Hey Everyone! This week's video is something that you have been waiting forever and ever and ever and ever for!
Trichotillomania. What is it? Why do we do it? How do we get help for it? So stay tuned.
So, like I said, today I am going to talk about Trichotillomania.
Now, I know some of you are like, "What the heck is that? That's a really long word."
That really long, ridiculously sounding word is actually just hair-pulling.
So, we can just call it hair-pulling if you want, but Trichotillomania is kind of fun to say.
Trichotillomania is a disorder that falls under impulse control disorders.
Meaning it falls under the same realm as like impulsive gamblers and stuff like that, things where we act impulsively and there is a lot of tension around us trying to stop.
I have always lumped it in the same category as kind of having an addiction to something, if that makes sense.
Because we have and impulse, right?
It's almost like I talk about in CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy)
we have this thought or this belief and we have this action that we're supposed to do, right, and we do it.
We do it. It's and impulse. We don't think about it.
And so, we get in this rhythm of just doing it and not thinking about it
and the way that you characterize trichotillomania is when there is a significant amount of hair loss.
Now the most common places that people pull is from our head, from our eyebrows, and from our eyelashes.
Some people will pull body hair from their arms, legs, where ever you grow hair, you can pull it out and it will be characterized as trichotillomania
Now, that's really it. That's all we need for the diagnosis.
We pull our hair and there is noticible hair loss and that there is tension or extra anxiety before we pull, or if we're trying to stop and we don't.
Most of my clients, to be honest, this isn't the main issue.
Trichotillomania isn't something where you have no other struggles, ,but you pull your hair. That just isn't so.
Usually, it is from something else. You may have depression or anxiety, have an eating disorder, or self-harm.
There is something else going on. You know how I have talked about before in my eating disorder and self-harm videos
This is often times a coping skill that we're using in lieu of other healthy coping skills.
Trichotillomania is another one of those. We need an outlet. Sometimes our eating disorder or self-harm aren't enough.
This is something that we will do and don't even know. We could be completely relaxed.
Sometimes I will ask my clients a really tricky question and when they're thinking about it they start feeling for the hairs to pull.
The first thing that I have my clients do is just recognize when you're doing it. Try to pull attention to it.
I know it is hard, I'm not expecting you to know 100%, I pulled here and then. Just start noticing how often you are doing it and if something triggers it.
If we know when we were doing it, we can often track it back to something that may have happened earlier.
That's why I believe that talk therapy as well as CBT are the best treatments for trichotillomania.
Trichotillomania is something that is a subset of our other issues and we need to work through those.
You'll be surprised, with therapy, the hair pulling will go away.
I've had many clients even in inpatient where they've been hair pulling forever and a lot of them would cut their hair really short.
One woman wore a wig and some people wear hats and stuff because of the big significant bald spots.
For these two clients it was trauma they had in childhood, once they started processing that, the pulling urges went away.
If this is something that you struggle with or that you have been worried to talk about,
know that you're not alone, tons of people struggle with this. It is just another coping skill that we're using.
We need to process what we're going through in our life and come up with some new coping skills to make it go away.
I promise you the urges will go away and that tension, that build-up will go away, we just have to work through it.
If any of you have worked on this before with your therapist, group therapy or whatever
leave your comments below, let us know what has helped you.
I can always learn from you as much as you can help others in our community and that's what makes us so great, right.
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a healthy mind and a healthy body
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