The Silver lining to chronic skin picking...
The pain of skin picking, how it seems to suck the joy from life and wipe your confidence and ease off the map. This discomfort is there to serve you. It’s your Core Self crying out to be seen again and the only way to reunite you with yourself is to hold this pain close and delve even deeper into it...
Deeper into self-love and compassion and why you struggle to give this to yourself. Deeper into anxiety and all that you fear. Deeper into anger - your knight in shining armour, bound and gagged, who’s only wish is to sweep you off your feet and show you where your
boundaries lie. Deeper into sadness that wants to connect you with your tenderness.
Deeper, deeper, deeper… until you reach the other side, and the pain turns sweet.
Instead of an ominous, writhing dark ocean it transforms into a warm white, gold light, embracing you and welcoming you home.
THE GOAL
You were born to be someone unique, vibrant, expressive, and unstoppable in the pursuit of what lights up your soul. Children do this naturally until they learn that what lights up their soul is not what’s accepted by family or society. Their Core Self is replaced by conditioning. This conditioning is designed to keep you safe and free from judgement and rejection. The thing is this is entirely unrealistic. You will be judged and rejected by people in life. The goal is not to prevent this, the goal is to love and accept ourselves so thoroughly that the rejection or judgement of others rolls of our skin because we KNOW our own worth.
The struggle you feel around skin picking is the struggle of suppressing your core self. We use skin picking to suppress emotion. Emotion is what tethers us to our Core selves, it’s how we EXPRESS our Core selves. When we are conscious and attuned to our emotions, we become conscious and attuned to our needs. When we know what we need at our core we discover our boundaries, we raise our standards, we protect our peace, we start putting ourselves FIRST - this is how we heal from dermatillomania.
THE 2 TYPES OF EXPRESSION
There are two types of expression: expression from our conditioning and expression from our Core Self. When we express from our conditioning it’s usually an unconscious act. We tend to project our pain into the world, or we get swallowed up by it and lost in its inky depths. We do this because we aren’t allowing ourselves to fully experience the emotion. Rather than allowing the energy of that emotion to move and flow through us we hold onto it and keep it hostage in our body and in or mind - this is trauma.
If you were shut down in your anger as a child, you were shut down in the most painful and confusing part of expression. Rather than feeling the anger to completion you were suspended in the pain. This is all you know of anger, not it’s purpose or its power for good. Now, when you feel anger (if you allow yourself to feel it at all) you’re experiencing it from this place of limbo. This is how it will remain until you consciously decide to become curious about your anger and explore its depths, its purpose, its power, until you can finally release it from your body as you were always meant to.
Suppression is the root cause of chronic skin picking.
Authentic expression is its cure.
The other side of expression is that what comes from our core. The conscious feeling and expression of our emotions. When we consciously feel and express anger there is not inflicting it on ourselves and others. We don’t create more pain like the unconscious expression of it does.
THE PURPOSE AND POWER OF EMOTION
Anger is a sign your values are being disregarded; boundaries are being crossed. Anger is your watch dog, protecting the peace and stability of your inner world. What happens when we suppress it? It becomes over reactive and bites any person who gets too close, or it becomes overly submissive and allows any and everyone to walk all over you and trample the peace and safety of your inner world – you become an Angry, Jagged Stone or an Appeasing, Squishy Doormat.
Each emotion has its purpose and power. The suppression of emotion is the suppression of your Self and a weakening of your character. It takes strength to be who you are despite what you’ve been taught. Despite the judgement of society or your family or loved ones.
THE DECEPTION OF THE MAGIC PILL
If you could take a magic pill to stop yourself picking your skin, you wouldn’t be “free”. You would end up engaging in other addictive, self-destructive behaviours because the need to supress your emotions and your Core Self would still be there. We overcome skin picking by removing this need altogether – by reconnecting with our Core Self, unashamedly being ourselves, and fearlessly feeling and expressing our emotions.
The silver lining to skin picking is the person you become by healing from it; this incredible, magnetic, powerful, vibrant, unique human being. The real you is waiting beneath your scared skin. Delve deeper than what you can see and into what you can feel. Take courage, know you’re worth this journey, know you’re worth the effort, know you will heal, and you will become the person you were always meant to be.
