120: A part of me really enjoys it! What do I do?

Satisfaction, rest, soothing - these are some of the most common things people report they enjoy about picking, pulling, and biting.

The biggest reason why we enjoy it so much is that it gives us something we aren't getting enough of in life already - Read the first three words again...

Despite how much you might enjoy it, when you begin to address the root cause, you start building a life that gives you more genuine reasons to feel satisfaction, rest, and soothing (and much more).

When this happens, we stop needing picking, pulling, or biting so much.

Sounds far-fetched?

I've seen it happen for my clients, and I have a couple of their incredible stories to share with you in this episode, PLUS 5 relationship areas we can focus on that make all the difference.

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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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Firstly, fair enough. There is an element to chronic skin picking, hair pulling, and nail binding that for most people, a lot of people, is simply just satisfying. And that's okay. We don't need to eliminate that to heal and regain control. I used to struggle with binge eating. That's no longer a problem for me, but it's not because I no longer crave cake or ice cream. It's not because I no longer eat those things ever and I'm militant and incredibly strict with myself. I'm just simply able to consume those things and enjoy consuming those things in a healthy way that does not have a detrimental impact on my well-being, either emotionally or physically. But what can you do to get yourself to that place? I'm going to share with you five areas of relationship. Relationship is the most healing experience we can have because it is how we experience love. Love is the greatest healing experience in someone's life. Nothing beats it. But it's not just relationship with other people. There are five areas where we want to cultivate really healthy, strong relationships. So I'm gonna ask you just to listen to what I share and see which area stands out to you the most. This is episode 120 of Beyond Skin Picking and Headpulling. My name is Rafaela Marie. I am your host. I've healed from 15 years of chronic skin peaking through addressing the root cause and treating it like an addiction. And now I am a coach helping others like you to heal as I did. And this podcast is a space where I share absolutely everything I know with you. If you appreciate what I do, don't forget to hit like and subscribe. Any kind of interaction that you give to this podcast really helps to push it out to more people and in turn really supports me in doing this work that I do. And if you would like support yourself, I would love to invite you to share your story with me. This is an opportunity to feel deeply seen, heard, and understood by someone who actually gets it. And also to receive tailored insight and guidance from me about the root cause of why you pick, pull, and bite, and what you can do right now that's going to make the most difference. So if you want to share your story with me, I would love, so love to hear from you. Just go ahead and click on the link in the show notes. This is something that one of my clients shared this week in our group coaching session. She said that she's noticed that the intensity of the urge to pick has lessened quite a bit. When she first joined my program, she was loving the things that she was learning. And she also said that she recognized that there was a part of her that just really enjoyed skin picking. And she wondered at the time, how can I ever move past this when I enjoy it so much? She is helping herself to move past it through addressing the root cause, which is what we focused on in my program. But the thing that she personally focused on was connection, developing a deeper and more healthy and honest connection with those closest to her in her life. And this is the kind of thing that a lot of us can feel a lot of resistance around because developing deeper connection with another human being requires us sometimes to have hard, honest conversations that can feel really scary. And to be honest, this is an important place of healing for virtually all my clients is cultivating this deeper connection and this healthier connection through having hard conversations, through vulnerability, through getting the support that you need to be able to do that. And it has been a little over six months of this person focusing on building connection. And she shared this week, she noticed that because the connection has been getting better and she feels more capable of creating that connection. She feels more capable of accessing vulnerability, of having hard conversations, that the intensity of the desire to pick has reduced. Then we have another client of mine, and it was finding her voice that was the turning point for her. Learning how to speak her mind, set boundaries with, again, people that were close to her in her life, family members. And in fact, she was interviewed on this podcast. Her name is Angela, and when you scroll back, you will find her podcast interview where we talk about the power of finding her voice and the impact it had on skin picking for her. When she started to truly access her voice, truly access that part of herself to set strong boundaries, to speak up, to say what she thought, to trust herself. For her as well, she noticed a great reduction in skid picking. And she as well said in the beginning, I also just really enjoy it. There's a sense of satisfaction in it. But the thing we need to understand about this enjoyment, this satisfaction, this soothing that we get from this behavior is that it is a pseudo sense of satisfaction and soothing and comfort that we are searching for. But when we start to actually cultivate the real thing in our life, then we don't need the pseudo-sense of it quite as much. Because there is a great amount of satisfaction in cultivating a deep, meaningful relationship. There is a great amount of satisfaction in learning how to trust yourself, in learning how to trust your voice, in realizing that, oh, I am capable of having hard conversations. I'm okay. I can handle this. There is an immense amount of satisfaction in that. And the level of trust that you begin to build in yourself because of that is also deeply soothing. This is real. What we cultivate when we address the root cause is real and it's reliable and it's sustainable and it lasts. That doesn't mean we don't have rough patches and fall back on all coping mechanisms. But through the process of addressing the root cause, we mature, we grow, we learn, we understand ourselves better. And so when we come across rough phases or rough patches of our life and we notice ourselves slipping back into some old habits, we're much better, we're much more capable of catching ourselves and bringing ourselves back to ourselves, back to center, of caring for ourselves through difficult times. And so from here, how can you start to address the root cause? I'm going to share with you five areas of relationship. I'm going to ask you just to listen to what I share and see which area stands out to you the most. It's going to hit on some soft spots, some tender spots, or maybe you're going to feel some resistance around it. The first relationship is your relationship with thoughts. A really great way to assess our relationship with our thoughts is simply to assess our relationship with our inner critic or negative thinking. Because we all have thoughts. We always will have thoughts. It's just part of being human. And we can't ever make negative thoughts go away. We can't get rid of the inner critic, but we can know that we have a low trust relationship with our thoughts when our inner critic or negative thoughts are quite dominant and loud and demanding and don't allow us to relax and slow down or feel satisfaction in our work or feel good about ourselves after a long day. These are the signs of a low trust relationship. Or we flip the other way and lean heavily into toxic posity and we try to ignore and shove down all the negative thoughts and just try to be happy all the time. What this represents, the either toxic positivity or feel overburdened by negativity, negative thoughts, and pressure. This is a relationship of resistance. We are resisting our thoughts. And what resists persists. The relationship we want is a relationship of curiosity. And this looks like recognizing that we are not our thoughts. So I have a thought, oh, I always mess things up. And instead of going, yeah, true, I always mess things up, oh damn. Instead of disagreeing with the thought or having a toxic positivity thought come in of, no, I can do it, it'll be alright. Instead, we recognize a thought, we can become consciously aware of it, and we can go, huh, that's an interesting thought. That's a recurring thought. I wonder where that comes from. What if it's not true? What if it's not totally true? What else might be true? It's turning towards these thoughts. Instead of resisting them and pushing them away, we turn towards them and get curious. This gives us choice. Instead of just believing all our thoughts or resisting all our thoughts, we get to listen to them, get curious about them, and choose: do I want to act on that or not? Do I want to fully believe that or not? This is when we start to build trust. And if you're more guidance for this, I have a seven-day challenge. It's a really gentle challenge. And within that, there is an exercise specifically around the inner critic and how to start building a relationship with our own thoughts. The link for that is in the description. Number two, the second relationship is relationship with emotions. A relationship of low trust with our emotions is we either minimize and dismiss how we feel through becoming highly rational and logical. So we spend a lot of time in our heads. Or on the flip side, we become overly emotional with no logic. This is when we feel like we are looping or drowning in emotion. And we tend to swing from one to the other. We feel like we're looping and drowning in emotion. We get exhausted by that. So we escape into rational thinking and logic until something triggers us enough that we fall back into emotional looping and drowning and feeling stuck in emotion. And then we escape back into logic and rational thinking. Just like with our thoughts, you are not your emotions. You have emotions. You experience emotions. It's like you are not your thoughts, you have thoughts. You cannot be an angry person or a nice person or a caring person. You are a person who is capable of caring. You are a person who is capable of feeling anger because every person is capable of feeling anger. A lot of the times when someone says, oh, but I'm a really nice person, that means I'm afraid to get angry. I'm afraid to feel angry. I'm afraid to push back. When we identify with our emotions, we really limit our experience of life. Because emotions are what allow us to experience life. They are simply a language. And when we limit ourselves and say, I am an angry person, I am not, or I am not an angry person, where did you learn that? Where did you learn that you were an angry person? Where did you learn that you were just a nice person? It's something that you learned. It's like learning, it's like if you learned a second language, but you really limited yourself to the most basic of the language. You would really struggle to build connection, genuine connection with those people around you. If you limited yourself to just the most basic things that everyone can learn on Duolingo, emotions are a language. You cannot own and hold on to one by making it your identity. When you do that, you are limiting yourself. And the reason why we do that is because we are afraid of what it might mean if we were not that thing. And this happens because we didn't learn how to actually process emotion. Our ability to process emotion as an adult is heavily influenced by how much co-regulation we received as a child. If we didn't receive much, then we are going to start making emotions our identity. We're going to label certain emotions as good and bad. There is no such thing as good or bad emotions. There's just emotions that are a little more pleasant, and there's ones that are a little or a lot more uncomfortable. There's dark and light, but there's no negative. Because that presupposes that it's bad and it's bad to feel that way. Emotion is a language, when you feel something, it has a message. Now, if we didn't receive much co-regulation as a child, then that simply means that when we were having a hard time, we had an adult who was regulated, who could be with us and help us to process and understand what we were feeling. Who didn't blame or shame or dismiss or minimize or ignore what we were feeling. And if your parents couldn't handle their own emotions, if they couldn't process their own emotions, then they couldn't have done that for you. Because they would have also been dismissing, minimizing, ignoring, and blaming themselves whether they felt. And so that's what they would have given to you as well. And that's not because they're a bad person or a bad parent, you could have had a great childhood. A great childhood with maybe not enough emotional achievement. And that leaves an impact. So if this relationship with your emotions is really standing out to you, and this is one that stands out to a lot of people in this community, then we need to learn how to feel and process emotion. We need to experience co-regulation. This is why working with a coach who knows how to do this, working with a therapist, psychologist, someone who can sit with you and hold space for your big emotions. Because this particular thing, co-regulation, must happen with another person. You cannot learn how to healthily process emotion on your own. This is a skill we learn in connection to another human being. There is nothing that can replace it. We can make a bit of progress on our own, but at some stage we need someone to sit with us and help us learn how to sit with ourselves so that we can learn how to regulate ourselves. And if you want support with that, that is exactly something I do with my clients. You can reach out to me. Link is in the description, or reach out to a therapist or psychologist. Don't deny yourself this healing. Number three, the relationship with your body. Many of us exist as floating heads. We go about a day constantly on go, constantly thinking, constantly doing, constantly ignoring the signals of our body. We either ignore the fact that we're hungry or thirsty or need a rest. We need soothing, we need comfort, we need connection. Or maybe we don't even know how to identify what that is, what that feels like, because we become so cut off from our bodies. Our body communicates through emotion and sensation. Anxiety, stress, tension, tightness, shallow breathing. These are all signs that the body is trying to communicate something with us. That means when you sit down to watch TV, you find yourself scanning and picking and pulling and biting. When you feel like you should be relaxing, you feel like you are relaxed, but why can you not seem to sit still? Or you find that you are constantly reaching for your phone or reaching for that snack. To build trust with our body, we want to learn how to listen to our body's no and take it seriously. Listen to our body's yes and take it seriously. Now, this isn't to say that everything we feel is the truth. Sometimes our body will be telling us to do something. Like, for example, we will physically feel a strong desire to go pick or pull a bite for an hour or more. Or you'll meet someone and your body will tell you you can't trust that person. There's something off about that person. When in actual fact, maybe that person is super nice, it's just your past wounds being triggered. The goal is to learn how to listen to the advice from my body. It's to become a leader of ourselves. To listen to the advice and notice, huh, I feel uncomfortable. Where might that be coming from? I feel uncomfortable. Is that because this is really out of alignment for me? Or is that just because I'm nervous because there's something new and I don't know what the outcome will be? You get to listen and then make a choice rather than being reactive to the feelings and sensations that show up in your body or being dismissive and avoidant of them. We turn and listen and then we take grounded conscious action from it. And sometimes we will end up making the wrong choice. But that is simply an opportunity to learn oh, that's what that feeling meant. Next time I'm going to listen to it instead of choosing to do something else. This isn't about avoiding mistakes. This is about getting to know, getting really fluent in the language of our body. And also to add on to that, it's also to really take care of our body. Give it the nutrients, the nourishment it needs. Make sure you drink enough water, eat proper food, get the rest that you need. You are not your body, you have a body, and you have a responsibility to take care of it. Because the body belongs to you. It doesn't belong to anyone else. And it is your core responsibility to care and maintain it. So there's a few ways we can start to build trust with our body. It can simply be if you notice that you don't eat properly, that you don't rest properly, the first place to start is really the basics. So if you notice that you don't eat properly, then it's looking at, well, how can I start to improve that? Because if we aren't taking care of the real basic needs of our body, then trying to listen to the more subtle cues that our body is giving us about the yeses and no's of our life, the wisdom that our body holds, it's hard to do that if we aren't eating properly. That in itself is gonna push us into a state of fight or flight because that's a state of scarcity of like, oh, I'm not eating very well. There must be something wrong. That's a very good reason to feel constantly stressed. A lot of the steps we take in this journey are gonna be really simple, basic things. Nothing super big and dramatic. Something as simple as, oh, I'm gonna start finding a way to make sure that I eat well. And that's my assignment for the next month or two months. Or maybe it's my assignment for this year, and that's enough. Relationship number four is relationship with others. This was very well described with the example from my client. But this is us learning how to develop a functional, healthy relationship with others. Maybe you feel like, oh, I got that. I've got great relationships in my life. If you feel like, well, I'm pretty isolated, I have friends, but we're not super close, or have pretty strained relationships with my family, and I don't really have other people that are super close to me in my life, or maybe you feel like you've got a bit of a mix of both. The lower trust we have in relationship with others, the more isolation we are going to experience. And building a healthy functional relationship with others just looks like learning how to have healthy boundaries, learning how to have hard conversations, learning how to create intimacy, learning how to get your needs net within a relationship, and learning how to meet someone else's needs within a relationship without self-abandoning. At least for me personally, this is probably one of the hardest and most triggering areas of growth for me. But it has also been the absolute most fulfilling and rewarding and life-changing area of my life that I have grown in. And a shout out to my husband for being my partner in crime, for being the person who I have worked through so much of my shit with. We both worked on our shit together. Um, but it is not easy. And I understand the desire to just want to be busy on a subconscious level, just want to stay busy, be busy, not have the time to really make for other people. And to say, yeah, when I when I get this done, when I succeed in this area, when when things have settled down, then I'll have time for other people. I used to tell myself that all the time until I realized I was spending years telling myself the same story. And I could see as long as I continued that way, I was going to end up very lonely. The place where we are going to cultivate the deepest connection and healthiest relationships is in your real life with people face to face. Online is great, but it will never replace human-to-human contact and connection. But if you feel like that sounds really overwhelming and too much for you right now, then join an online community. One of those steps you could take is joining my free WhatsApp support group. This is a place where I share messages of motivation and inspiration and insight every week. And there is often some really spontaneous, beautiful conversation. It's a support group within this community that is not heavy. It is incredibly uplifting. And if you would like to join that, just send me a message. The link to do that is in the show notes. I feel like I'm saying that a lot in this episode, but there's just so much I have to share with you. I also do monthly free masterclasses, and that would be another place to connect in community with other people and take that small step out of isolation, out of holding yourself back from connection. If the relationship with others is what's calling to you, reflect on how, what is one teeny tiny little step you can take towards connection with others. And if it feels too overwhelming and big, then try and find an even smaller, tinier step. The step might feel or look like it is totally insignificant and not that meaningful, but take whatever step feels manageable to you. Don't just try and force yourself to do what you think you should be doing. That brings us to relationship number five. Relate the relationship with meaning and purpose. And I know these two words can feel really overwhelming. It's like, boah, I don't know what that is. What is that for me? Put really simply, it just means contribution. It can also be spirituality for some people. Find an area of your life where you would like to add meaning, where you would like to give back. We thrive off contributing, of feeling like we are doing something meaningful for other people. And of course, this can also lead to self abandonment and overgiving and feeling drained and resentful. That is not contributing. That is us trying to manipulate getting our needs met by overgiving and hoping those people will give back to back to us in the way that we need. Real contribution is giving without the expectation of receiving. In fact, it is being able to support people and make a difference, is what you gain from it. And that can give us a great sense of fulfillment and satisfaction and contentment with ourselves. And it doesn't have to be something dramatic. It can be, I want to be the best parent I can be to my kids. And watching and supporting them in growing and thriving into incredible human beings is incredibly meaningful for me. And that is where I want to draw the meaning for my life. That's where I want to contribute. For others, it might be I just want to be the best team member at my work that I can be. Maybe you don't have great aspirations to progress up the ladder. Maybe you're happy with where you're at and you just want to contribute to the team and the work that you're doing. Life is not all about us. There is an element of contribution of giving back and finding meaning in giving back. If you find that you tend to fall into overgiving, self-abandonment, and then resenting, when we start to feel resentment, we know we're not contributing from a heartfelt place. We're contributing from a wounded place. Now, if that's the case, we want to look at, well, how am I caring for my physical body? How am I, am I nurturing myself physically or am I neglecting myself? We must be nurturing ourselves to then be able to contribute back to society, contribute back to the people around us. Am I nurturing myself emotionally? Or am I neglecting myself emotionally? If I'm neglecting myself, then it's going to be harder to find fulfillment, meaning. It's going to be harder to contribute in a way that leaves me feeling fulfilled. Now, I want to say though there is no black and white with this. You can recognize that, oh, I need to build the relationship with my body and with my emotions more, but I still want to do things, something that's meaningful. I still want to find fulfillment. You can do that and still see that you need growth in other areas. We don't have to be perfectly connected to our body and our emotions and others to then be able to contribute in a meaningful way and find fulfillment. All these things will grow together. They're all interconnected. So out of these five relationship areas, what drew you in the most? Relationship with your thoughts, relationship with your emotions, relationship with your body, relationship with others, relationship with meaning and purpose. Whichever stood out to you the most, hit the most home, is most likely your greatest area for growth right now. And it can and it will change, but right now, that there is something in your life that is calling to you to say, hey, look at me. And maybe you already know what that is, you just haven't wanted to look at it too closely until now. This is what it means to address the root cause. It is not for the faint-hearted. It is hard work. It does challenge us, it is so uncomfortable. And it will lead you to the greatest amount of fulfillment and joy and awe and love and connection that you will ever experience in your life. And in order to cultivate that in our lives, we must be willing to give up what's comfortable and familiar and to take risks and to take a chance on ourselves. Take a chance on yourself. Because maybe, just maybe, what if you will be absolutely okay? Thank you so so much for hanging out, and I look forward to seeing you next week on the next episode of Beyond Skin Picking and Hair Pulling.