Are you looking for treatment of trichotillomania? Let us help you through either our self-help program or individual trichotillomania therapy to overcome your hair pulling disorder.
This is the third part of this article in the series on how to stop hair pulling. You can read the first part of this article about ‘trichotillomania therapy uraveled‘ here. The previous part is available here.
Treatment of trichotillomania and getting into resourceful states at critical times
Also, for each of us, also when you are looking for treatment for trichotillomania, we sometimes fall prey to conditioned behavioral responses which can hinder us for creating in internal peace.
A funny example is a young girl here at the camping where we stay who, as the youngest of the family of three children, always starts to scream very loudly when things don’t go the way she wants.
In a very angry state she can sometimes scream for almost 10 minutes without realizing what he wants. Her parents just ignore her when she starts to scream, but that is the pattern she sticks with now for already a whole week.
But she is still young and will undoubtedly come up with a new set of skills and behavioral strategies in the future that will make here more flexible and better equipped to achieve what she wants.
Trichotillomania therapy also focusses on helping you to better cope with the world around you!
Maybe you to have some repeating patterns in your behavior besides pulling out hair by which you sometimes hinder yourself that may seem hard to change consciously because they have become automatic reactions.
I myself have sometimes difficulty with people who in my experience can ‘push me’ (the meaning I give to certain behavior).
As soon as that happens I often get into an inner state of feeling angry, will build up tension inside and may sometimes do things in those moments that I may regret later on.
I even understand where this pattern is coming from, from my childhood, in which I was sometimes ‘pushed’ to do certain things against my own will.
Learning to break through these conditioned patterns for more effective behavior, more peace inside and better relations with lots of people will unfortunately not happen through conscious insights alone.
Because every time it happens I am on a kind of ‘autopilot’ and may attack people verbally when they push me for something I don’t want after I asked them not to do so.
My reaction of sometimes becoming very personal and offensive has become my natural defense mechanism from my past that sometimes that can run on auto pilot and take the upper hand.
Whereas other people may give a complete different meaning to the same situation, may even laugh about it and stay calm in the moment, I myself can sometimes have great difficulty to effectively cope with these situations.
But my emotions can become so intense in these situations that they kind of become the decisive factor how I will respond. I become kind of triggered by the behavior of someone else that will put me into a limiting state the way I feel.
Which can make me do certain things that with hindsight I didn’t always wanted to do. And often leads to heightened, and sometimes unnecessary, feelings of tension or frustration inside.
By which I can actually hinder myself the way I feel and how I am able to cope with the situation. Can you imagine the way this works?
So merely understanding where this is all coming from and how this works does not help me. What does help is learning through techniques that we will teach in our trichotillomania therapy program how to break through such a pattern of stimulus response behavior.
So instead of experiencing being pushed and then automatically becoming angry I may experience being pushing and then automatically stay calm.
So there is far less reason to release any form of buildup tension through pulling out hair for example that is often at stake with Trichotillomania in one form or another.
And can you image that such a state of calmness over feeling angry would actually allow me to become more resourceful and better able to deal with such situations instead of being overwhelmed by feelings of angriness or frustration.
Techniques that luckily I was able to learn during the years and now have at my disposal as soon as I notice a pattern in my behavior that is actually hindering me.
Because trying to control the world and people outside of us to do everything we want is a mission impossible. But taking ownership and training ourselves to better cope with these situations is the doorway to freedom!
The same techniques that you will also learn it our trichotillomania therapy program, by which you will target some specific unconscious patterns of behavior that are at play with almost everyone we were allowed to help over the years to create the freedom in behavior they all longed for.
We lost and wishing you well,
Rik
