Shownotes Transcript
This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. It always felt like there were two of me, the me that didn't want to be doing this, then the other me wanting those sensations, living in that moment. But the person who was pulling was just stronger than the person who wanted a perfect life. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein.
You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 191. What if you suffered from trichotillomania?
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My parents raised us in Memphis, Tennessee, like a suburb of Memphis called Germantown. It was a really communal neighborhood. There was a neighborhood pool and my sisters and I would always play outside in the big magnolia tree in our neighbor's yard and just do a lot of stuff outside. So a lot of good memories from childhood of just spending a lot of time with my family. And a lot of the time we spent was at church and at church.
My religion and my relationship with God was my whole world. I also went to a Christian high school and middle school. So I was very involved and surrounded by, I guess, the laws of the church. A lot of that relationship was fear-based. It just instilled in me to kind of be afraid of a lot of stuff. I was always afraid I didn't say the prayers correctly, so I wasn't actually saved properly.
I was always afraid that I wasn't doing the right things or that I wasn't praying the right way, that I wasn't being the correct Christian because I wanted to make sure that I was going to go to heaven and not be separated from my family. I think I was always worried that I was going to be alone, that they were all doing it right and I wasn't.
You know, martyring is a big part of, or was a big part of Christianity. So people would get killed for their faith. And so I was always worried that I was going to get killed because I was a Christian or that somebody was going to ask me point blank, do you believe in God? And if I said yes, they'd shoot me. And I think I always just had this underlying fear that somebody was going to come take me away from my family.
And then I also had this idea of what marriage looked like because of the church, what I was looking for in a husband and that I was really geared towards marriage. So everything was kind of, is this boy going to protect my heart and guard my heart for God? If he's not, then he's not worth investing in. And I ended up being really hyper-focused on relationships with guys. I always wanted to be dating somebody, but I was really insecure about
I had a lot of body image issues and compared myself a lot to both my sisters. I'm the middle child and both my sisters are blonde haired, kind of shorter than I am. They're beautiful. And I would always think that they're the ones who are going to get the guys. And I am a little bit taller than them, which made me always feel really big. I just don't fit the bill. So that was kind of my narrative all the time.
I was very close with both my parents. I always saw them as like a really great role model of marriage to me. I was always just super open with my mom about worries and concerns, specifically about things with my body, just telling her like, I don't like this part of me. I always knew that she wanted to help me, but didn't really know how. And then with my dad, he was definitely like the father figure, the breadwinner of the family.
So family was a big part of my upbringing. But in my mind, I always felt like I was a little bit of the black sheep of the family. We were all such close siblings growing up. But I just I was so in my head about thinking that I just didn't belong in the family, that people wanted to hang out with them a lot more than they wanted to hang out with me.
I don't feel like my sisters treated me like the black sheep that I thought I was. And to this day, they always say that it's kind of ridiculous. I felt so different than them. So this black sheep mentality was very in my head.
As young as I can remember, I thought women were supposed to look a specific way and men were supposed to look a specific way. Almost like, you know, Adam and Eve, kind of as these perfect depictions of human. A woman with long, beautiful hair, a thin body. It was petite and smaller than this muscular man. I wanted so badly to fit into that mold.
I hated my body when I was younger and always would tell myself just things I could fix about it or what I wanted it to look like. Even when I was 12 and my body was growing, I still would look in the mirror and spend so much time crying and being upset that my stomach wasn't flat or that the way I was growing wasn't correct.
I felt gross, even though I was only a little kid, that my physical appearance was not good and that people didn't like it. I always felt hyper-focused on different parts of my body. And one of the places that I felt very hyper-focused was my hair.
I thought blonde hair was superior. And I think that that was just because I had this idea that my sisters were superior than I was. So I already felt like I was kind of at a disadvantage having brown hair and my hair was also curly and kind of frizzy and I had brown eyes. So I felt like all of these things weren't feminine and delicate, which is what I always wanted.
So when I was in eighth grade, I felt so fed up with the way that I looked that I wrote it all down in a note. And I cried while I was writing this. And it said things like, I hate the way that the rolls on my stomach look when I sit down. I wish that I could just get rid of all of what my stomach looks like. I wish that I wasn't born the way that I looked. I wish I looked like my sisters. I wish that boys would like me.
And I went downstairs and put it on my parents' bed. And of course, they ended up coming upstairs and were really concerned that I was so sad. And I cried to them about that for a long time. And that weekend, they told me they were taking me to see a therapist. That was my first kind of break into trying to figure out why I was sad.
I was diagnosed with clinical depression and I ended up probably six months into therapy getting put on an SSRI.
So I met a boy who I ended up dating when I was 15 and I felt incredible. I felt like this is exactly what I wanted. But I remember talking to my therapist a lot about how can I make sure that he isn't the reason why I'm not sad anymore. But I think a lot of my satisfaction in life came from having a boyfriend at the time. And so I put a lot of my eggs in that basket.
When I was a sophomore in high school and I was a year into this relationship with my high school boyfriend, I noticed when I was sitting in my biology class that I had all these split ends.
I had dyed the underneath of my hair that summer and bleached it. And so it was really just kind of dead hair. And a lot of these hairs were splitting and I started to split them with my fingers because it felt like I could fix these pieces of hair that were not of use anymore. They were dead. And so I wanted to get rid of them. And 10 minutes later, I looked down and there's all these little hairs on the ground and all around the desk. And I start sweeping them up because I'm
trying to figure out why I did that. And I went home and I kept touching the bottom of that hair, feeling it and just wanting to fix it still. And I took a shower and I remember running my hands through my hair a bunch. And every time I ran my hands through my hair, some hairs would come out. And so I'd look at them and had this, you know, clump of hair at the bottom of the drain.
A few weeks went by where I continued to run my hands through my hair pretty vigorously and like see what would come out. Because of all of that, I ended up feeling a little bit worried that something might be wrong, but I couldn't stop doing it.
And it turned into me looking and feeling for specific hairs that were more coarse than the other ones. And it got to the point where I would actually pull the full hair out of my head. And I got really interested in the bulb of the hair. So when you pull your hair, there's a little white bulb that comes out sometimes. And so I would spend a lot of time looking at those and remember feeling like there were specific parts of my head that felt like I needed to rid the hair from those parts.
There was a part of me that really felt like all of the things I was doing was helping create a more perfect look and get rid of the pieces that didn't belong anymore. So I was convincing myself that the things that I was doing for my hair was benefiting it. But in the back of my mind, I knew that it wasn't.
When I started fully pulling hairs out of my head, I was really fascinated about the root of a hair and the makeup of it. I remember the first time I saw the squishy root that comes out of your hair. I got really fascinated. I wanted to own a microscope so I could look at it and see exactly what it was because I wanted to understand it. But the feeling of pulling those hairs also was really intriguing and played into this idea that I was ridding myself of certain ones that didn't belong.
And if I would get a full hair root out, that was like an accomplishment. In one of my weekly sessions with my therapist, I ended up bringing it up to her. And she was like, oh, yeah, that's a condition that people have. It's called trichotillomania.
Didn't make me feel good at all that she threw this huge name at me, but I asked her more about it. And she was saying that there's this sense of pleasure pain that can be involved in trichotillomania. And I understood what she meant by that.
Of course, I went home and Googled the shit out of Trichotillomania. And I convinced myself that I was not in the same position as the people in the images that I saw. Because these people in these images...
had super balding heads of hair or no eyelashes and eyebrows at all. And at that point in my life, I had a full head of hair and was just struggling. So I felt like I wasn't in this terrible position that these people in these images were in. And then I needed to fight this, which ended up kind of tailspun straight into pulling all the time, constantly.
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The focus on my body became so tailored to my hair that it kind of in a weird way helped me not focus so much on my body itself because I was so hyper focused on what everybody thought about my hair. I wasn't as focused on what people thought about my weight or how I thought I looked in the mirror in regard to what my stomach looked like. I was way more focused on if I had bald spots.
I've come to learn that body dysmorphia also fits into the category of a body repetitive focus behavior like nail biting, like trichotillomania, like skin picking. So it just went from one body repetitive focus behavior to another and trichotillomania was stronger than my body dysmorphia, but it was still there. One of the biggest triggers for me for pulling was pulling. So
The stress that pulling brought to me was egged on by like more pulling and more pulling. And then the denial that I was in this position that these people in these images were in brought me a lot more stress. And I remember I'd always say, if I stop today, it'll be okay. If I stop today, I won't get to that point that I saw in those images. But I couldn't stop. And I felt really alone in that fight.
I did eventually end up connecting with a man at the church who has TRICC.
I walked into his office and he has a completely shaven head. And I remember walking in and bringing up to him that I think I sometimes deal with pulling my hair out. And he told me that it's uncurable and that it will ebb and flow in seasons. And I remember feeling very distraught by him telling me that it wasn't something I can just get rid of. It was really hard for me to realize that this could be something I deal with for the rest of my life.
I remember a lot of times being in class and not being able to focus on what the teacher was talking about because I would just be looking at the ground and counting how many hairs I was pulling out and trying to stop myself at a certain number so I wouldn't keep going. And then also I would try to scatter the hairs so it wouldn't look like there was just this huge amount of hairs under my chair.
And then it got to the point where I would be looking in the mirror a lot because I would concentrate my pulling on specific places and I started to notice that they were getting thinner. I began really hyper focusing on the way that I was doing my hair and trying to cover up these thinner spots. But I would spend nights after nights in my bed sitting and pulling.
and pulling until I had these huge clumps of hair on the ground. And I would pick them up and I actually would document them. I would take photos of them. And I had like a private folder on my phone where I had pictures of those. And sometimes I would take pictures of the follicles themselves because I just thought they were really interesting.
And then I would take pictures of my scalp as well. So I would try to keep up with how my bald spots or my thinning spots were looking, which ended up turning into this really bizarre way of being mad at myself for the lack of progress that was happening.
I also got really focused on wanting to pull full follicles out. So not having ones that kind of had half of a follicle on it or like a little bit of a follicle. I wanted the whole thing on there. And that often ended up being a reason why it was hard for me to stop in those binges. I would want to stop on something that was perfect. I wanted to like finish this binge on a hair that had the perfect follicle.
which ended up probably being an excuse for me to continue pulling because there's never gonna be like this perfect feeling. I also want to bite the follicle itself off and try to bite it into as many pieces as I could. I think it just felt like the bigger the follicle and the more pieces I could break it into, the better that hair pull was. This focus on the follicle itself also became a focus on how big is it and what does it feel like in my mouth? So it was just another way to get sensation.
I start to have these bald spots that get bigger and they get bigger and they become so big that I can't deny anymore that they're there. And I talked to my mom about seeing if I could get like a top piece, something that could help me cover the top part of my head. So we went and saw a woman who works with cancer patients primarily. It's technically not a wig, but it was pretty much a wig.
I never wanted people to know that I was wearing a wig and it was something I became very fearful of that people would notice. It felt embarrassing and shameful. So I would spend probably 45 minutes to an hour every morning fixing the wig to make sure it looked as natural as possible.
One day I just came to school with a full head of hair because I was wearing this wig, hoping that nobody would notice. But there was a boy in my class who asked me why my hair looked different. And I remember getting so red in the face and not knowing what to do. And I remember he tried to like touch it. It scared me so bad that he was going to find out that I was wearing a wig.
Which ended up turning into me feeling like I needed to take control of that narrative. And so I began a blog where I wrote about how trichotillomania played into my life and played into my relationship with God. And I tried to like spin it in my mind as a blessing.
So I began trying to convince myself that I was given trichotillomania for a purpose. I was declaring to the world that this problem was a gift that God gave me. I remember reading my Bible one night and remember seeing this specific verse that said, to find joy in all circumstances. And I felt like that's exactly what I was supposed to do.
The purpose I felt that trick played in my life was to glorify God through my ability to choose joy in a difficult circumstance and to be able to kind of help others do the same, even though I really had such a hard time believing that for myself.
Somebody in the hallway, in a math hallway, came up to me when I was a senior and told me, "Hey, I heard that you pull out your hair because you're like going crazy or whatever." Just said that in front of a handful of people. And I remember feeling really uncomfortable with that. So I tried really hard to control this narrative that ended up spreading in my small private Christian school pretty quickly.
I just felt like I was lying to everybody by wearing this wig. And I felt really ugly without it on because I just felt like I was a failure to myself and a failure to this idea of what I wanted to be. This beautiful, long-haired, petite woman that I just wasn't fitting that mold. And this was just adding on to that. I remember sitting and looking at my hair in the mirror and seeing these bald spots everywhere.
It was just so hard to really fathom that I was in control of destroying my own hair and that I was actually taken over by this condition. And I also just felt ugly because of that. I relied so heavily on my boyfriend to make me feel beautiful. And it wasn't his role to fill me. And I made him do that. And it ended up kind of being the demise of our relationship in the end.
I remember my mom telling me that if I stopped pulling my hair, she would buy me a new computer. And I think that she was just trying her best to help me by bribing me to stop. But then I just felt like I would let her down because I couldn't do it. It hurts me to know that she was hurting so bad as a mom. I remember one time making a list of things Trichotillomania had taken from me. That was the title of my journal entry. And I came up with
probably like 30 or 40 things that I felt like I couldn't do anymore. Having a lot of fear just during normal situations, fear that somebody would notice because it was windy outside. I couldn't drive in a car with the windows down with my friends, or I didn't feel comfortable going to prom and all hanging out afterwards and then falling asleep. I would never really go swimming. I
Working with kids was kind of hard because kids just tug at things. And so I was always scared that they would tug at my hair. Giving people hugs, taking pictures with people and being in like an arm, a group hug always was so nerve wracking for me.
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When I was a senior and choosing where I wanted to go to college, I made the decision by myself that I was going to stop wearing wigs when I went to college because I felt like it was a cool way to just kind of jump into this new era of my life. So I went and got my hair cut by a professional and stopped wearing a wig that day.
So the beginning of my college experience was the first time I was wearing my hair as this short haircut. I also had a nose piercing and one tattoo and I felt very edgy. I thought that I was really breaking out of who I was. If I was going to have short hair, I was really going to embrace it. But that's when I really realized that short hair was an insecurity for me.
I was still involved with church in college at that point. And so I was going to a college ministry every week and it felt like people were kind of meeting their partners for life there. And I just felt like my hair was holding me back from that. It felt really hard to wrap my brain around the fact that it wasn't my choice.
I remember a specific instance where I bought clippers because I was so frustrated that I shaved it as bald as I could. And I just remember looking in the mirror. I felt very alone because it was me in the mirror and choosing to do these very monstrous things that I felt were life changing, but nobody else was a part of.
But choosing to shave my head that day was a choice to start fresh. And every time I've taken clippers to my head and shaved it, I always feel like it's a fresh start. It's a positive thing now, but it was a very dark moment for me to look in the mirror and the skin on the top of my head could be seen. And it felt so weird.
It always felt like there were two of me, the me that didn't want to be doing this, then the other me wanting those sensations, living in that moment. But the person who was pulling was just stronger than the person who wanted a perfect life.
My older sister, probably my freshman year of college, I went and visited my older sister in Knoxville where she lives. And she took me to the church she was going to at the time. And that church believes really heavily in healing. And so I had like a handful of people at the church come and put hands on me and pray for healing. And I cried and I thought that that meant that something had worked. But I think I just cried because it made me so uncomfortable.
And then again, I felt like I let her down and I let God down because it didn't help me. During college, I had a lot of friendships with people who were not a part of the church and knew a lot of people who believed different things. A lot of my best friends in college were also gay or part of the queer community. And growing up, of course, in the church, you're told that that's incorrect.
I ended up just not really being a part of that community anymore. It kind of happened organically. My beliefs just tailored so much more with the friends that I had outside of the church, which ended up also expanding my idea of relationships and what is okay to do physically.
So after my high school boyfriend and I broke up, I ended up having some hookup experiences and lost my virginity to some random person on a dating app that I never saw again.
This ended up creating problems for me with physicality in my hair because it was hard to be involved with people physically and not worry that bald spots were showing. And it was hard for me to believe that a heterosexual man would be attracted to me because I had short hair, which is weird.
Funny to say out loud because I know that it's not true, but it's still something that's hard for me not to believe sometimes that if I only had long hair, then maybe at this point I would be married or whatever.
I would have found the person that I wanted to be with. But I had a boyfriend who dated me while I had a buzzed head. And I it's, you know, I've been proven time and time again, that hair is not as big of a deal as I let it be. But still, I sit here and I am concerned.
For some people who have a body repetitive focus behavior like trichotillomania, it has stemmed from a traumatic experience and the body has chosen to use trich as a way to fight against those stressors. But for me, there wasn't a specific situation that caused stress. I think I just caused stress and anxiety to myself constantly and nothing had to happen for me to begin pulling.
These repetitive behaviors is a huge part of me, even as a child. I feel like I can see that now looking back with all of this body dysmorphia. And I've always been focused on my body. It doesn't matter how you grew up. You can still just think that there's something wrong with you and that you're not reaching this potential that you should be reaching. I think it's just this terrible body dysmorphia and never thinking that who I was was good enough.
My older sister is still my role model and my best friend. And she got married when she was 23 and has a house and runs a business. And it's
It's such a fight because I want that, but I so much enjoy knowing that the world is so much bigger and much more open and accepting than what I have told myself to believe. And that I don't have to rush to get to a specific part of life that my life is happening currently. A really challenging part of trick for me has been understanding and coming to terms with the fact that I do this to myself often.
but not blaming myself for it. It's an addiction where you're physically damaging your own body, but it's still an addiction. And it's still something that there's a part of me I can't blame myself for. I can work really hard to control the urges to pull that I have, but I will always have urges to pull out my hair.
I have joined a support group for people who have TRIC and that has absolutely been the most helpful thing for me.
To know that trichotillomania is a part of who I am, it's hard to come to terms with that that's a condition that I'll have for the rest of my life. But somebody in the support group that I'm a part of has pointed out that the urges to pull and pulling itself are different, that the urges to pull will always be there, but I'm able to work towards not pulling.
That gives me more control and more power back into this situation than I thought that I had. I can be ready for the seasons that it's harder and use the tools that I have in my pocket. And if I do pull to be gentle with myself and not to beat myself up about it, because I know that if I do beat myself up about it, it spirals into pulling more. So trying to stop it where it starts.
With my family members who struggle with addiction, I can understand this feeling of not being able to stop and feeling like there are two of you and that it's this cyclical pattern of trying so hard and failing and having to get back up and that your addiction is causing you to spiral farther into the addiction itself.
It's also given me a lot of empathy for my family members who have relapsed because it happens. It's a part of having an addiction. It can always happen, but that doesn't mean it's going to. It just, it can always happen.
I can't imagine not having TRIC just because of how much it's a part of my life. And it's not that I focus on it negatively. I think it's just a really great identifier of how I'm doing internally. If I have a lot more urges to pull, it often means that I'm a lot more stressed and that I need to do something about that stress. So it's kind of this external reminder constantly of what's going on internally for me.
I used to write down on a piece of paper and put it like on my bedside table and different things or put it on my mirror. And it just said, healing is for me. Believing that the healing from God was always for me, that that was going to be a part of my life at some point.
But that always set me up for this like degree of failure, because if I didn't find healing, then what does that mean about my relationship with God? And what does that mean about me as a person?
Coming to terms with the possibility that I won't be healed from trichotillomania is relieving to a degree and also saddening. But in the relieving way, it's just a relief because there's not a pressure on me to be better.
And I don't feel like my progress is measured by abstinence alone. I feel like my progress has so much to do with taking care of myself mentally, physically, emotionally, and also spiritually. To say that because I'm still pulling means that I'm not healed is a disservice to all the work that I've done over the years of having TRIC, the work that I've done for my mental health.
I think letting go of the concept that the numbers of days that I've been pull free is the only way that I'm being healed is good to let that go. And understanding why it is that I am pulling because the pulling itself isn't the problem really. It's a response that my body has to stress. But to relieve the stress is really important. And so digging down and figuring out why that stress is there is huge.
It's so interesting that I used to get mad that I couldn't find joy in the circumstance of Trick. But I think at this point, I do feel like Trick has had to pull me into a place of finding joy in a circumstance that is hard.
If it wasn't for having Trick, I wouldn't understand that I have these ideals of being a woman that aren't true, of being feminine that aren't actually true, that these molds that I've created for myself, I don't have to try to fit them anymore and that who I am outside of my hair is enough.
Today's episode featured Caroline. To learn more about trichotillomania, go to brfb.org. There you can find additional information about TRIC and other body-focused repetitive behaviors, as well as support groups and helpful resources.
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I'm your host, Witt Misseldein. Today's episode was co-produced by me and Andrew Waits, with special thanks to the This Is Actually Happening team, including Ellen Westberg. The intro music features the song Illabi by Tipper. You can join the This Is Actually Happening community on the discussion group on Facebook or at Actually Happening on Instagram.
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