Posted by backseatdriver on February 19, 2009, at 10:34:55
In reply to Oops - Double quotes for Amazon searches, posted by SLS on February 19, 2009, at 8:12:14
Trichotillomania is tough. I have a smudge of it - enough to make me self-conscious. I think there is a spectrum to this problem - one can do it a little or a lot or somewhere in between. I found that SSRIs -- eg 50-75 mg Zoloft daily --- didn't help nearly enough to justify the side effects.
What has helped me most is identifying triggers. What are you feeling or thinking or experiencing *just before* the urge hits you?
I have found that trigger identification is really hard work. I keep a notebook and pencil handy, to write down the date and time of the "urge" and hopefully to record what I was experiencing at that moment.
Sometimes even *noticing* our own experience is hugely difficult. Growing up, I was trained NOT to be aware of what was happening around me or inside me. Psychotherapy helps with learning to notice things going on inside.
For instance I recently discovered that one of my triggers -- this was astonishing to me -- is throwing out food, which I have been doing quite a bit for the past few years, because I have a small child who is quite sensitive to taste and smell.
My trigger started here: I was raised in a very guilty household where the "starving children of Africa" were more on my mother's mind than the affection-starved kid right in front of her nose. It is hard to throw away food when there is an inner disapproving mother looking on. To assuage my guilt, which is really awful and completely out of proportion to the amount of food thrown away, I feel like picking and tweezing. Pulling out my "badness" a little at a time makes up for failing to ingest all of my mother's "good" food. Of course I did not fail to "ingest" her ideas about me, even if I did leave food on my plate. Needless to say therapy helps a lot here, too.
Yours,
BSD
poster:backseatdriver
thread:881011
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20090214/msgs/881060.html