I’ve had a milder version of that kind of thing going, which mostly comes out day to day in not being able to leave my cuticles and other skin around my nails alone, and picking at scabs and keratosis pilaris bumps and sometimes eczema. (Leading to some scabs to pick, yeah.) It gets harder to manage when I’m under stress. To the point that if I start having worse trouble leaving things alone now, I look for stressors that I might not have consciously registered yet. And, yeah, to me it’s very different from either purposeful SI (which I have also done) or the headbanging kind of reaction. It kept getting treated as purposeful SI, and I was also threatened with hospitalization over it more than once. Which did not decrease the stress causing that exascerbation, no.

someone^Amorpha wrote: And we had this thing going on for awhile where we would be able to kind of “save up” the impulse to do it and then let it out in private, because we got told we were hurting people we cared about by making them “watch us hurt ourselves.” And that, in its own way, felt worse than the guilt about not being able to stop it ever did, or having people yell at us that it was disgusting, or…

Oh yeah. I used to get guilted like this a lot, not limited to the picking at things, but definitely with that. For extra fun, substitute “mutilate” for “hurt” there. Definitely identify with managing it rather than doing the destructive kind of neverending self-psychoanalyzing. Which, to me at least, is about as appropriate as trying to come up with the deep hidden psychological reasons you’re having Tourette-type tics. (Not that this was not pushed as necessary too, mind you.) The compulsions feel similar enough to me that I have wondered if it might be related.

A friend of mine has an issue with his eyelids where they are almost open wounds for months at a time, and because he squints quite often, they rarely have a chance to dry and heal and he just keeps rubbing and rubbing and rubbing on them.

I’m glad to have read a post that didn’t offer a laundry list of solutions that aren’t personal at all and instead just celebrate the fact that it is what it is.

Also- thanks for the cat video ;)

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thanks for sharing. and hope everything is okay after Irene

I’ve had people reacting this way when I talk about eating paper (MY paper), which I don’t do much. “Pica pica pica.” Maybe we should start making up medical terms for things other people do and place the verb after the noun to make it sound more medicalized. What’s weird is that people seem to see eating paper as one of the worst things I could do and I get scared when someone might find out about it, but it’s actually not harmful to eat certain types of paper.

Seriously? I ate paper all of the time up through early adolescence (I’d tear Kleenex into strips and eat them), as well as all kinds of other odd things, and never got more than a mild “That’s weird” from people. However I’ve never been diagnosed with anything (I am, as far as I know, totally neurotypical) and was pegged as gifted and artistic at an early age, so that probably makes an immense difference in how these things are handled.

The suggestion ‘put something else on your skin and pick that off’ seems pretty stupid, since putting something on, peeling it off, putting it back on, repeat, is just not the same pattern of behavior. I imagine it might actually work if you spattered specks of adhesive all over one arm or something, but that would probably be, under most circumstances, not an improvement.

A friend of mine who had this problem was able to transfer the behavior to a big piece of flaky sandstone that I used as a coffee-table, when in the presence of my coffee-table. This sort of thing may help the parrot who plucks. Not a coffee-table, but a toy that has soft pieces that can be pulled off one by one.

The way I figure it, minor injury isn’t a problem–you just have to keep things clean, so the danger of infection is minimized.

I do get fascinated by the scabs and bits of skin, too – although I don’t keep them.

I always *know* when I’m picking, but it’s a really strong impulse and not doing when I want to means I can’t fully concentrate on anything else.

And… in our earliest memories of doing it, we remember it clearly as being an enjoyable activity for us, not something like hitting our head we did out of stress. It was like a kind of stim. I might go so far as to say that it just flat-out is one, under a lot of circumstances– not only the physical texture of the hairs, but also the pain. That part, actually, did not really come into focus for us until we read an essay on BDSM talking about the difference between “good pain” and “bad pain,” for many people who practice it, and the description of “good pain” kind of flipped a switch in our brain and we went “oh, yeah, holy crap, it’s a lot like that.” Because we had never really been exposed to the concept that pain could be good in any case, and we’d spent several years dealing with various kinds of chronic pain in various ways, none of which were “good pain” at all and which we very much wanted to get rid of. (Then again, like I think you mentioned in another blog post somewhere, the things that get called “pain” are a whole bunch of different types of sensations, and we haven’t got as many as you do, but have still had the experience of our brain dealing with and processing them in totally different ways. Like going to look for an Advil for a headache when our legs have been burning all day fron the fabric in our pants, but that somehow not registering to our brain as “being in pain,” and the concept “our body is in pain” only happening when we start experiencing a type that isn’t usual for us.)

So, yeah, I don’t know if it’s like this for you, but the pain associated with it is often a good feeling for us. And one of the other earliest things we remember about it was being fascinated with the hair that we pulled out and how it could vary in color, texture, etc, and a lot of other little things, and having a box that we’d saved a bunch of our hair in, and making up various onomatopoeic words for different types of hair. And it not seeming to be gross at all, just fascinating, sometimes too fascinating to the point where we had to force ourselves to try to do something else.

…we’ve, um, also had some experience with people regarding it as a deliberate form of self-harm, even if not the exact same experiences as the ones you describe, and… well, I don’t feel comfortable talking about it much here, but there was a point at which we felt absolutely horrible not because we couldn’t stop doing it, but because we had been told that if we kept doing it, it meant that we “believed our body deserved to be punished” and that meant we hadn’t “healed,” in a recovery-movement type of way. And we had this thing going on for awhile where we would be able to kind of “save up” the impulse to do it and then let it out in private, because we got told we were hurting people we cared about by making them “watch us hurt ourselves.” And that, in its own way, felt worse than the guilt about not being able to stop it ever did, or having people yell at us that it was disgusting, or having people spread rumours around our school that what we were actually doing was picking lice out of our hair and eating them. We’ve actually had more success minimizing it by… approaching it as something to be managed rather than totally eliminated, or guilt-tripping or psychoanalyzing the hell out of ourselves by deciding there must be some deep buried psychological reason for why we “want to hurt ourselves” and that we must stop it now now now.

And yeah it’s strange how people can completely ignore how hard you are trying to hide something and call it attention seeking.