready to listen to what's inside.

Rest assured, if you listen, I'll be with you every step of the way 💛.

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Journaling Prompts:
Make sure you listen to this episode before answering these Qs.
🌟What do you not want to accept?
🌟What do you feel the scars are costing you?
🌟What do you feel you can't have because of them?
🌟From what you've written, what do you suspect might not be the full truth?
🌟What might you be able to allow yourself to grieve that you haven't yet?

If you need more support, reach out to your therapist, psychologist or coach. You can also reach out to me. I'm here for you!

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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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Understandably, the scars that we create through chronic skin picking and hair pulling and nail biting are not something that we feel good about. And when I say scars, they can be bald patches or thinning, they can be visible long-term damage to your nails or to your skin that may or may not return to how they were before. And if they do, it's probably going to take some time. Just looking at these scars can trigger feelings of shame, self-judgment, of being unlovable. And these feelings then trigger more skin picking or hair pulling or nail biting. It's this really difficult cycle that we get into. Now, some people may suggest to you to cover your mirrors, dim your lights, maybe cover up those parts that bother you. And while these can be handy things to do, they can be handy tools. They don't actually help us to get to the root cause. And this podcast is all about getting to the root cause. This is an episode where you're going to find some answers, you're going to find a path forward, and you're going to access just maybe a little more acceptance and compassion and love for yourself that is going to empower you to create the change that will actually make a difference in your life. You are listening to episode 119 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, through treating it like an addiction. And in this podcast, I share everything that I know with you. So if you are looking to address the root cause, and if you feel like this is more of an addiction for you, you are in the right place. And I'm so happy that you're here. I also want to extend an invitation to you to share your story with me. This is an opportunity to feel deeply seen, heard, and understood, and also to receive tailored feedback and insights and guidance about what you can do right now to heal about what one of the root causes behind skin picking, headlong, and nail abiding might be for you. So if you're feeling drawn to that, go ahead and click on the link in the show notes. When we look at our scars, how do we react to that? What do we, what's the first thought? It's like I wish these weren't here. I wish these scars weren't here. I would feel so much better. I wouldn't have to feel this way. I want to share with you a part of a transcript that I read in preparation for this episode. It's from a speech that Yuval Noah Harari, a historian, philosopher, and best-selling author of the book Sapiens, which maybe you have read. And this is a direct quote: At the core of any experience of suffering is a rejection of present reality and a preference of something else. Something that doesn't exist at present. You feel something, but you want to feel something else instead. You feel pain and you want the pain to not be there. We are rejecting reality. We are rejecting the reality of the fact those scars are there and they're not going away very quickly. And maybe they won't ever fully go away at all. I know this might be a really heavy thing to hear, but this episode is about embracing the truth and reality. And reality sometimes really fucking hurts. And I'm not going to be using toxic positivity to try and sprinkle something nice onto something that just simply isn't. But I'm also not going to just leave you with that. So please do stick with me until the end of this episode because I am going to give you a way to actually do something with whatever is coming out for you, maybe with the heaviness that is coming out for you around this topic. Here's another quote from this transcript: suffering is not the pain itself. Pain is just a sensation. Suffering is the mental reaction to that sensation. It is a reaction of rejecting and hating the reality that we encounter and preferring something else which is not there. I felt this so deeply as a teenager when I was struggling with acne, also in my early 20s, when the acne didn't go away as I thought it would. When I was a teenager, I thought, oh, I'm a teenager, so by the time I'm an adult, the acne will be gone because only teenagers get acne. Ha ha. Now I'm 30 and the acne is still there, although much, much improved. Now I felt this deeply, and actually I have a very specific moment where I can recall the pain of wishing that I was different, that my skin was different. And it was actually while I was watching one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and there's a mermaid in one of them. I don't know which movie it is, but there's a mermaid, and she pops up out of this pool. I think it is in like some sort of forest, rainforest thing. And this woman is gorgeous, of course. And she has absolutely flawless skin. And of course, it's also the work of makeup and all the things that had go into producing a movie. But as a teenager, you don't take that into consideration. You just see, wow, she is beautiful. Her skin is flawless. And then I would compare that to me and see, oh, I am like the dirt on someone's shoe in comparison to this woman. And that sounds really harsh, but that's how it felt. That was the emotional truth for me at the time. It is not the truth, but it is how I felt. I felt so insecure and insignificant and less than. And so it made me really hate and reject the acne. And also understandably, I mean, I don't think we need to learn how to love the acne. We don't need to learn how to celebrate it and be happy that it's there. This is where we're going to get into the acceptance side of things in a moment. But it was in that moment that it really hit me. I could not accept my skin as it was. I couldn't. I could not accept reality. Now, I'm sure you're seeing how this ties into our scars. The more we can't accept the reality that they are there, the more we try to push that away and distract ourselves from it, the longer we are going to suffer with that problem. And the more we suffer, the more we're going to actually end up picking, pulling, and biting at our body. Because that is one of the ways that we deal with the suffering that we feel. So I want to ask you a few questions. What is it that you don't want to accept? And just set your logical mind aside for a moment and just allow your subconscious to answer that automatic response. What do you feel the scars are costing you? And again, allow the emotional truth to come to the surface. If you find yourself starting to reason with it and go, oh, but it's not that bad. I know that's not true. I know it's not actually that way, not helpful. Knowing how things actually are is just dismissing and minimizing and preventing you from actually accepting reality. Because preventing you from feeling. If we can dismiss and minimize the emotional truth, then we don't have to feel it so much. So just allow the emotional truth to come to the surface and accept that as it is. What do you feel like you can't have because of the scars? And how do the answers to these questions make what you feel? What if it makes sense that you feel that way? What if you're allowed to feel that way and it's okay to feel that way? And saying it's okay doesn't mean it's good, doesn't mean it feels good. It just means that it makes sense. This is when we get into allowing ourselves to feel the pain of reality, the grief that might be there, the sadness, the loss, the disappointment. And you might be asking yourself, yeah, but I don't want to feel this way because it feels like shit. And what if I just get stuck in it? I don't want to be living in this reality if this reality is so painful. This is where this is what we need to understand about emotions, is that emotions are not permanent. They come in ways, they come in go. What makes them feel permanent is the rejection and resistance of them. And we reject them as we're also rejecting reality. When we start to allow reality to be seen and to accept it and embrace reality as it is, we allow ourselves to feel. And it can be really, really intense, but when we actually allow ourselves to feel, we allow the full wave of emotion to come and go. And the intensity begins to decrease. It's the resistance of the feeling that makes it stay stuck inside us. And this brings us to the damaging misconception around acceptance. Because I've actually had this conversation in the comment section of one of my um posts on Instagram, and it was talking about acceptance. And this lady said, Well, I can't accept this because it's not okay and I want better for myself. And if I were to just accept it, then I wouldn't be motivated to actually make any change. I wonder if that's resonating, because I know that definitely resonated with me really deeply for most of my life. I understand the misconception, but acceptance does not equal complacency. What that lady was talking about, complacency is settling into a passive state of comfortable stagnation. And when I say comfortable, I just mean familiar. We get used to our problems. We get used to living with them. We get you we know what to expect, and that's comfortable in its own sense. When we start to want to push ourselves, do things differently, change and grow, that's when shit gets really uncomfortable. But complacency is passivity. It means we stop trying and we just start trying to live with what we have and say, well, it just is what it is. I can't do anything about it. I have no power here. That is complacency. Acceptance is the conscious choice to stop fighting reality. And that is empowering because as long as we fight reality, we are going to keep looking for a different one. And that keeps us busy. It keeps us doing it, it keeps us overworking, it keeps us searching for that next program, that next retreat, that next book, that next thing that is going to help us achieve a reality that is better than the one that we're currently living in. We're trying to run from reality and create a new one at the same time so we can escape into the new reality where we can just forget that the current reality exists. We doom scroll on our phones, we pick more so that we don't have to see the truth of reality. But when we turn to face it and we start to accept, we start to allow ourselves to feel, to feel all the pain that is there. We process how some of that pain is probably actually tied to our past. The shame that we carry, the the unbelievable self-judgment that so many of us carry, we start to see that, oh, that was never fully tied to the scars. That was tied to my past. It allows us to re it releases us from our past. It brings us into the present moment. And it's with the present moment that we can actually start to move forward. When we realize, okay, instead of me trying to, instead of me searching for perfection, maybe I can embrace the imperfection that exists right now and start working with that. And this is actually really important in all levels of healing in different parts of our life. This is something that is especially important around trauma. From a personal place, I had a really rough upbringing. I didn't have a picture perfect childhood. I had a really rough childhood, to be honest. It's not something that I would wish on anyone ever. And something that we often tend to do when we experience either a really hard childhood or there are aspects of our childhood that were hard, we tend to dismiss and minimize and say, oh, it wasn't that bad. Like looking back, I can see that people didn't mean it in that way. Or looking back, I can just see that my parents did the best with the tools that they had. And I don't want to blame them. I don't want to be angrier. What we're doing when we do that is we are dismissing and minimizing reality. And part of me, and also this is also what I help my clients with in so many different areas of life. But for me, in healing and letting go of the pain of my past, I had to start accepting the reality, which is I didn't have a very nice childhood. And I will never get that back. And that can't be undone. You can't go back and change the past. And part of deep healing is accepting that truth and the pain and the grief that comes with that truth. It's also in my relationship with my husband. This was a huge turning point for our relationship. But and I talked about this in a previous episode, and my husband is also okay with me sharing this. But part of moving into a healthier relationship with my husband was me accepting the reality of where our relationship was actually at instead of holding on to hope that things would change. And that ultimately actually ended up with me deciding to leave the relationship. We are still together now. So things took a turn for the better. And from that decision, it actually totally changed our relationship and allowed us to start to grow together. That's not the case for everyone, though. But the acceptance of reality allowed me to see what was truly there and feel the heartbreak because the hope that I was clinging on to was helping me to not accept reality fully, to not feel the heartbreak fully. And when I allowed my heart to break, I could actually make a decision that was based on reality, that was actually, that would actually empower me rather than keep me stuck. Acceptance is feeling deeply. I just want to add this bit in. And I'm recording this after editing. And just while I was listening, I thought there's just something missing from this piece. And what I'm wanting to share with you is not that we have to give up all hope and accept reality and feel the pain of reality so that we can move forward. When we let go of hope that is placed in essentially a made-up reality, we're hoping that something will be that isn't currently right now. It's not based off of current evidence. It's not based off of what you can already see, hear, touch, taste, feel. It's based off of what you hope things might be. Brene Brown, through her research, defines hope not just as an emotion, but as a cognitive process made up of goals, pathways, and agency. It is also something that is forged through struggle and adversity. What this means is that we find hope based on what we have right now and what we can do with what we have right now. That's agency. We can set goals, but then to be able to work towards those goals, we need to look at what do I have right now? What can I work with right now that is real in my life right now that will help me to move forward? But if we are clinging on to hope, we're just clinging on to an emotion. We're clinging on to something that doesn't exist right now. That's what I mean when I was sharing my story in my relationship is that I was clinging to hope. I was clinging to the potential of how things could be, but I had to look at the reality of what is the behavior that I've been seeing consistently. How have things been consistently? And to recognize that and accept that reality. And that reality at that time was heartbreaking. I let go of just clinging to the feeling of hope. And I embraced reality and all the pain that was there, which allowed me to work with what is, which gave me a different kind of hope of I know I can get through this and I'll be okay, and I'm gonna grow and be a stronger person because of this, even if the reality that I really, really wished could have been probably isn't the case. Probably the happiness and the joy that I would like to find is maybe not in the reality that I was wishing for. Now, like I said, our relationship has transformed entirely. I am so proud of how far we've come. I'm so proud of the people that we are today. And I am so grateful of how much growth we've been able to experience from coming from such a rough place. So I wanted to just step in and just share this piece that I feel is missing is that real hope is found in reality. It's based off of well, what can I do with what I have right now? Not wishing for things for just somehow to be magically different. And I want to share this last quote from Brene Brown. In very simple terms, hope happens when we have the ability to set realistic goals based in reality. I know where I want to go. We are able to figure out how to achieve those goals, including the ability to stay flexible and develop alternative routes. I know how to get there, I'm persistent, and I can tolerate disappointment and try again. We believe in ourselves. I can do this. And I think a lot of the time, especially with these behaviors, we don't base our goals in reality. We base them in kind of like wishful thinking. And I talk about this in I think the previous episode where we base our hope on the arrival fallacy, which is a cognitive bias that keeps us trapped, which actually makes us afraid to hope. Because when hope isn't based in reality, there is no path that we can find to actually get to that place. But when we are able to embrace reality, process the pain that is there, we start to find our agency, our power of, well, this isn't what I wish it would be, but what can I actually do right now? And that is how we move forward. And so when it comes to how do I deal with the scars so I can actually start to make progress in healing from skin picking or hair pulling or nail biting, it's in accepting reality and the pain that is there that maybe you've been wanting to avoid this whole time. And one of the ways that you can help yourself to access that and actually allow yourself to feel what is there is through a journaling practice, which I'm gonna put these questions that I asked you earlier in the episode. I'm gonna put them in the description. And I encourage you to take some space to do this. It doesn't have to be perfect. You just need to be in a quiet space. You can do it spontaneously even. Keep it simple. Maybe there's a certain playlist that helps you to connect to your emotions. Listen to that playlist. I'm sure you probably already have some songs in mind. Get out your journal or your piece of paper paper or your pen and put it somewhere where you can see it. And that will give you an inviting opportunity to just spontaneously sit down and do it. But to be able to better handle the scars, we need to allow ourselves to feel the pain that we feel about the scars, feel what we feel, feel the anger that might be there. Because as long as we avoid that, that emotion that we are avoiding and suppressing is going to be fuel to the fire of skin picking, heppling, or nail biting. Allow yourself to feel. Allow yourself to accept the painful truth. And if you need support in knowing how to sit with that emotion, I am here for you. This is exactly what I do with every single one of my clients. It's a core aspect of the work that I do with them. So if you do need, if you do feel like you need more support, you can go ahead and click on the link in the show notes and send me a message. I'm here for you. And if you found this episode valuable and insightful, please hit like and subscribe. Leave a five-star review. Don't forget to leave your thoughts in the comments down below. Any kind of interaction you get to this podcast really supports the work that I'm doing and pushes this content out to more people, which I super appreciate. Thank you so so much for dedicating this time to listening to this episode, for dedicating it to yourself. And I so look forward to seeing you next week for the next episode of Beyond Skin Picking and Hair Pooling.