A path to freedom from biting, picking and pulling.

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 and 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 the triggers might be, you’re unable 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 coping mechanism. Put simply, they started as an ‘appropriate’ response to a situation where there was no other way of coping – when you were 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 balance and so you adopted it as a successful means of managing uncomfortable feelings. Makes sense.

Often, because of the effectiveness of the behaviour in doing its job providing a sense of safety and balance, you don’t really need to 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. After all, it’s got you this far.

The Compulsion Cycle

If you suffer with compulsive behaviours, this might be a familiar cycle: a buildup of tension or discomfort, a strong urge to bite, pull or pick, a temporary relief or satisfaction from the behaviour and then feelings of guilt, shame, or frustration which leads to a buildup of tension and begins 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 cycle 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 or 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 and, in these cases, the behaviour is doing a job for you: 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 mechanisms that were adopted to protect your 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 very 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 talk therapies and ‘thinking’ based approaches like CBT, ACT, DBT and Habit Reversal, although effective, proven modalities are helpful in part. They are only a fraction of what is needed 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. However, they don’t work with the core processes within the brain to help dismantle this particular survival mechanism.

If you’ve had the experience of these approaches being used and, inevitably, failing then you know first hand the psychological and emotional damage you suffered being left with even more self-hatred, disgust, feelings of repulsion and hopelessness of ever being able to solve a seemingly unsolvable problem. Likewise, you’ve probably had the experience of making resolutions and trying to use willpower to break the hold of your compulsion and, while you might have been able to stay with it for a short while, willpower runs out eventually and, when it does, you find yourself in an even worse position.

However, change is absolutely possible.

Therapy?

The talk therapies and ‘thinking’ based approaches like CBT, ACT, DBT and Habit Reversal, although effective and proven, are only partly helpful here. The’re a fraction of what is needed to tackle the all 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. However, they don’t work with the core processes within the brain to help dismantle this particular survival mechanism.

If you’ve had the experience of these approaches being used and, inevitably, failing then you know first hand the psychological and emotional damage you suffered being left with even more self-hatred, disgust, feelings of repulsion and hopelessness of ever being able to solve a seemingly unsolvable problem. Likewise, you’ve probably had the experience of making resolutions and trying to use willpower to break the hold of your compulsion and, while you might have been able to stay with it for a short while, willpower runs out eventually and, when it does, you find yourself in an even worse position.

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.

Because you and sufferers like you may have been battling for years and want urgent relief, we need to look at therapy for compulsive behaviours differently so that meaningful change can start to take place.

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 behaviour and it’s compulsive nature. 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 picking, pulling or biting 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.