123: Stop The Spiral & Heal After a Picking, Pulling, or Biting Session

A highly effective practice to reduce the length, severity and frequency of picking, pulling, and biting sessions happens when you least expect.

💜 The moments after a bad session can be some of the hardest.

But what if I told you they were also one of the greatest opportunities for healing and growth?

In my own healing journey, and in those of my clients, I've consistently seen that how we respond to ourselves in these moments can directly impact the picking, pulling, and biting.

In this episode, I'll walk you through the exact process I use after a difficult session. You'll learn how to regulate your nervous system, validate what you're feeling without spiralling into shame, and take the next step forward with compassion instead of self-punishment.

🌱 Because healing isn't determined by whether you have another session. It's often determined by what you do in the minutes that follow.

If you've ever found yourself stuck in the shame spiral after picking, pulling, or biting, this episode will give you a practical framework to help you break that cycle.

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📝FREE Holistic Skin Picking & Hair Pulling Assessment - (this is no longer available. For this kind of insight and feedback, you can "share your story" with me via the link above)

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My name is Raffaela Marie. I'm a holistic BFRB coach who has healed from 15 years of chronic skin picking myself and dedicated my life to helping driven women do the same. Through my podcast, free resources, and programs, I teach strategies to overcome urges, build emotional safety, and expand into authenticity. My approach goes beyond quick fixes, focusing on root causes and long-term recovery.

Transcript

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When we can learn to be more gentle and forgiving and kind to ourselves in moments when we feel like we don't deserve it, this helps us to reduce the length, severity, and frequency of picking, pulling, and biting sessions. Because part of the reason why we stay in these sessions so long at times is because we don't want to feel what's going to come next. And so when we no longer fear the down, the heaviness after a session, then it helps us to reduce the length of them, which reduces the severity. And then because we're not grappling so much with the heaviness of this behavior, it also reduces the frequency. But we must first start by turning towards what's uncomfortable. And I'm going to guide you through this in this episode. You are listening to episode 123 of Beyond Skin Picking and Hair Pulling. My name is Raphaela Marie. I'm your host. I've healed from 15 years of chronic skin picking through addressing the root cause and treating it like an addiction. And now I am a coach helping others to do the same. In this podcast, I share absolutely everything I know with you so that you can finally take tangible, sustainable steps forward. And a deeply healing experience that I've found can make such a difference in a person's healing journey is simply being able to share your story and to feel deeply seen, heard, and understood by someone who actually gets it. So I'd love to invite you to share your story with me. I will then share with you my insights about the root cause of why you pick, pull, or bite at your body, and then give you tangible guidance in what to do next. This is an opportunity that I wish I had had when I was struggling. And it is so fulfilling to be able to now offer that to you and other people in this community. If you want to take advantage of this opportunity, go ahead and click on the link in the show notes and share your story with me. The first thing we need to understand about emotions is that when we are struggling, all we want is to feel seen, heard, and understood. We don't need someone to come in and point out everywhere that we went wrong. We don't need someone to come in and try and give us advice and tell us what we should do. We just need someone to be with us. Think about when a friend of yours is really struggling and they're just getting something off their chest and they're sharing someone, something with you. I think it's pretty natural to feel potentially an urge to want to give them suggestions or help them fix the problem. But in actual fact, being a really good friend in that moment is just sitting there and listening, saying, Yeah, man, that really sucks. That sounds really hard. I can see why that upsets you. These are the kinds of really validating words that make someone feel like you're actually listening. And when they feel seen, they feel understood. And when they feel seen, heard, and understood, that is a deeply soothing experience. It is regulating, it is validating, it is healing. Because so many of us don't know what that feels like. Or we've had so few experiences of true validation of someone truly seeing us and hearing us and understanding us. But imagine a friend is just really trying to get something off their chest because they're struggling. And you come in with, oh, well, have you tried this? Have you thought of it this way? Look on the bright side. You'll be right. Or you point out to them, yeah, but that actually was really crappy. You really did make a lot of mistakes there and you didn't do well there. And you know what? Maybe you just need to accept that you're a bit shit. Neither of those are particularly helpful. But this is what we do to ourselves when we are struggling in ourselves, especially when we're struggling after a session. Now, the reason why I'm explaining this to you is because the first place we want to start in helping you to turn that really difficult moment into a healing experience is to understand that that's what you need. The first place to start is sitting with what you are feeling. And this is the discomfort. This is what we don't want to do. Often when it comes to healing, the thing that is best for us is the last thing we want to do. And maybe you're listening to this in real time. So you have just had a really bad picking, pulling, or biting session, and you're looking for a way to move through it with more grace and more direction this time. So I love that you're here. Or maybe you're listening to this to prepare for when it's going to happen next. And I really want to acknowledge you for taking that step for yourself. I'm going to walk you through the first step in what to do after a bad session. And we're going to first start with your breath and sitting with what's there. Then we're going to move into validation. So helping you to feel seen, heard, and understood. And only then are we going to move into the action, into the next steps, the things that you can do. And when you follow this process or listen to this episode whenever you need it, this is going to help you to heal. How we treat ourselves and how we react to ourselves when we're in a really rough place and we feel like we've messed up greatly contributes to how we feel about ourselves overall and how we show up in other areas of our life. And also how much we need these kinds of self-soothing behaviors like chronic skin peaking, hair pulling, and nail biting. So if you are able to, I'm going to ask you to put one hand on your belly and one hand on your heart. And we're going to do a breathing exercise together. If you aren't able to put your hands on your body, maybe you're driving or whatever else, you can just follow along and do the breathing. We're just going to start with taking a deep breath into your belly and feeling your belly push against your hand. So your belly is expanding with that air. And just slowly let your breath out. And taking another deep breath into your hand. Letting the air feel your belly. And feeling your feet on the ground. Taking another deep breath. And in this breath, you're going to notice first how the air fills your belly and expands. And then you're going to notice how it expands your chest. And how your chest presses into your hand. And it's exhaling again. I'm going to do that two more times. Deep breath into your belly. And then feeling it expand into your chest. And letting it out one more time. Notice what is showing up for you. Maybe there's discomfort. Maybe there's restlessness, there's pain, those emotions that show up after a session. And we're just going to be with that right now. And just listen to my words. And as I speak to you, breathe deeply into your body. Continue doing those deep breaths. Noticing what shows up for you. Whether they are thoughts or sensations in your body, emotion, all you're going to do is continue to breathe into them. This is emotional regulation. And as I'm speaking to you, notice what you allow in and notice what you find hard to accept. I want you to know that it's not your fault that you struggle with this behavior. There have been moments in your life where you have felt out of control, where you have felt stuck, where you have felt lost, where you have felt scared, where you have been left alone with your problems and not known what to do. And because there was no one there to help you, you had to find a way to help yourself. And you did the best that you could at the time. And now today you get to learn the skills that you didn't get to learn back then of how to deal with what is showing up for you right now, those big emotions. It's not your fault. And you have the power now to start creating change. You've been trying so hard. I want you to know that you are allowed to not feel okay about the fact that you picked or pulled or bit at your body. It makes sense. This isn't a behavior that is in the long term good for you. It is destructive. And it is totally fair and understandable that that upsets you. You're allowed to be upset. You're allowed to be hurting. You're allowed to be frustrated and disappointed and exhausted. It doesn't make you a shameful person. It does not make you different from other people. There are thousands of people every month who listen to this podcast just like you. You are not alone. It doesn't make you less deserving of good things. This is just a behavior. It's a behavior that you engage in that you don't have full control over right now. And that doesn't make you broken. That doesn't make you a problem. All it means is that there is so much more to be understood about you. The more misunderstood that we feel, the more we are going to struggle. So let's take this moment to understand you a little more. Because you've been trying so hard to do your best to take care of everything. You're just trying to do what you think is right, and it can get so exhausting. It can get so exhausting to keep up. That constant pressure to try harder, to do more, to be more. That feeling of it's all my fault. It's all on me. If I could just be better, everything would be okay. You're trying so hard. You need a break sometimes. You need a moment to escape and to just put that weight down for a little while. It makes so much sense that you pick or pull or bite at your body, and it makes so much sense that you can't just stop. And it does not make you a bad, broken person. It makes you human. And if your best friend or if your child were feeling the way that you feel right now, what would you want to say to them? What would you want to do for them? How would you feel for them? You deserve the exact same. You are no different. And maybe there are some parts of you that resist that a little bit and that's okay. But not all of you need to be on board to allow this healing to happen. The resistance is allowed to be there. The doubt is allowed to be there. The judgment is even allowed to be there. Just knowing that there is also a part of you that does believe that you deserve more right now. That you maybe do deserve some kindness, just like you would give to that friend or to your child or to that family member, that loved one. And just allow that to settle. Notice your breathing, taking those deep belly breaths. Notice how perhaps the intensity has ebbed off just a little bit, or maybe a lot. Now that you have given yourself time to sit with you, to be present with the pain that's there. To really allow yourself to be seen in what you're experiencing. Now we get to look at what do I do next? When we sit with intense emotions, the intention is not to just sit in it and be stuck in it and wallow in it for the rest of the day or the rest of the evening. We want to give ourselves the time and the space to sit and feel fully and then decide, well, now I'm going to move forward. I did this with myself a few months ago on a day when I was having an off day, and I ended up scrolling on my phone in the evening for an hour and a half straight, instead of doing the things that I wanted to do. And I had some really nice things in mind that I wanted to do. And I felt the same way. I felt that heaviness that I would often feel after a picking session, the disappointment, the frustration, the exhaustion, the feeling of wasted time and feeling like I'd messed up. And I did what I just walk you through now. I breathed deeply and I just let myself sit and feel shit about it because fair enough. And then I got up and I moved forward. And I decided how I was going to spend the rest of my evening, how I was going to treat myself kindly, and the steps I was going to take to help myself to not do that again in the future. And I have not done that again since then. Not to say I haven't scrolled, absolutely, but not to that extent. It might have even been two hours, actually. But this is the point where I want you to ask yourself, what is it that you feel like you don't deserve to have right now? What is it that you, a part of you feels like it wants to take away from you? In what ways are you withdrawing kindness from yourself? Identify even just one thing that you notice you're withdrawing from yourself. Maybe it's, well, now I've had that session, so I don't get to enjoy the rest of my evening because I ruined my evening by doing this. Not true. You get to decide whether the day is ruined or not. And it doesn't mean that this doesn't impact anything, but what is an act of kindness you can give to yourself? Maybe it's making yourself a tea, sitting down with a book, maybe you want to put on your favorite TV show or your favorite movie, maybe you want to journal or go for a walk, or maybe you would normally cancel and isolate yourself and you decide, no, I'm gonna go hang out with my friends anyway. Maybe you want to give yourself a little spa treatment and take your time, having a shower or a bath and really treat yourself. Treat yourself with loving kindness. And this is the really important thing. You don't have to feel like you deserve it for it to be powerful and impactful. So you can feel really cringe at doing anything nice for yourself in this moment. You can feel like, I don't want to do that because I don't feel like I deserve it. When you, despite these beliefs that you hold of not deserving it, deserving of punishment, deserving of not nice things, of bad things, not good things, because you quote unquote messed up. When you do good things for yourself anyway, when you treat yourself with kindness anyway, that starts to shift how you perceive yourself. Because there's something that we have in our minds called confirmation bias. And essentially what this means is that our brain wants to confirm our beliefs. This is why we are biased. So if I believe I do not deserve good things after a picking session, then my actions are going to reflect that belief. My thoughts are going to reflect that belief. My feelings are going to reflect that belief because they all come together to confirm the belief is true. Now, if I were to treat myself with kindness anyway, it's probably going to be very uncomfortable because we are going against a belief that we hold about ourselves, which is I don't deserve that though, in this moment. And we are challenging that belief through our own behavior. Now, there's two ways of changing a belief. We can either work internally on shifting beliefs, and through shifting the belief, our behavior will start to change. And so will our thoughts and all that around it. But this can just lead to us spiraling and getting stuck in our heads. So a very effective way as well of changing our beliefs about something is to change the behavior, despite how weird it might feel, how uncomfortable, or how wrong it might feel. Eventually, our belief is going to slowly start to change because it must. We can't believe one thing and do a different thing forever. Eventually, our belief will start to shift so that they are in alignment with our actions. This is a big way that I help myself to heal from chronic skin picking. It was through after a really bad session, being kind to myself anyway. And that eventually started to shift the belief of, oh, I am deserving of kindness kindness even when I'm not perfect. And let me tell you, that shifted so many things in many different areas of my life. It wasn't just with skin picking. And that helped me to not have such horrible relapses and feel so horrible afterwards, which meant that the picking sessions weren't as long, weren't as frequent, and I wasn't as afraid of this behavior as I had been in the past. Now I'm not saying that this is going to cure everything for you, but it is a very, very important stepping stone. Because if you refuse to be kind to yourself and you refuse to go down that path, you are just adding fuel to the fire of this cycle because it's shame, judgment, criticism, that constant internal pressure, which fuels the need for self-soothing. Our internal world plays such a great role in these behaviors. And when we start to change how we treat ourselves, we start to change how we feel about ourselves, we reduce the need for this constant self-soothing because the constant noise and criticism internally has dwindled. So what is that thing that you can do for yourself to show yourself kindness and love? You were going to do that thing right now or at some time today. And if it helps, like I said, imagine it was a child or a loved one, what would you want to do for them? What would you wish they would do for themselves in that situation? And you are going to do that thing. And every time you feel like you're spiraling after a really bad picking session, you are going to go through the same process. You can come back and listen to this podcast episode again. And you are going to be kind to yourself afterwards. Your actions speak louder than words. And that is true in relationships with other people. And it is very, very true for the relationship with yourself as well. You are so deserving of that kindness. So deeply deserving. And no mistake changes that. You don't deserve to be punished. You deserve to be held and appreciated and respected even in your hardest moments. I hope you found this valuable. Make sure you save this episode if you feel like this is one that you are going to need again in the future, which it may be. And if you found this really valuable, please do hit like and subscribe, leave a five-star review, or leave your thoughts in the comments down below about what this episode brought up for you. If you want to be able to give back in any way, this is a way to support what I do and help me help more people. As always, thank you so, so much for spending this time with me. I believe in you and I do believe you can heal. And I'll see you next Tuesday for the next episode of Beyond Skin Kicking and Cam.