Trichotillomania: The Inside-Outs of Compulsive Hair Pulling

I recently read this from a practitioner who treats trichotillomania sufferers,

“It is not necessary for you to find or know the cause of your hair pulling.”

Whoa! While this sounds good on the surface, there’s a big problem with it.

Also, if you don’t learn the cause of your pulling, how can you be sure that the problem is solved and you will never pull again? You’ll always be powerless with your trichotillomania and with those whom you rely on to help you stop pulling.

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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!”

Use your mind’s eye to see yourself beyond this addictive behavior.

After exhausting all of the outside options I was willing to try, I knew that the only hope for healing my trichotillomania lay inside of me.  I began to believe that one day I would have a full head of hair.  I began to believe the possibility of self-healing, not to just control my hair pulling by using some method outside of myself.

Can you see your life without hairpulling in it?

The power to completely heal is totally within your own grasp.

“You cannot begin the work of releasing an addiction until you can acknowledge that you are addicted. Until you realize that you have an addiction, it is not possible to diminish its power”
-Gary Zukav

Right now, where is the burning desire to stop pulling out your hair? Is it present and available? Will you do anything to heal it, no matter what it takes? Are you so committed that you’ll

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The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper. -Bertrand Russell

We all struggle at times to see the magic that is right in front of us. It’s time to slow ourselves down and discern where the magic is. Our wits can never grow sharp if we’re buzzing around trying to make it happen. Rather take today to grow your wits a bit and see if you can spot the magic.

This goes double for those who deal on a daily basis with addiction and compulsive behaviors because rather than slowing down they fill their time with mind or emotion numbing things. For those with compulsive hair pulling, for example, it’s more important to find that “perfect pull” than to slow down, feel your feelings and allow them to exist within you. But it’s only in doing so that we begin to spot those magical things that are waiting for us.

Just because you go down one path earlier in your life, doesn’t mean that you’re stuck in that rut forever.
-Walter Shaw, author and ex-master burglar.

Wow! This is a great quote, don’t you think?

Trichotillomania and other compulsion sufferers are often so stuck in their repetitive ruts that it appears to them that change and a better life are completely impossible. One of the things that I help them to work on is unsticking their minds so that they can vision a better future for themselves. But, while this is a critical step, it often is not enough to get them to move to that better future.

They also need to the tools and support to do the work of healing the underlying issue that continues to fuel the compulsive behavior. For people with compulsive hair pulling and other compulsive disorders, I offer a comprehensive program that moves them through the self-healing framework.

The program is very powerful, but it alone, is not enough. The student must do the work for their own healing is waiting inside of them to be discovered.

“All things are permeated by a power which makes for health. A human being can relate himself to this power, and ally himself with it. He can also separate himself from it in his thoughts.”
-Wallace Wattles

Healing is a natural system (like a internal weather system) that exists inside of us. We are always being invited to heal one thing or another. But most often we (especially those who struggle with addictive and compulsive behaviors like compulsive hair pulling) run from the opportunity. The next time you feel a challenging moment in your life, why not ask yourself if this is your own invitation to heal that has come calling. Then run toward and embrace it for all that you’re worth. Who knows, you might just come out the other side a whole lot lighter and whole.

“When I first began my work as a medical intuitive, I thought that people wanted to heal. Now I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that at all. We’re addicted to the power of the wound, to the privilege the wound gives us. We don’t want to be in pain–but we sure don’t want to heal.”
-Caroline Myss, medical intuitive and author

Maybe this cigarette (binge, job, meal, lover, encounter) will finally satiate you. Maybe it will be enough. Once and for all–maybe it really will. So you do it but it never satisfies–it is never enough. Addicts fool themselves into thinking that maybe the next one will do it or the next or the one after that. But it never does and there is no end to the addictive or compulsive behavior. Does any of this sound familiar? [Read the rest of this entry...]

In an ideal world every person is a fully connected being–the internal voices are so well-integrated that whatever aspect of a person is best suited to handle any given situation arises to deal with it.  In that world your inner voices would be connected in a constantly flowing and fluid dance.

But, the inner hair puller world (and the inner world of most people) does not match that ideal.  For hair pullers, like other compulsion or addiction sufferers and those in present and past emotional pain, it’s likely that just one or two voices/aspects are in power.  These “top dogs” quell and squash the rest of you into compliance.