me: okay I know that my skin-picking and hair-pulling compulsions are exacerbated by stress, let's make a conscious effort to do less picking today
also me: spends about 5 collective hours destroying the skin on my right arm

since I stopped the trichotillomania behaviors for the most part I seem to have just switched over to dermatillomania

it's in the same vein as the hair pulling behavior; it's all about seeking out "imperfections" and trying to get rid of them

with hair it was easier to hide bc basically it was just searching for hairs with kinks in them and pulling them out and the compulsion felt soothed by 1) locating a "suitable" hair and 2) isolating and removing it

so it was a very small number of hairs that were removed despite a lot of time being spent combing/touching

but with skin picking, it's like. there's no way to hide that short of wearing long sleeves all the time, which is now impossible bc it's getting hot here

not only do I get acne on my shoulders, I have that awful bumpy skin on my arms so there's A Lot to pick at

except unlike pulling out a few hairs if you pick at your skin often times it bleeds or at least gets red and then stays red for a while, I've given myself very small bruises from it before

I have so many little scabs

but like... ostensibly the hair pulling compulsion was less damaging

so it's like "boy I wish I hadn't stopped pulling my hair out because skin picking is much more painful and obvious"

and compulsions are so weird

and I do a lot of picking (and some pulling) at work because that's where I'm most stressed

PLUS now when I reach a certain stress threshold I break out in hives all over my hands

me @ me: have you tried not being stressed

like obviously the solution here is Reduce Stress

but how do you do that when everything is happening all the time and there's no opportunity to take a break and even weekends don't feel like breaks because you haven't relaxed properly in like a year

Oh gosh.... I know we don't know each other well, but I feel this so much. I have both trich and derm (to a lesser extent), but it gets so bad when your stress levels are high and there's no way to stop it.

It's really easy to get down over it.... I'm sorry that it's flared up for you.

my trich used to be a lot worse and then it became what it is now, the derm is a pretty recent development but I can only assume it evolved out of no longer allowing myself the full scope of the trich fidget compulsion

Yeah, that's definitely a thing. My trich is pretty bad, but when I try to suppress it, my other OCD tendencies shoot through the roof.

it's never been so bad that my arms are covered in scabs/noticeable spots before;;

Ahhh, I'm sorry....

most of my other OCD behaviors are a lot less physical (I am an All My Food Could Maybe Be Contaminated With Something person) but it's all very based in anxiety and since the amount of stress never really changes all that nervous energy's gotta go somewhere

so it's like all the OCD points went to skin picking instead of being a little more divided up between other behaviors

Ahhh, I see.... I have a lot of the typical repetitive things like closing doors in succession, putting something down over and over, etc.

So it translates to that a lot more easily.

I ammmm a hand washer, that's like my only "typical" symptom

But it makes sense that yours would translate to derm, unfortunate as it is....

but it's all kinda rooted in a weird mashup of perfectionism and fear of disease/illness so derm is like a 1-2 punch of eliminating imperfections and getting rid of things that "look unhealthy"

even though obviously armfuls of scabs don't look healthy either, lol

but now that I'm thinking about it, I've made a conscious effort to wash my hands less frequently because it was giving me fucking eczema lmao AND trying to be less weird about food expiration dates and so on so I basically really did siphon all the OCD points into picking

also I've never actually met anyone else who had trich or derm before (that I knew about anyway) so it's a little relieving