126: How To Stop Chronic Skin Picking & Hair Pulling

🙌A great follow-up episode to listen to after this one is 123: Stop The Spiral & Heal After a Picking, Pulling, or Biting Session

What if the thing keeping you stuck in chronic skin picking, hair pulling, or nail biting isn't just the behaviour itself, but how you treat yourself because of it?

For so many people in this community, there is one thing that shows up again and again: a loud inner critic. And the shame, judgment and relentless pressure it creates can actually become part of the reason you need picking, pulling or biting in the first place.

In this episode, you'll learn:

✨ How your inner critic may be fuelling the cycle of picking, pulling or biting

✨ Why these behaviours can provide an escape from the noise inside your own mind

✨ How the way you treat yourself after a session can become a powerful opportunity for healing

This isn't a quick fix. It's about building an inner foundation of compassion and support so that, over time, you simply don't need the behaviour in quite the same way.

💌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

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Well, first you're going to need to get some gloves, cover all your mirrors, or just throw them away. And then just try really, really hard to not pick, pull, or bite at your body. Don't switch off this episode just yet. I am joking, because those are things that we have all tried many, many times, and they simply haven't worked. So we want to look at the root cause and see how we can start to work at the root cause to create long-term sustainable change. How we stop at the root cause is by understanding why we need this behavior in the first place. And I have had hundreds of conversations with amazing people within this community. And there is one particular thing that stands out amongst the crowd. And that is that every single person that I speak to has a loud inner critic. And when we start to look at the root cause, this already gives us a lot of information into why you pick pull or body or body, plus a big part of the solution to healing from it. Let's unpack this in this episode together so that you can better understand why it is that you engage in this behavior and how you can start to heal through addressing the root cause. And at the end of this episode, you are going to have one very big tangible thing that you can focus on that will help to make such an incredible difference in your healing journey. I have seen this work for so many people. It is a vital step in healing. You are listening to episode 126 of Beyond Skin Picking and Hairpooling. My name is Raphaela Marie. I'm your host of healed from 15 years of chronic skin picking through learning how to actually feel my feelings and treating it like an addiction. And now I am a coach helping others like you, till as I did, and I share absolutely everything I know with you on this podcast. If you appreciate the work that I do, please don't forget to hit like and subscribe, leave a five-star review, or leave your thoughts in the comments. Any way that you interact with this podcast supports me in supporting more people inside this community. And if you yourself are looking for even more support, I would love to invite you to a very special opportunity to share your story with me. If there is one thing that is missing within this community right now in terms of the kind of support that we need, it is feeling deeply seen, heard, and understood. This is what you will receive in sharing your story with me. Plus, I will share with you my insights into the root cause of why you pick, pull, or bite at your body, plus some really tangible, practical steps to start addressing this at the root cause and start to create change that is sustainable. If you want to share your story with me, go ahead and click on the link in the show notes. What does it mean to stop picking, pulling, or biting at our body? And I mean actually stop, not the fantastical magical thinking of I will just never feel or crave it again, and I'll never ever touch my skin or my hair or my nails again, and everything will be wonderful and perfect. The reality, what it actually means to heal, is to reduce these behaviors back down to a normal level. And normal varies from person to person. Because these behaviors in themselves, I mean, every, pretty much every single person on some level picks or pulls or bites at their body, but only a small percentage of us struggle with it as a chronic behavior, as an as a process or behavioral addiction. Every single animal, mammal at least, grooms themselves. And it is normal to feel a sense of soothing through self-grooming behaviors. Part of self-brooming is a self-regulatory process. And so healing, stopping, does not mean 100% abstaining from this behavior. It does not mean never feeling the urge again. It means you're able to engage in this behavior in a way that is not emotionally and physically self-destructive most of the time, because every person sometimes goes a little bit too far with that hangnail or with that bit of skin or with that pimple. I think I've shared this before, but my husband once, he doesn't get pimples very often, but he once had a pimple and he went too far. He made it so much worse. And he generally never does that. He can generally leave things alone. But this one pimple he went too far. That doesn't mean he now has chronic skin picking. He's just a human being. We are not expecting perfection from ourselves when we're healing. And that is something we must keep in mind when we are on our own healing journeys, because it is so easy to slip into that black and white thinking and that perfectionist way of thinking, which only keeps us more stuck and generates more shame. So, in the context of this episode, that is what we are focusing on and that is what we are working towards. And in fact, in every single episode of you listen to, that is the context and what we're working towards. So now that we understand what it is that we're working towards, what it actually means to stop, we can start to look at, well, why do I need this in the first place? Why am I engaging in this behavior in the first place? Because every behavior has a purpose. And the way we can start to understand what that purpose is is through the emotion that it evokes. Because emotion drives all behavior. If we didn't feel emotions, we would do nothing. How do you know you are hungry? You feel it. How do you know you enjoy something because you feel it? How do you know if you do or don't like someone? You feel it. And of course there is some logical processing that happens there as well. But the main driver is emotion. And emotion is also how our body communicates to us our needs. So then we want to look at how does skin picking, hair pulling, nail biting, cheek biting make you feel. I have spoken to so many hundreds of people within this community over the past few years. And here are the typical things that people say how they feel after a session, or how they feel about the fact that they engage in this behavior. There is shame, embarrassment, self-judgment, criticism, exhaustion, apathy, hopelessness, sadness, grief, despair. Now, something we need to understand is that these emotions most likely didn't start, they didn't originate because of the picking, pulling, or biting. There are other experiences that you have had that have created those emotional experiences in a time when you didn't have the support or the skills or the capability to process those emotions. And this is something that I mentioned in a lot of these episodes is that if you didn't have emotionally attuned parents, emotionally regulated or emotionally stable parents, or parents who understood how to feel and process and express their own emotions in healthy ways, then you wouldn't have learned how to do that either. It is a human thing to experience shame and frustration and hopelessness and despair and to feel self-criticism and judgment. That's a normal human thing. But if we, especially as children, don't have support in how to move through those emotions and understand them, then they become stuck inside of us because we don't learn how to process them and so we hold on to them instead. I'm sharing this because we often blame the picking, pulling, or biting as the source of why we feel so bad about ourselves. And it absolutely does exacerbate those feelings. And of course, if we are damaging our body, if we are causing physical damage that other people can see, if we feel like we need to hide that damage, absolutely that adds to some, that really does generate shame and frustration. All those feelings about the behavior, they make sense. And I'm not trying to say that they're not real. I'm just saying that it is not the behavior that created that inner emotional turmoil that you experience. This is important to understand because if we think that this behavior is the source of all our suffering, then it really does trap us in this thinking of, well, therefore I have to be absolutely free of this behavior, otherwise, I'll always be suffering. Instead of the more attainable and realistic and compassionate perception, which is, oh, this behavior is actually okay at its core. I just want to reduce it back down to a normal, healthy level, a regular level that is not self-destructive. Those of us who place all the blame or majority of the blame of our suffering on this behavior will really struggle to accept that. There will be maybe some grief or despair in thinking, oh, so I'm probably going to, on some level, pick or pull a bite at my body. Always. Most people do. It doesn't mean it's a chronic problem. It doesn't mean you're going to be chronically causing damage to your body for the rest of your life. Recognizing this is to encourage you to look beyond the behavior. Get curious for other aspects of your life. Reflect on where you've learned to hide and not be yourself. Because there is so much more to you than this behavior. There has always been, there is so much more to you than this inner turmoil that you struggle with, these heavy emotions that you experience almost on a day-to-day basis. The emotions that you struggle with and the behavior that you struggle with, yes, they are intertwined, but they are not one and the same. The behavior is a symptom and a tool we use to cope with the emotions. And so through working on the root cause, we can help ourselves to better handle the emotions so we don't need the tool quite as much to help us to soothe the emotions. Now, if you resonate with any of the emotional experiences that I listed out before, what this tells me is that you most likely have a loud inner critic. And I have taken so many people through this process, and everyone says, yeah, yeah, I do. I totally resonate with that. It doesn't mean the inner critic is there 100% of the time, or maybe it is for you, but it means that when you make mistakes, when you don't show up the way you way you would like, um, the inner critic is there to tell you you should try harder, you should do better, what are people gonna think? There's like this constant pressure and harshness and relentlessness within you. And it's hard to slow down and relax and take a break without feeling guilty or without this sense of urgency and this nervous energy driving you to get up again and start doing something, quote unquote, productive. And this was actually a conversation that came up in my free WhatsApp support group, which you're more than welcome to join. The link is in the show notes. This past week, a conversation came up where everyone was talking about how loud their inner critic was. And it's just incredibly interesting to see that this is such a common denominator within this community. Now, if we look at the loud inner critic, what this tells me about you is that being inside your own mind most of the time is not a really nice place to be. It's a place that is quite harsh, that is, like I said, relentless. It's not a place you feel like you can come home to and relax in, especially if you've had a hard day, especially if you've made mistakes, especially if you haven't been as good as you would have liked to be. There isn't an inner sense of home. Now, when this most of the time is what our internal experience is, that's exhausting. Day in and day out, that is your inner experience. No wonder you search for an escape to get a break from that internal experience. Just think about what skin picking, hair pulling, nail biting, cheek and cheek biting gives you. How is it to be in a session? It's like going into a trance. It's like almost helps to quiet, damp down the noise, can even stop your thoughts, or it makes it easier to process your thoughts. It just dampens down the noise, takes off the pressure. And I'm curious if this is something that resonates. Often sessions can go for a long time because in the back of your mind, you're thinking, I'm gonna feel like absolute shit when I stop. And so there's that motivation to just keep going, to just stay in that space and that quiet for a little longer to stave off how horrible you're going to feel, the inner, how loud the inner critic is gonna be when you finally stop. For a lot of people, that's why they're picking sessions or pulling sessions or biting sessions go for so long. When we look at healing this behavior from the root cause, we want to start to build an inner foundation within you of compassion, of forgiveness, kindness, love, motivation, encouragement so that your internal world most of the time is a nice place to be. Rather than the inner criticism and harshness being the dominant experience that you have, we want that experience of compassion and support to be the dominant experience that you have. Now we can't get rid of the inner critic. Everyone has one, and it's fine that it's there. We just don't want it to be so loud and dominating and controlling. Because just think about this, and this is a question that I ask every single person that I have a support call with. Just think about if your inner world was most of the time a nice place to be, if it was a place that you felt like you could come home to and relax in, if after a bad day, after a really long day, after making mistakes or even letting some people down, you knew that you could lean on yourself, come home to yourself and find kindness and compassion there. How would that impact skin picking, hair pulling, or nail biting? How would that impact every other area of your life and how you feel about yourself? It would make an incredible difference. You wouldn't need picking, pulling, or biting as much. You wouldn't have to be as afraid after a session of that loud inner critic being there. And so therefore your sessions would become shorter. And I have seen this happen time and time again. I saw it happen for myself. As people start to build a stronger, more solid foundation of compassion for themselves, their sessions become shorter because they're no longer dreading how they're going to feel after a session. They might not still, they're not going to feel fantastic, but their inner critic isn't going to tear them down like it used to. And that makes such a difference. And this does this doesn't just apply to after a picking session. This applies to every other area of area of life. When there's mistakes in a relationship or at work, or when you're not living up to the standard that you expect from yourself in certain areas of your life, things just become easier to handle because you're not being so mean to yourself. And I just want to address one thing is that the inner critic, we can hear the inner critic talking in our head, but for some people, maybe you don't hear a voice. You just feel the heaviness, you feel the shame, you feel the judgment, you feel this drought, this pulling, this sinking feeling. That's also in that's also indication of an inner critic. Not everyone is aware of the words that are coming into their head. So where can we start to help ourselves to build this foundation of compassion? Maybe you've already got an idea of that from listening to this episode, from listening to what I've been saying so far. Maybe you've also heard me talk about this in previous episodes. But it is actually in the hardest moments of struggling with this behavior that we can start to create the most healing and the greatest change. And that is in those moments just after a session, when that shame and that inner critic is really going hard. Because it's in that moment that we don't feel like we're deserving of good things, of kindness, of love. We feel like we're deserving of punishment, of withdrawal of love and kindness. And this kind of reaction that we have to making a mistake, to not being our best, that doesn't just show up with picking, pulling, or biting. It shows up in other areas of your life. These are not isolated experiences. It's a pattern. And what we want to understand is that this is when confirmation bias comes in. So our, we are very biased creatures. We have our beliefs, our subconscious beliefs, and our mind is going to work to ensure that we confirm these beliefs to be true. It doesn't matter if they're good or bad. We just want to make sure that we are right about what we believe. And a great example of this is I've worked in hospitality for 15 years, and half that time has been spent in service. And something that's really interesting to notice is that if one of my colleagues is having a bad night, having a bad shift, they're not in a good mood, they're feeling agitated within themselves, or they've had one customer that was maybe harder than normal, this shifts that they'll start to say things like, everyone just seems like they're on it today. Everyone just seems like they're super impatient or really demanding or everyone just seems like they're in a bad mood today. And because they have this belief, they'll start to see that in customers' expressions, in their tone, in how they speak. And what is incredibly interesting is that if I am not on that my colleagues' wavelength, if I feel chilled and calm myself, if I don't have the belief that everyone is in a shit mood, I won't see what they're seeing. My experience of the restaurant, although we're in the same restaurant serving the same people, will be like night and day. And that is simply because of confirmation bias. So if you believe you are not deserving of good things, of kindness, of love, of compassion, when you mess up, when you when you're not at your best, then your mind is going to do its damn hardest to prove you right, which means that your actions and your thoughts and your words and your emotions all going to reflect that belief that you have, which means you're going to feel like crap, like really, really heavy after a session. The inner critic is going to come in and be really loud. You're going to withdraw and isolate. You're going to maybe even punish yourself and say, well, I don't get to have that thing, or I don't get to do that thing, or I have to do 10 push-ups now because of this. You're going to withdraw affection and kindness from yourself. And so the it's really simple. The most powerful way we can start to create change is to show ourselves love and kindness, even if we feel like we don't deserve it. Because I could tell you, like, just work on your mindset, give yourself some nice positive affirmations, tell yourself some nice things after a picking session. But what I found is that yes, positive positive affirmations can be helpful. But even more importantly, in this moment is how you treat yourself. It's your actions. So if you treat yourself with love and kindness, even if you feel like that's super weird and cringe, if you do it anyway, you are challenging that belief. And so when you continue to show yourself some kindness and some love when you feel like you don't deserve it, eventually your belief is going to change. You are going to start to see that you are deserving of good things when you mess up. That is going to start to quiet the inner critic. It's going to start to release some of that shame and self-judgment and the heaviness that comes after a picking, pulling, or biting session, which then is going to take some of the fuel out of the need for this behavior because we also engage in this behavior to help us deal with the heaviness and the inner critic and the shame and all that difficult emotion that gets triggered by it. That in itself is going to reduce, help to reduce picking, pulling, and biting. Plus, it's going to help to reduce the length of sessions because your inner critic is no longer waiting there with a wooden stick getting ready to beat you down as soon as you stop. This is the kind, this is the kind of thing that it sounds so simple, but it is deeply healing and incredibly powerful. And if you want more steps and more detailed guidance on how to do this, episode 123, I take you through that process step by step that will help you to stop spiraling and start healing. This is not a quick fix. It's not an easy solution. Most of the time when I say this to people, they're like, oh, right, I see what you mean. I agree. I really don't want to do that. But then they do it anyway, most of the time. And they start to see, oh, this really does make a difference over time. It won't make a difference immediately, but over time you will start to see a change, not just in the picking, pulling, or biting, but in every other aspect of your life. This is what it takes to help yourself to stop picking, pulling, and biting through addressing the root cause. And it's also one, it is probably the most vital step you'll take. Because if you don't focus on building more compassion for yourself, building this foundation of compassion over self-criticism, you can engage in any other practice you want. You can do anything else you want. But as long as that inner critic is there, beating you down every single day, you're going to need the picking, pulling, and biting to help you deal with that and cope with that inner relentlessness and harshness. And if this resonates with you and you want more guidance on how to do this, make sure you listen to episode 123. You are absolutely worthy and deserving of good things, even when you're not at your best. And only you can prove that to yourself. If you found this episode valuable, make sure you hit like and subscribe. Leave a five star review. Leave your comments down below. It has been an absolute pleasure to have you here listening to this episode. Thank you so much for hanging out with me. And I look forward to seeing you next Tuesday for the next episode of Beyond Skin Picking and Hair Bulling.