Day 12 –Dermatillomania: How and Why We Build Up Anxiety
3:33 PM
Dermatillomania, which falls under the umbrella of OCD
disorders, is among other things, an anxiety disorder. What has intrigued me is
how and why OCD/dermatillomania sufferers build up anxiety until it reaches a
state of disorder- meaning; it continuously cycles and perpetuates itself
regardless of the current life-experience of the sufferer. I have observed this
from experience throughout my life, because over time, I’ve taken specific
steps to create many big changes in my life in an attempt to cut out the stress
and anxiety that was causing me to compulsively pick at my skin.
I recently realized a lot about anxiety, after listening to a
very informative interview which, if you have the resources, you should
invest in because it definitely helped me to streamline my understanding of
this experience.
I have experienced a lot of anxiety in my life, as I’m sure many people can relate to. I have tried to write about the experience, but have found it quite difficult. The difficulty arose from the fact that I found it very hard to figure out what was causing me to be so anxious all the time, it just seemed to always be there, wearing a different mask or pinning itself to a different situation. In my life, I would resolve issue after issue, thinking the anxiety would go away, but it just kept on cycling over and over, until I had to realize that the ‘issues’ weren’t the problem, it was the pattern that was the problem.
I have experienced a lot of anxiety in my life, as I’m sure many people can relate to. I have tried to write about the experience, but have found it quite difficult. The difficulty arose from the fact that I found it very hard to figure out what was causing me to be so anxious all the time, it just seemed to always be there, wearing a different mask or pinning itself to a different situation. In my life, I would resolve issue after issue, thinking the anxiety would go away, but it just kept on cycling over and over, until I had to realize that the ‘issues’ weren’t the problem, it was the pattern that was the problem.
What I learned about anxiety is that it is triggered by
something, like a new situation (meeting someone new for example), or a project
about to start, and then it finds a feeling or emotion (or even a
personality/character) to attach itself to and amplify. In my case, wherein I
have an actual anxiety disorder, I will use the anxiety to amplify a worry or a
fear for example, to the point that it becomes unbearable and actually starts
to disrupt my life.
I have likened OCD/dermatillomania to a drug or an addiction before,
and I want to use this same understanding to look at the use of anxiety within
self as a self-experience. When we feel things (feelings/emotions), our body is
subjected to chemicals secreted by the brain, wherein we can actually react to
our own thoughts, and have a chemical experience based on our own mind/body
reaction to the thought, in the form of a feeling (positive) or emotion
(negative). After repeated exposure to these chemicals over years, the physical
body can then go through a withdrawal when the feeling or emotion fades, and
can then look to re-charge or re-inject the body with the same chemical it had
been repeatedly subjected to. Just like cigarettes or alcohol can quite easily become
addictive with repeated and prolonged use, so can depression, stress or adrenaline, for
example.
Looking at OCD/derma again, I’m sure as many battle with this
disorder, periods of triumph are experienced. This is certainly the case with
myself. I will be ‘doing good’ and ‘on the road to recovery’, and then I will
experience this weakening and then a fall back into the disorder. This fits
with the analogy where my body is not getting the energetic charge or ‘drug’ it
receives when I cause the internal anxiety that eventually leads me to the
compulsion, so it needs a boost, a re-charge, an injection of worry, of stress,
of fear or irritation.
So if I could take an example of a real-life situation, I
would look at where and how I get these ‘injections’, meaning, where does a
subtle anxiety experience arise, causing me to now analyze a situation from the
perspective of fear, or worry, or stress as examples of my most common anxiety
induced experiences. My first example would be walking into a cluttered room. I
would have a very brief moment of no reaction – that small window where I can
either think practically and rationally about the situation, devise an
efficient and effective cleaning plan, clean the clutter then move on. Or, what
more commonly happens is that I’ll feel a little movement within my solar
plexus – an intensifying electric energy that tightens my breathing as the
anxiety moves in, and then my outlook on the situation is now chaos; my
thoughts jump to conclusions such as: the amount of things to clean is
innumerable, there must be bacteria everywhere! I’ll have to scrub ever corner
in order to get this room really clean.
So in this circumstance, the anxiety let me mindlessly filter through all
possible reactions, only to choose the most extreme one that is fitting for
this particular situation, which in this case, happened to be overwhelming-ness.
The anxiety attached itself to this emotion and amplified it, causing my body
to be flushed with a chemical, and causing my actions to become obsessive and compulsive,
as I would desperately seek to change my environment to calm me down, when the
real culprit is actually my internal experience consisting of the thoughts,
feelings, emotions and reactions going on in my mind without any intervention
from my awareness.
Another example: I would make a mistake at work. I would have
a moment of no reaction, followed almost immediately by the first sparks of
anxiety. So instead of understanding the mistake, learning from it and moving
on, I am having thoughts of losing my job, of my boss yelling at me, and I’m
experiencing my entire team’s disappointment in my performance. The anxiety had
attached itself to my fear (fear of survival, fear of not having money, fear of
failure), and amplified it within me so that I am actually experiencing
fear-reactions to the thoughts as if they were actually happening.
This pattern is going on a lot, to varying degrees, to a
point where at the end of (and even during) each day, there is this
accumulation of amplified emotions such fear, overwhelming-ness, stress and
worry that I don’t know what to do with. I personally feel dirty with it, it
feels like its crawling in my skin, and my whole body feels grimy. Picking at
my skin feels like a cleansing. It becomes a hypnotic purifying ritual where I
can go so deeply and fully into the experiences of the day that if feels like I’m
processing them and clearing them out, but what I’m actually doing is like recycling
them, re-hashing them, re-living them at some deep level and integrating them
into and as my very physical body.
What I am going to do from here, is to locate five examples
of instances where I go into an anxiety reaction. I am doing this in order to
learn how to slow myself down enough to be able to pin point the moment where
the anxiety it triggered. I will then use that moment as an opportunity,
instead of a falling point. It will be my opportunity to choose who I will be and how I will be and handle the situation,
instead of letting my auto-pilot, unconscious mind, default-mode way of
thinking direct me, my personality and my actions.
Some self-forgiveness to pave the way:
I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to fear
taking on the beast that is anxiety.
I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to fear
living without anxiety because as I have lived so far, I have become dependent
on the energetic experiences it gives me, and I fear losing this thing and the
withdrawal it may bring.
I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to hold
onto something that is detrimental to myself in every way.
I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to not pay
attention to myself and my reactions in small moments where I miss windows of
opportunity to direct myself, and instead I accept and allow anxiety to direct
me for me.
I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to live
with anxiety and let it decide for me who I am and how I live.
I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to be a
slave to anxiety, and I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to
think/believe/perceive that anxiety is bigger and stronger than me.
I forgive myself for NOT accepting and allowing myself to
see/realize and understand that I created this beast, and so I can un-create it
and stop my participation from within and as it.
I commit myself to support myself to open up moments of
choice for myself, where I can step in as a clear and aware author of my
decisions and the directions I choose to take.
I commit myself not to be fearful of that which I myself have
created, to rather look upon these things as investigations to be done into
myself, with myself, as an assistance and support to walk myself out of the
disorder and into an order I have chosen to create for myself.
I commit myself to walk a process to stop hurting myself,
physically and emotionally.
I commit myself to pay the utmost attention to myself, and to
open up opportunities for my self-healing, self-growth, and self-expansion.
I commit myself to show myself that I am in fact strong
enough to face myself, my life and how I’ve lived.
I commit myself to be gentle with myself through this
process, and forceful when necessary.
If you would like to teach yourself how to find the answer to yourself within yourself, check out DIP Lite, a free online course. As you move through the lessons, looking at the mind as you've never seen it before. You are assigned to a 'buddy', someone that has already walked the process, to support you through the writing. It is completely free and confidential. On lesson 6 you get 4 amazingly supportive chats with your buddy. 
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