[NeonLady]

Hello!

Looking for fellow sufferers. I've been harming for about 17yrs now. I tried addressing it when I was about 15 and my parents just laughed. Since then it's affected my sex life, self confidence, how I dress, going to hospital, having children, what activities I do. I have permenant scarring. I normally go through phases of intense activity, not so much now I'm an adult but if left to my own devices I could shred myself in a night. Very much triggered by stress/tension and boredom. Often feels like an itch and a disgust at having clear skin if that makes any sense? I'll pick my face, cuticles, chest, breasts, back, thighs, calves and I also pick my lips and bite my cheeks. In the last few years I've started eyebrow and eyelash pulling, once again due to an itch or the sensation I have a hair out of place and must correct it. I can go for weeks and be fine too. Never really thought about it much until I started addressing a bad period of my life and low & behold it was when this started too. And I'm SO ready to kick it's butt! Found myself picking my chin tonight and decided to confront it. Any tips! Seeing my therapist tomorrow to see what she says....

[pbutton]

Good luck tomorrow! I have torn apart my fingers since childhood. I recently started pulling out my eyebrows, but I think I'm finally turning the corner on that one.

I constantly pick at my cuticles. I will do it sometimes to the point of drawing blood. Really minor I know but I suppose similar. My OCD really is minor and usually manifests in harmless ways. When I was very young I would silently repeat everything I said. Still don't know what that was about
Good luck with the therapist and with kicking butt!

[Blue_Bird]

I pick at my the skin on my head, it's a hard behavior to break. I have sores all over my scalp from it, I haven't picked since yesterday afternoon which is a great achievement for me and I hope to continue doing well, good luck to you

[flockpride]

Good luck tomorrow.

[purplek0ala]

I've picked my thumbs and fingers since I was little. Every time they start to heal, I pick more. It's so hard to manage. I'm scared of getting serious problems from it. Best of luck with your therapist!

[Buffala]

I used to pick my cuticles and around my fingernails to the point of bleeding. I have no eyebrows, they stopped growing back.

With therapy and meds I don't pick now, but sometimes if my meds need adjusting thats one of the first things that shows up.

[coyotee]

I used to pick out my eyebrows, just mask it by saying it was a fashion statement, some people thought it was cool. They grew back eventually, but it was a tough month watching them grow and not picking them out. But glad they came back.

I still pick my face like crazy though. Everyday, many times a day.

And OP I relate, when I did have a few instances of clear skin, it felt abnormal. I looked good, but it felt kind of wrong, off...

I went a little overboard today though with picking my cheek, will be paying for it with self-consciousness tomorrow at work.

[snickie]

I never really fully realized this was a thing until today. It's been bubbling for a while but now the tea kettle is whistling and I'm not sure how much further I can go with this metaphor I just made up. ._.

((I'm going to go ahead and put this in trigger tags since I don't know how squeamish people are about the details of picking, and so I'm going to err on the side of caution. I consider this rare for me because I don't have many if any triggers and I usually forget that other people do, or don't realize that what I'm typing could possibly be a trigger.))

Possible trigger:

When I was little, I would pick at the skin between my toes because... well, it needed to be done! I'm talking just the top layer that would occasionally (painlessly) rub off when wearing certain shoes and would leave those spots with the white edges where the edge of the skin was and that's what I would pick. Heaven forbid I got a hold of a safety pin or a pair of nail clippers... What's more is I would eat the pickings. I still do sometimes. With the nail clippers I would cut whole strips of skin off of the bottoms of my feet, usually my big toe where it's thickest and the balls of my feet and very occasionally the heel, and sometimes the pads of my fingers. I try not to do the finger pads anymore especially since I kind of need them intact to play clarinet.

I pick at little spots on my thighs. I don't know what they are, ingrown hairs or something. They look like little red spots with gray things in them, and I like to squeeze them out. (I don't eat these.)

There was this one time where I had a line of white skin (the kind almost like I described above as what I would pick from between my toes) on my thumb just above the nail, and so I picked at that until it was about a centimeter down the pad of my thumb, and I stopped because it started to irritate my skin on the sides, so I ripped off the flap and chewed on it for an hour and it swelled and turned white. All of this was in a public location but I kept it pretty well-hidden.

Then of course there is peeling sunburns, but I also assume everyone does that. Maybe not obsessively, and they probably don't eat it either. I don't eat it if it comes off my face, but from just about everywhere else I will if I'm not in anyone's company.

I guess subconsciously I've always known this whole thing was a problem because I've always consciously kept it hidden.

I started carrying a safety pin on my keychain about a month ago. I'm not sure why; I think I just found it and decided to keep it. Since then I've been using it to pick underneath my nails (just to get the dirt out) and to pop zits. I lost it recently and now there's this little nagging voice in my head saying I need to put the other one (much bigger) on it so I'll always have a safety pin with me, but I keep the bigger one on my nightstand because I keep my keys away from my bed.

It all comes and goes, and I still have to resist the urge to pick whenever I get that little white line on my fingers again.

It's gotten worse recently. As I mentioned above, I've been carrying a safety pin with me. I never really thought to use it until one day I got an earlobe zit. Earlobe zits are really bothersome for me, and I remembered how once I had a cyst on my eyebrow and it formed a head, so one day my mother held me down and poked the it open to drain it. So I poked two holes in it and drained it, and then picked at the scab every day for a week, forced myself to leave it alone for a few days, and the zit came back so I did it again only this time with three holes. It ended up going away in the end but it was messy.

The skin around the sides of my heels doesn't peel very well, so I sometimes take scissors and use them like a blunt razor to scrape off all the flakes of skin so that I don't inadvertently cause them to flake in public. It's something like the technique my dermatologist used to quickly collect skin samples when I had ringworm.

A couple of weeks ago I poked holes through the flesh of my fingers right by the side/tips of my nails where there's no bloodflow, and then strung my fingers on the safety pins like beads or something. That's also an area I've been known to pick at with the nail clippers. They're healed now and I'd like them to stay that way, but the temptation to poke them again is still very strongly there.

I also have this big mole on my arm, a birthmark of sorts. I've started picking at that with my safety pin as well. I've another, smaller-but-still-sizable one on the back of my neck that I poked today and forced it to bleed. That's when I realized it was really becoming a problem. Other than pimples (I assume nearly every girl pops her own pimples which almost inevitably end up bleeding), I've never delierately tried to make myself bleed like I did today.

The urge to pick comes and goes, and the more I do it the less likely it is to go away anytime soon. There's some kind of inherent satisfaction with this picking, and while I don't do it to the extent of causing visible damage (except in the case of the ear-zit, which I think most normal people would have left alone), it's still a problem. I don't know if it's entirely stress-related or what. I don't consider my case to be self-harm since I've never (knowingly) caused any irreversible damage or scarring. And yet here I am, posting about it.

[RinseRepeat]

I am a sufferer. I pick,i pick and i pick.

I pick my nails, the skin around my nails, my face - i find imperfections and pick away until i actually cause an imperfection! I pick spots, and what would usually last a day or two is a wound on my face for a few weeks.
When i try to consciously stop picking my face, ive noticed i bite the skin on my lips, i then wind up biting the skin off the insides of my mouth.

going off what ive typed there, i think im actually far worse than i first thought

[Madge Sad]

Cuticle and side of nail picker here... sometimes bleed and need Bandaid... nails are a bit deformed now, yes worse during times of stress or boredom... dry hands drive me bankers... been doing it a long time on and off (mostly on)