My Hair

Trichotillomania Learning Center Workshop 9/12/15

I pulled my first hair when I was 10 years old. It was twenty years ago and I still remember everything about that moment. To this day it was the most pleasurable and private moments of my life…

No one ever told me that pulling out my hair was wrong, but something felt really taboo about it and I knew it wasn’t something I could talk about. It took my mom only a few weeks to catch on and notice that I was missing hair. I was ashamed of my baldness but loved the sensation so much that once she did know and the secret was out, there was no reason that I could see to stop.

                                                            

At the time I had no idea that this was going to become everything to me.

No one could control this action except for me and I chose to pull. It was a form of comfort, it helped me deal with my trauma and anxiety,  and it made me feel like I could be safe when the world was an unsafe place.

I felt like I had control over it because I wasn’t doing it in public, but it started becoming a big problem and by the time I was 11, I barely had enough hair to put back into a ponytail. My mom put me in counseling and I saw psychiatrists who put me on meds. It just made me feel like something was wrong with me.

Seeking out additional support my mom found this lady on the internet who had trich. Her name was Kim and she was 30 at the time; the same age I am now. I went to her house to meet her and she was wearing a wig. I remember thinking to myself, “That is never going to be me. I am never going to be that girl because I can stop whenever I want to.”  Then I proceeded to wear my hair in a bun from the time I was 10 until the time I was 20. At the age of 20, I started experimenting with different hair styles- clip on extensions, falls, and eventually I got so tired of people asking me why I didn’t wear my hair down that I started wearing a wig…. The wig just made my hair worse.

It was obvious that I didn’t have control over my pulling. It was hard to do “normal” day-to-day things- swimming, roller coasters and dating. This huge thing in my life was a secret and I hated not being honest about it, so I started to tell friends what I had when it came up. Telling friends got them to stop asking questions but it also became a crutch. I felt like the more people I told, the less willing I was to change.

This past year, it became very apparent that my pulling needed to get under control. The pulling was no longer suppressing all of this anxiety I had, so I joined a support group, went to counseling, started logging and journaling, meditating, watching my diet, taking supplements, substituting pulling with alternate behaviors and even helped get a trich meetup and book club going here in Portland.

In February of this year, I transitioned into a weave and my hair pulling dramatically decreased.  When I would cut my weave out, I would get it put back in immediately so that I would pull. Last week, I took out my weave, but as I was cutting it out this time, I felt like it was different… It had been six months of having a mesh net over my head that acted as a barrier to protect my head from my hands. When I cut my weave out  (The wig comes off) and looked into the mirror, It occurred to me that my hair was not growing back and that I had become Kim, that woman who wore a wig 20 years ago and that I would never have a full head of hair regardless of whether I stopped pulling.

But then I decided to think of my trich differently. Even though I may never have a full head of hair, I still want to stop pulling. 

OUR PULLING AND OUR PICKING ARE GIFTS. This thing that I do is teaching me how to manage my stress in healthy ways. It’s teaching me how to set boundaries, what relationships are healthy for me and which ones aren’t and that everyone has their thing that they do. What is important, is that we can use our Body Focused Repetitive Behaviors as an opportunity to learn something about ourselves, and that as we overcome these obstacles, we can share what worked for us and tell our success stories to others so that they don’t have to feel alone and so that they can have hope that there will be success for them too.