CAUSES: HOLISTIC CAUSES

Out Out Damn Spot

This face picking has severely limited my ability to have physical relationships. I am embarrassed and shamed over my skin… I do not consider myself a ‘cutter’ (self mutilation by razors, pins, etc.) even though I break the skin to blood with my nails and metal instruments.

I decided to do an experiment. If I just did nothing to it, then I could see what would happen. If it just sat there and did not progress, it would give me justification for the picking and poking that I do. I had tried to leave pimples alone before, but they seemed to lingered so long that I always lost patience. I would eventually go back to picking at them.

This time my attitude was - I didn’t have any expectations that it would go away faster, but that I had hope that it would. By this point I had already done my research on how the skin operated. Through understanding the skin’s mechanisms I had a little more sympathy for the processes that were going on. I would check back in on "the site" to see how it was doing a couple of times a day, which probably didn’t help it much, but after a few days the angry painful lump was changing and becoming a softer less angry lump. A few days later it had shrunk. And another day and it had shrunk more. Until… half a week later or so it was like the tip of a thick needle. I found hope.

But to tell you the truth, I still was not happy about it being there – even if it was just a small little bump… I wanted it out completely.

Another example of this obsession of "completion" was an ingrown hair on my inside hip just outside the bikini line. I justified myself that it wasn’t on my face, so it was OK to pick at it. Some justification, huh?

Of course it started out with my body knowing it was there before I had seen the evidence. When you are a habitual picker, you develop some kind of hypersensitivity to your skin. I would know in an instant when a pimple was forming, long before it was visible. My hand reached down to the exact spot and felt it. I got in some light and checked it out. And sure enough, there it was a red bump with a dark hair all wrapped up inside of it. I squeezed and out it popped with the usual blood. Then I squeezed some more just to make sure there wasn’t anything more left inside.

Sometimes picking at something that seems to want to be picked at – such as a full blown whitehead - doesn't seem so unreasonable. But as an obsessive picker, you usually go beyond reason. You go overboard to make sure there was nothing left. I think it’s a common feeling most pickers have, that need to dig out everything. Perhaps it is because we are so desperate not to have to go through the picking again, that we become extreme and thorough in our measures. We want it to be the last time each time. And we want ‘everything’ out. We want it to be final. But that ‘everything’ is more than a pimple or hangnail, it symbolizes all of our pain, fear and frustration with life.

That’s a lot to put on a pimple.

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