Healing takes a firm commitment to one’s personal growth and an unwavering belief that freedom is possible.

I had to be willing to experiment with my life in order to see which ideas and concepts felt right for me.  I embarked on an intense period of study, reading books about family dysfunction, inner child work, addiction, spirituality and how people grow through adversity.  Throughout my process I took whatever resonated deep within me and threw away the rest.  I was no longer willing to unquestioningly accept someone else’s prescription for what I needed.

No one knows more about me than me.

My whole life I’ve been looking to everyone else to take responsibility for me (my parents taught me this).  I thought everyone else had the answers for my life.  Therapy, doctors, etc-everyone I knew or met.  I will no longer look outside of myself for my own truth.

How does your self-perception as a hopeless victim disempower you?

Might the belief that you are a victim keep you stuck?  Are you willing to shift your perspective from being a victim to taking full responsibility for healing your hair pulling and growing your life to its true potential?

True self-regard is mistrusted in our society.

Considering your own feelings first doesn’t always go well with our social customs.  In fact, many hair pullers grew up learning that to survive we have to make our needs a lower priority than those of other people rather than act on our own behalf from a place of power and self-worth.

If you are self-loving, then nurturing and honoring yourself come first and foremost.  In each moment you ask yourself if the next choice adds or detracts from your experience of life.  This isn’t self-indulgence or allowing inappropriate feelings to drive you.  It’s staying tuned-in to yourself to see if a particular decision adds to or detracts from your sense of self.

I walked out of the Mental Health Center and another 12-Step meeting.

I had spent an hour listening to the group confess their multiple addictions and pledge to work on them.  I listened as one elderly gentleman swore that attending those meetings for 30 years had saved his life.

Something troubled me.  I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life going to meetings.  I wanted complete Freedom, with a capital F.  And what really troubled me was how could anyone possibly fix multiple addictions at once?

“Wait a minute,” I thought!  “That’s exactly what I do.

I have a laundry list of problems and I say I’m going to solve them all, but nothing budges.  If I really think about it, you can’t ever fix more than one problem at a time.  Maybe I better focus all of my energy on fixing just one thing!”

Toxic Belief:

I’m not allowed to really focus and take care of my own needs.  Other people’s needs and other responsibilities always come before me.

Pull-Free, At Last! Antidote:

I will focus on my own need to heal hair pulling until I achieve it.  This is not selfish, but truly necessary to my life and my future.

We struggle with the inability to believe that we are powerful enough to create our hopes and dreams.

Or, in the moment that we feel inspired to set out after our passion and share it with a husband, lover or mother, we often find our dream smashed to smithereens in less than five seconds.

Another part of our ranking culture is that others often lack the ability to genuinely support you in your dream of healing.

So here is my advice:

Believe that you can change it.  Believe that healing is possible for YOU.  Your beliefs create your reality.

Your task in healing your hairpulling is to uncover and heal your own negative beliefs about yourself. This work is NOT about what others have done to you but what you have done and continue to do to yourself within your own mind.

The answer is inside of you. Keep looking within and be willing to see it.

Hair pullers are often in denial of their inner truth. They fool themselves into believing that denial is the route to safety but instead it’s a route to perpetual pain, emptiness and sometimes even death.  Denial is a quicksand – keeping them stuck and gradually sucking them in deeper and deeper – without any hope of escape.  On the other hand, waking up and taking “stock” of their life and coming out of denial offers new choices and possibilities that even moments before weren’t available because of the limitations in their own minds.

Shakti Gawain reminds us, “Remember that the first step in any healing process is always acknowledgment and acceptance of what is true right now.  We don’t heal anything by trying to block it out, get rid of it, or pretend it doesn’t exist.  We heal it by accepting that it’s there, and then becoming aware that there are other choices possible.”

Without this understanding and subsequent acceptance of any problem, one never begins looking for a solution in the first place.