The Secret to Recovery

This is a story about my greatest downfall during my recovery from chronic skin picking and how it opened the door to true freedom and healing.

Without this experience, I wouldn't have been able to break free.

Here's my story. I've written it like a piece of fiction. Enjoy...

Chapter 1

This is it.

The thought pulsed through me. I'd had this thought before... But this time it somehow felt different.

I can feel it. This is the last time. Today is the day I stop...

A surge of determination, motivation, and certainty filled my veins, drenched my mind.

I felt invincible.

I felt powerful!

I felt hope, and lightness, and joy, and all the things that I knew I would feel when I was finally free from this daemon that kept me picking and scraping at my skin.

I was free.

I was so proud. I felt like something had unlocked inside me. Like I'd figured out what it was that I needed to rid myself of the beast that had tormented me for the past 12 years.

No more. I was done. IT was done.

I was free...

2 weeks later...

I relapsed.

Defeated, full of confusion and shame. I sat in the aftermath and felt my faith and trust in myself sink and seep away.

Why did I do this? Why am I so weak? How could I be so certain and then fall so hard?

It was all me. I did this to myself. I had no control.

Fucking pathetic...

Something glimmered in the back of my mind and, like a gasp of air, floated towards me out of the darkness I was falling into. It asked gently, quietly, "What really happened?"

Confused, I somehow knew the answer to this question was not that I was weak or pathetic... it went deeper. It gleaned into my soul.

A light began to break through the dark. I felt... curious. What answer would satisfy this question?

I searched, seeing past my sinking heart and the disdainful words I'd been lashing myself with just a moment before. I felt a strange peace settle over me as my focus shifted from self-deprecation to curiosity.

I sat and pondered. Looking out over the snow-capped mountains I could see from my seat in the living room.

A pin dropped. Oh... That's what happened.

It all seemed so obvious now.

I didn't relapse because I was weak. I relapsed because I had been avoiding the growing anxiety in my chest for 2 weeks until it became too much.

The only tool I had to soothe that anxiety was skin picking. So of course I'd relapsed!

It made sense.

A sudden wave of understanding and compassion came over me. I wasn't weak. I was just working against myself. Trying to force my mind and body to do something unnatural.

I'd ripped away my main tool for self-soothing and left my nervous system with nothing else to replace it. What else was I supposed to do but relapse?

I had willpower. What I lacked was self-compassion and understanding.

In the wrong hands, in the hands of the part of me who saw me as weak and pathetic, "willpower" was a destructive weapon. But in the hands of the part of me who was compassionate and understanding... I felt I could finally start to move forward.

My willpower would no longer be focused on willing myself to stop but on understanding why I found it so hard. By answering this "why" I would slowly break down those walls holding me back until my path was clear. Clear for me to become the version of myself who didn't need skin picking. Who didn't criticize, belittle, or berate but loved, soothed, understood, and accepted who I truly was.

Relapse was a gift. It was a lesson and a big, fat arrow pointing me in the direction I needed to go to heal.

That's what relapse really was. Not my own personal VIP access to hell... But soft earth that cushioned my fall and was rich with growth and transformation. If I dared to look past the shame and frustration to see the lesson lying underneath.

That's all it was - a lesson and one I was determined to learn.

This marked the day I began to see past skin picking and into the core of why I did it.

Skin picking is a symptom of deeper hurt. This deeper hurt contains the parts of ourselves we have locked away from the world and ourselves.

The path to recovery is the path to recovering these lost and aching parts.