possible si trigger - compulsion

I have a new T and one of our sessions has me thinking lately. I believe I had dermatillomania, mostly I pick my fingers, nails, lower legs and bottom of my feet. One of the sessions I showed her my fingers, they were particularly bad. She asked me why I showed her and I wasn't sure. Thinking back I think it was a test to see if I could scare her away. As in, I can't trust you/open up because you reacted wrong to my fingers. She didn't react wrong though.

At one point during our talking about it, she asked me if they hurt. I reacted with my perfected response "nope, it's like I've killed off all my nerves" and then I chuckle and changed topics. I think she picked up on me feeling uncomfortable because she let me change topics.

Now here's my issue -I lied, and I don't think that's very beneficial to the process. It does hurt. Sometimes when my feet get bad it hurts to walk (unless I wear really soft fluffy slippers or walk weird which hurts my ankles). Sometimes my fingers hurt and I have trouble typing especially on my phone. But I couldn't admit to her that I would intentionally do something that hurt me. So when I got to that thinking I started wondering, would it be classified as si? I usually only pick with my fingers, or teeth but if it's not accomplishing it I will get nail clippers. And I do go into a trance that I believe is common for the dermatillomania.

And the part that I have the hardest time admitting to, and makes me worry about my reasons behind it is that it's not a bad hurt. It's something I accept. It's like a dull stabbing pain but it isn't a bad feeling?

I guess I'm just confused and lost.

It took me 2 years to trust my current T enough to bring up this subject with her, and it took me even longer to be totally honest with her about it. It's still a struggle for me to talk about. It's even a struggle for me to admit in this post to picking at my skin.

Yes, technically, it's SI, but it is also a compulsive behavior. My T asked me once if I consider my own behavior SI and I told her that while I understand that I am injuring myself, that is not really my primary purpose, so it's hard for me to really consider it SI, even though I understand that it really is.

I think it's important to talk to your T about it, but you can take that in baby steps. When I finally got up the courage, I told my T "I want to talk about this, but I'm afraid to and I don't even know how to start." My T usually prompted me by asking if I could just tell her one true thing, or if I could just stay on the subject for 5 minutes...and we built from there.

I guess you're right. I think I was afraid of admitting that was what I was doing. Thank you