A path to freedom.

You’re so capable in every other area of your life except here, where you battle an overwhelming urge to (among other things) pull your hair, bite your nails, tongue or cheek or pick your skin. It distresses you to see the effect this is having on your health, your thoughts about yourself and the way it contaminates the way you are out in the world and the relationships that you have there.

You know that beyond this lies a better life, free from all the damage that your compulsive behaviour causes. You’re so certain that if you could only break free from this, you would be so much happier and at ease in your relationships, your career and in the way you view yourself. You’re tired of not being able to step fully into all the potential that you know you have.

So, what have you done so far? You’ve tried and tried to stop. You’ve done your utmost. You’ve talked it out, made decisions and resolutions, bought the toys and the gadgets but just when you feel like you’re making progress, that this time it’s going to work, the behaviour comes back – often worse than before. Every single time, it eventually comes back, and you feel yourself slipping further and further into a pit of hopelessness.

Please know, change is possible! You just need the right approach.

Here we’ll explore what compulsive behaviours really are, why they might develop, and some new thoughts about how your healing can begin.

So, What Are Compulsive Behaviours?

Many live with compulsive behaviours (also known as Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviours or BFRBs) that feel out of control. These behaviours don’t take hold and continue because of a lack of willpower or laziness but are more closely linked to complex and deeply ingrained psychological mechanisms.

They show up as a group of behaviours that involve repetitive actions such as hair pulling (trichotillomania), skin picking (dermatillomania), nail biting, and cheek or tongue biting, to name a few. Folks with these behaviours often live with noticeable physical damage to their bodies, deep emotional distress and profound feelings of shame.

However, it’s important to know that these behaviours aren’t simply bad habits - they’re compulsive, which means that although you might be aware of them and even what might be triggering them, they occur outside of your ability to consciously control them.

This is the bit that is so important to understand, and this is so often where misunderstanding happens.

The behaviours themselves would have started out as an adaptive coping mechanism. Put simply, they started as an ‘appropriate’ response to a situation where there was no other way of coping – possibly as an infant faced with something that felt overwhelming in the moment. The behaviour, whatever it was, would have done what was needed and provided some sort of comfort, soothing or emotional re-regulation and so have been adopted as a successful means of managing uncomfortable feelings.

Often, because of the effectiveness of the behaviour in doing its job providing a sense of safety, you don’t develop alternative, non-damaging, coping strategies. Instead, you naturally rely on using your (unwanted and damaging) old behaviour patterns to feel safe in the world.

All of this makes so much sense and does not mean that you are somehow wrong!

The Compulsion Cycle

Those suffering with compulsive behaviours often describe a familiar cycle: a buildup of tension or discomfort, a strong urge to act, temporary relief or satisfaction from the behaviour of picking, pulling or biting, and then feelings of guilt, shame, or frustration which then begins the cycle once again. This can be repeated many times a day, each time reinforcing the behaviour and deepening the emotional toll it takes. For others, the behaviour happens below the level of their awareness, leaving them feeling out of control, fearful and powerless.

It’s Not About Willpower

If you’re living with these behaviours you might blame yourself, believing that if you could just try harder, do better you’d be able to stop. The tricky thing is that compulsive behaviours do not respond to willpower in the long term. They often stem from earlier life experiences including trauma, attachment wounds, and nervous system dysregulation and, in these cases, the behaviour serves a purpose: it may provide you with relief, distraction, or a sense of control when faced with situations that feel overwhelming.

It bears repeating – these behaviours, paradoxically, serve a purpose and started out as adaptive mechanisms that were adopted for emotional safety. They’re successful in helping with uncomfortable feelings and so they often stay with you for years, decades or even lifetimes. They become maladaptive (not in your best interests) when they cause more harm than good leaving you, and others like you, with both physical and emotional issues to cope with.

This is the bit that is not very well understood – that your naturally acquired coping mechanism is the very thing causing you harm. Of course, you need to cope and to feel safe and emotionally stable and so to ask you to suppress your go-to behaviour by force of willpower will likely leave you feeling extremely anxious, even quite panicky. Again, this makes sense – what else do you have to rely on if this is what you’ve used all this time? This is where I have a different approach which I’ll go into later.

The reliance on willpower, or even cognitive based approaches like CBT, ACT, DBT and Habit Reversal, although effective modalities and helpful in part, are nowhere near enough to tackle the complex elements at play in overcoming an unwanted compulsive behaviour. These approaches work with specific areas of brain functioning and are useful for ‘thoughtful’ change. They don’t work with the right processes within the brain to help dismantle your survival mechanisms.

It bears saying that the psychological and emotional damage suffered when these approaches are used as a primary intervention and (inevitably) fail is devastating, leaving a legacy of self-hatred, disgust, feelings of repulsion and hopelessness of ever being able to solve a seemingly unsolvable problem.

However, although its complicated, change is absolutely possible.

Therapy?

The talking therapies are brilliant for helping with so many issues but not as a first, or standalone, choice for tackling your compulsive behaviours (which we’ve now come to recognise are contributing to your felt sense of safety and emotional balance).

In fact, relying only on these forms of talking therapy can often make things worse by re-traumatising you and keeping the discomfort of overwhelming feeling states ‘switched on’. What we absolutely don’t want is a short-term reduction in the unwanted behaviour, relying on willpower and cognitive based approaches, leading to exhaustion and relapse into an even deeper reliance on that same behaviour and more self-blame, shame and confusion.

The complexity of compulsive behaviours means it would be misleading for there to be any suggestion of a quick-fix and this is so hard for sufferers to hear when they have been battling for years and want urgent relief. This means that we need to look at therapy for compulsive behaviours differently and I hope to be able to provide a fresh perspective to help in that process.

I prefer to go deeper, targeting not only the behaviour but also the elements that put it in place to begin with and keep it going currently.

Broadly, this starts with the humble work of building up your coping resources, developing the capacity and alternative go-to strategies to withstand disengaging from the behaviour that is damaging you and is unwanted. So, in helping you towards being better able to meet emotional discomfort you develop greater strength, and access to alternative strategies so that you can make coping choices that do no harm and, most importantly, let go of the damaging behaviour.

I work with the mechanisms in the brain responsible for your reliance on your compulsive behaviour. We work directly to ‘rewire’ your stress responses and uncouple you from your specific unwanted behaviour. I approach this work in a trauma-informed way using EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) and integrative approaches to reprocess all that goes into the compulsive aspect of the behaviour. We don’t just look at the behaviour itself - we explore what lies underneath, helping you process unresolved experiences, learn to regulate your nervous system, and build more appropriate inner resources. This means that the unwanted compulsive behaviour is no longer the ‘go-to’ in times of emotional discomfort.

Importantly, this also means that if the behaviour comes back, we see it not as a failure but as a signal pointing towards new areas we need to work on.

Simply put, the aim is to help you develop all that you need to release your dependance on the unwanted behaviour so that it is no longer needed and instead to develop strategies to meet emotional discomfort in a more appropriate way.

A Message of Hope

If you’re struggling with a compulsive behaviour, know this: you are not your behaviour and you are not to blame in any way. If you’ve tried and failed to ‘stop’ in the past it’s not because you’re broken, it’s because you’ve not had the right help.

Change is absolutely possible, and you don’t have to do it alone. Healing begins with understanding - and from there, everything starts to shift.

Book a free Pathfinder call here.