125: The 3-Step Reset for Picking & Pulling Urges: Regain Control in the Moment

This isn't a quick fix, and it won't make the urge disappear. But it is a process that can help you create long-term, sustainable change.

These 3 steps were vital in my own healing journey, and I continue to see them help my clients and other wonderful members of this community find their way forward.

In this episode, you'll learn how to:

✨ Regulate your emotions through your breath and reconnect with your body

✨ Ask effective questions to better understand what you actually need

✨ Take intentional action that makes sense, feels good, and can actually move you forward

Instead of seeing an intense urge as something you need to fight, fix, or get rid of, you'll learn how to use it as information - an opportunity to pause, check in with yourself, and respond differently.

But there is one mistake that can completely derail this process and I'm yet to meet a person who doesn't make it.

Listen in to learn how these 3 simple steps can change the way you respond to urges and, over time, change your relationship with skin picking altogether. 

💌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 - (this is no longer available. For this kind of insight and feedback, you can "share your story" with me via the link above)

🎯Join the 7-Day Skin Picking Recovery Challenge

🤓Sign up - FREE BFPA Monthly Masterclass

✨Join - BEYOND Support Group on WhatsApp

🙋‍♀️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

SPEAKER_00 0:00

There is a process and certain skills that we can learn that can help us over time to better handle intense urges. We start with the breath and regulation, checking in any self-assessment, and then conscious intentional action. It's an incredibly simple process, but there is one mistake that a lot of people make, which can turn this into a frustrating process instead of a healing process. You are listening to episode 125 of Beyond Skin Picking and Hair Pulling. My name is Rafaela Marie. I'm your host, I feel from 15 Years of Chronic Skin Picking. Through learning how to feel my feelings and treating it like an addiction. Now I'm a coach helping others like you to heal like I did, and I share absolutely everything I know with you on this podcast. If you appreciate the work that I do, the best way you can support me is by hitting like and subscribe, leaving a five-star review, or leaving your thoughts in the comments down below. And if you would like more support, then I would love to invite you to a very special opportunity to share your story with me. A key component to healing is feeling deeply seen, heard, and understood because there is so much isolation and misunderstanding with these behaviors. In this process, I will also share with you my insights into the root cause of why you pick, pull, or body, or body, and some tangible, actionable things that you can do right away to help yourself to start addressing the root cause and create long-term sustainable change. If you'd like to share your story with me, go ahead and click on the link in the show notes. How much time do you spend in your head from the moment you wake up in the morning to the moment you go to bed? How many moments throughout the day do you check in and remember that you have a body that you actually feel into your body? Most people I ask this question to can't really put a number. But what they can say is, yeah, I don't really do that, actually. It never really crosses my mind. And it's understandable. We live in such a fast-paced world and we are raised in a society where productivity is the most important thing. How much you can do, how much you can achieve, how much you can produce are markers of worth. So it's not your fault that you didn't learn the importance of connecting to and checking in with your own body on a regular basis. Now, here are some problems that can arise when you are not connected in with your body, when you are on go the whole day, when you spend most of your time inside your head, and you essentially exist most of the day as a floating head. You'll find it hard to take a break. You prioritize other people and things above your own well-being. So making sure that you eat properly or that you move your body or that you take a break when you need a break. It's easy to ignore those things or make excuses to not do those things when we're not connected into our body. Because our body is what communicates our needs. How do you know you're thirsty? Because you feel it. How do you know you're hungry? Because you feel it. How do you know you need to go to the toilet? Because you feel it. How do you know you don't like what someone just said to you? You feel it. But if we are not in our body, if we are disconnected from our body, we are disconnected from our feelings, our emotions, and so we are disconnected from it, from our needs. That doesn't mean that nothing gets through to us, but the greater the disconnection, the greater the self-abandonment. The more we will find ourselves pushing ourselves beyond our limits. Because the more you are tuned in with your body, the harder it is to ignore your body saying, stop. No, I don't like that. That's not okay. Or I really need this. And so this brings us to the first step. There are three steps in this process to better managing intense urges to pick, pull, or bite. Because what is an intense urge? It's a feeling. It's your body trying to communicate with you, trying to get your attention. And so when we can start to use that urge, not as something that we are super afraid of and trying to avoid and prevent and trying not to think about, we can use that moment as an indication of, okay, I need to pause for a second. My body is trying to tell me something, then that can help us to build a healthier relationship with ourselves and heal in a really sustainable long-term way. So how do we get out of our head and into our body? We're simply going to use the breath. And if you want a five-minute guided meditation specifically with the breath, then listen to the previous podcast episode, episode 124, because I do that inside that episode. But essentially, what we want to do is that when we are, when we are disconnected from our body and we are inside our heads and we're on go, our breath becomes shallow. Our breath is also shallow when we are in fight or flight. So to help ourselves to connect back into our body, we want to take deep belly breaths. So when you feel the urge, that is your first indication to, oh, I need to pause for just a second and breathe deeply. Take a deep breath into your belly. Feel that breath expanding your belly and then also expanding your chest. And then you let it out. And you can do that once. You can do that two or three times. You can spend a minute doing that. But all we're doing with that breath is just bringing our mind and reminding our mind that, oh, we have a body as well. It brings in a moment of consciousness, of awareness. And you don't just have to do this when the urge comes up. You can do this anytime you feel intense emotion coming up. So you're feeling very frustrated, you're feeling hurt, or you're feeling confused, or you're just noticing there's something there. That is an opportunity to listen to your body. And when we pause and breathe, that is an active step in healthy emotional regulation. Simply being with what we're noticing in our body and breathing, that is regulation. It doesn't mean it's going to get rid of the feeling. So what I'm sharing with you is not a quick fix. It doesn't mean that you're going to now perfectly be able to handle every intense urge and get rid of them, not at all. This is a process, a three-step process to learn how can I actually use the urge to learn about myself. Use it as a learning opportunity, use it as an opportunity to remember to check in with me, use it as a reminder to breathe. When I'm working with my clients and we're learning these kinds of techniques, they'll often say, I just always forget. I forget to do it. And then I set reminders on my phone and it kind of helps, but not really. We want to start using our own physical cues as reminders. Because it's great to set reminders on our phone, especially in the beginning, maybe to remind ourselves that that's something that we're practicing, or to have a post-it note. Excellent. That is great. In the long term, though, we we really want to be using those external reminders to remind us to listen to our body. So if you like, you can put some poster notes around that say breathe, put some reminders on your phone that say breathe. Maybe you want to do this with someone else and say, hey, I want to, for the next week or two, I really want to focus on remembering to breathe. Breathe deeply. That's a great way to get started in it. And then we want to start practicing using intense feelings as an opportunity to check in, or using feelings that we notice in our body as an opportunity to pause and breathe. That's what we're wanting to train our brain to do. So that's the first step is to listen to the urge that shows up. And instead of trying to avoid or run away or try to get rid of it or freak out because, oh my God, I don't want to ruin my hair, my skin, my nails right now. Instead of that, it's, oh, it's an opportunity. This is my body telling me, stop for a second, breathe for a second. So that's step one. And the second step is where we want to understand that chronic skin peaking, hair pulling, and nail biting, they are your teachers. They are guiding you back to yourself. They are not your enemy. That intense urge that you're feeling is information. And when we can get curious, that is when we can start to take a step forward. That's when we can start to gather new information, more understanding. And instead of judging ourselves and trying to control ourselves or avoid or hide from ourselves, we start to turn towards ourselves. And it's extremely simple. After you do that deep breath and you pause for just a couple of seconds, you're going to ask yourself, what do I need right now? Because these behaviors, they are self-soothing mechanisms. So you're needing soothing for some reason. You're needing something to help you to better regulate your nervous system. So what do you actually need right now? Do you need to take a break and step away from your laptop? Go stare outside, stare out the window for a minute or two, do some stretches. Have you moved your body today or this week or this month? Have you eaten yet? Or have you been eating properly? What do I need right now? And maybe the need that comes to your mind feels like an inconvenience. That's the truth about us being human, though, is that sometimes we simply are inconvenient. But part of the problem is that we try to make ourselves as convenient as possible to everyone else. And so therefore our needs become an inconvenience. They are a necessity. And yes, there are moments when we do have to set our needs to the side, but probably not as much as you're currently doing. So what do I need right now? That's the first question you're going to ask. Now, another question we can ask, this is a second question, is is there anything I've been avoiding or neglecting lately? Have you been avoiding any kinds of conversations? If you find that you're having arguments or conversations in your head a lot, it's probably because you're not, it's probably because you're not saying enough of those things out loud. And you're not having the conversations that you need to have. You're not sharing what you think or how you feel. So are there any difficult conversations that aren't being had that maybe you need to have? Are there any tasks that have been weighing on you? Like maybe your apartment or your office is a mess, but because you're trying to be a convenient for everyone else, you're letting those things slide and they're having an impact on your mental health. We want to ask ourselves questions. What do I actually need? Sometimes the answer is really simple. Sometimes it's a little more confronting or scary. Sometimes nothing comes. And if you don't get any answer, maybe that's an invitation to just sit and be with yourself, to continue breathing deeply, because sometimes there's nothing for us to do. We just need to give ourselves a moment to process. Like if you've been on go for the past five hours or more, or maybe you've had a few really intense nonstop hours of work. Maybe you just need a moment to sit and process. Not to think about it, but just to breathe and process and come and come back to yourself. So the second step is to check in and get curious. Ask yourself the question, what do I need right now? Or is there anything I've been avoiding or neglecting lately? And I'm just gonna throw this one in here. Do I need to be an inconvenience to meet any of those needs? And how do you feel about that? We've got to be a goddamn inconvenience sometimes. There is no way around it. None. And these self-assessments can help us to see where am I consistently not meeting my own needs and not meeting myself, not respecting myself, not honoring myself. This brings us to the third step. And this is the action step. After this, I'm going to share with you a mistake a lot of people make. So make sure you stick around because this mistake will undo everything we've just talked about if you do it. Step number three is action. When you receive that information from yourself and you gain that little bit of insight into maybe what you need or what's happening for you, then we actually have an opportunity to do something. Instead of just taking action and it's kind of like throwing paint at the wall and hoping something sticks. Is that what people say? Throwing ideas at the wall and hoping something sticks. I think that's more the saying. Instead of just trying something, we get to do something specific. For example, I've used this example in previous podcast episodes. Because I work so much on social media, creating content and connecting with people, I often fall into doom scrolling. There was one particular evening where I doom scrolled for two hours or so, and I felt like crap afterwards. So I actually implemented this process of pause, breathe, allow myself to sit with what I was feeling, and it was uncomfortable. Then I understood, well, what do I need? And I realized I need a tool to help me to better manage my access to social media. And so I thought, tomorrow I'm going to take 30 minutes to set up that app. And I did. And what that allowed me to do was it was allow me to have a shit moment, to process it, to understand, well, what do I actually need? I need help. I need a tool of some sort to help me manage my social media access. And then it gave me something to do. It gave me a direction to go in, which when we have that, and science shows this, when we have something meaningful to move towards, it makes us feel better. But what is important is it that is that you have gone through the process of understanding what it is that you actually need. Because if we don't take the time to understand, then we're just going to think, oh, I should do that. Because either that's what society expects, that's what people are telling me I should do, that's what sounds the best. And then we try the thing, and probably it doesn't work if it isn't actually in alignment with what you need. But when you can take the time to get curious and gather information, then you can actually figure out what it is that you need and base your action on that. And I still end up scrolling on my phone. It's not like that moment fixed everything, but I am much more in control and I have tools in place that can help me to not scroll for two hours. I don't think I've scrolled for two hours in one go since that moment. Another example that I've seen come up for a lot of people and I've worked with with my clients is when people have done that self-assessment and recognize what do I need? What have I been neglecting? What have I been avoiding? Many people have not been prioritizing, they've been neglecting nourishing their body. So they realize I haven't actually been eating properly. I'm just constantly on go. I prioritize my work and other people. And I kind of just snack or I don't really have a proper meal throughout the day. I just feel like I'm in such a rush. And let me tell you, if you're not making sure that you eat properly, it makes you feel like shit. It makes you feel subconsciously unworthy. I mean, imagine you have a kid with you and you're just telling they're hungry and you're just telling them, hey, I don't have time to feed you. Go and grab some nuts and some dried fruit from the cupboard and eat that. You think that kid is going to feel very loved? Not at all. Neither are you. And so it's gaining the information of, huh, okay, I haven't actually been eating properly. Okay. If I haven't been eating properly, what's an action step I can take? Right. I'm going to focus on helping myself to eat properly. That's the thing that I'm going to focus on and work on. That is something that is meaningful. That is something that'll make a difference. That is something tangible that makes sense. And this is the kind of process that has helped me over years to find freedom from chronic skin picking. Not just chronic skin picking, but it's the process that has helped me to better manage my emotions by using the discomfort that I experience as information and an opportunity to check in and understand myself better so that I can act in a way, so that I can respond to how I'm feeling in a proactive and intentional, functional way, rather than just mindlessly reacting. That is the third step. Intentional, conscious, practical action based off of what you uncovered in the second step, which is what do you need? What have you been avoiding? What have you been neglecting? Which we discover through taking a moment to breathe and feel into our body and process and connect to what it is that's going on in the body. The mistake that so many people make is that they try, they feel the urge, they feel the intense emotion, and they immediately try to jump straight to, well, what do I need? What's going on? What can I do? And there is maybe a millisecond of, oh, I feel something. All right, action. They skip step number one. Step number one is vital. You must pause and breathe into your body. Take that deep belly breath, expand your chest with air. If you cannot be present with yourself for a few seconds, then the response you might get about what do I need? What have I been neglecting might be more of, would probably be more along the lines of, I'm probably feeling this way because I should be doing this, or I'm not doing this, or because that person did that. It's a logical process. You're still stuck in your head. We want to connect to the wisdom and intuition that lives within the body, which means we need to breathe into the body and spend some time there. And I explained this more in the previous episode, 124. The mistake is we skip regulation, we skip connection to the body, we skip the breath in order to try and figure out what the problem is so we can fix it and make it go away. I say this so many times. You are not a problem to be fixed. You are a human being to be understood. Step one is vital. Step one, if that's all you focus on for the next couple of weeks, amazing. It will make a bigger difference to your relationship with yourself, to your life, than if you were to only focus on step two and three. And this process will directly help you in gaining more understanding, which will then lead to more healing and seeing those really tangible long-term changes that you want to see. And they don't happen all at once. But when you do this process in three months' time, six months' time, twelve months' time, you'll pause and look back and see, oh wow, I've changed. Things are different. They're maybe not perfect, but they never will be. Let's be honest. Thank you so much for spending this time with me. I really appreciate that you're here. And I appreciate that you have this will and this drive to want more for you. Because you deserve it. Keep going. You're on the right path. And I will see you next Tuesday for the next episode of Beyond Skinpicking and Hell.