Hi everyone.
I thought I’d get a bit more personal with you this evening and give a review/account (forgive the length please!!) of the one strategy I’ve used personally that I can say for me was successful in
producing dramatic results: Habit Reversal Theory paired with a whole lot of will power.
Using this technique, I managed to stop pulling for just over three years, during which time I was so confident that I’d beaten this thing for good I even completely forgot that I had ever had such an issue in the first place (no small feat for a Trichster).
Unfortunately, some serious stress reared its ugly head near the end of my high school years and slowly the old demons came out of the closet to help me cope. Because of this, I don’t necessarily believe that “habit training” alone can solve the problem permanently, but I can say with complete confidence:
Since that first relapse, I’ve had many successes and setbacks, but after tasting that sweet freedom as a product of the habit training I have NEVER let my Trich get as bad as it was in my earliest youth.
For the first few years that I struggled with the disorder, I had no eyelashes top or bottom and no eyebrows at all. I was completely bare, and got asked on a regular basis if I was undergoing some kind of chemotherapy-type treatment. My mom had to pencil them in for me with make-up every day before school because I was too young to do it myself and too embarrassed to leave the house without it. But after those three pull-free years, I have NEVER again touched my eyebrows beyond cosmetic tweezing or my lower lid lashes at all. I have always managed to restrict my pulling to upper lashes, usually even only the corners, and I do consider this to be a huge success.
It may have come back, but I was certainly WAY more confident and equipped to deal with it than I had ever been before, and I’ve never lost that confidence. I knew I had beaten it once, so I knew I could do it again. And I have. By telling my story with this strategy, I hope at the very least I can give some of you a bit of confidence too.
The Background
Trich for me started when I was about 12 years old, innocently at first as it always seems to go. Oddly enough, I simply became fascinated with the story that if an eyelash fell out, you got to make a wish and blow it away and hope that it would come true. Somewhere along the line, though, my twelve year old mind realized that if I sort of helped them come out then I could make a whole lot of wishes at once.
A few weeks later, I barely had any eyelashes left on either eye and I had started to move to my eyebrows as well. My parents were furious and confused, as many often are who have never heard of such a disorder, and they tried many different treatment options usually centered around some kind of punishment if i didn’t stop. After realizing this was ineffective and doing some research, they gave up and at least sort of left me alone to figure it out on my own time.
My father, while supportive, refused to believe that Trich was any kind of disorder and instead was determined that it was merely a “bad habit” like biting my nails. As much as this outlook of his frustrated me then, it ultimately would be the way out. A few years later, just before my freshman year of high school, he showed me a text about habit theory, which stated the following:
- It takes 21 days to make or break a habit.
It dawned on me that day that if in fact it was a habit, then I was in control and that it was, just maybe, possible to beat it. Prior to this time, I had just resigned myself to the idea that “Trich is a disorder, and I was just going to have to deal with it for awhile because there wasn’t any cure yet”, which unfortunately I think is a problem a lot Trichster’s have upon finding out there is an official name and diagnosis. As much as I do believe that there are psychological reasons behind the pulling and that it is in fact a disorder, I am firmly convinced that the “disorder” point of view allows a lot of people to give up and become engrained in their failures.
I decided to give the habit theory a try.
The Psychology
Now, there has been a LOT of debate in the psychological world about whether or not this theory is at all factual. It apparently originated in the book
Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz, after he observed that patients who had lost a limb to amputation took about 21 days to stop feeling phantom sensations in the limb. Maltz' theory states:
Brain circuits take engrams (memory traces), and produce neuroconnections and neuropathways only if they are bombarded for 21 days in a row. This means that our brain does not accept “new” data for a change of habit unless it is repeated each day for 21 days (without missing a day).
The thing about this theory that’s so difficult for Trichsters is that there can be NO EXCEPTIONS. 21 Days, not one hair pulled out or it simply wont work, or so the theory goes. And while that might seem impossible to some, for me I think it worked because it was a fairly tangible, practical,
short term goal. I was able to focus on the idea that three weeks really wasn’t very long, and if at the end of three weeks I didn’t feel better I would just go ahead and pull to my heart’s content and try something else.
I think that a lot of Trichsters see their whole life stretched out in front of them and the stress of hoping for success in the long term just leads to more pulling and anxiety. For me, the way to beat Trich was to set very short term goals and reward myself ecstatically for meeting them.
The Process & The Tools
Okay, so how do you do it?
I am a very visual person, so the way I went about enforcing this 21 day abstinence was to bombard myself with messages & ways to log the success. These are the tools I used:
- A HUGE Calendar (Desk-size): I took a desk calendar and wrote a count down of the days in bright marker. Every day that I went pull-free I crossed it off with more bright colors and kept it in my room where I would see it right before I went to bed, right when I got up, and whenever I was at the computer (the three times that my pulling seemed to be the worst).
- “Don’t Pull - Only ___ Days Left!” Signs: I made a TON of these signs and placed them around my house in places where I was most likely to pull, like on all of the mirrors in the house, on my computer desk, the walls around my bed, and around the Television. I found it was more helpful to replace them EVERY day because it held me more accountable and it was really rewarding to see the new numbers go down and down.
- Keeping the Plan A Secret (At least from non-Internet people): Now this might sound strange, since most websites out there about Trich are very adamant about having a strong support group, but I am convinced this was the single greatest strategy to my success. I knew that if I kept it a secret, then if I failed, I didn’t feel any worse about it by being responsible to other people like my parents, but if I succeeded, then I could surprise them at the end by showing the people close to me the results. Somehow, knowing that I was the only one with any idea, with any power, and with any say really helped my confidence level get over the hump that seemed to fall right around the 8-10 day mark.
- Reward Yourself, Daily: This was the final piece to my personal strategy. When I was younger, I was a total chocoholic. Anything chocolate, I loved it. So, I saved up some money before starting and every day that I didn’t pull I went out and bought myself my favorite expensive candy. The key here, I think, is to make the reward something that you usually wouldn’t normally afford, and to buy the reward daily, not just stockpile up a bunch. They say that shopping and splurging can give you a sort of mental high, and the act of physically going out and rewarding myself every day REALLY helped me get through it. If you’re hesitant about spending a lot of money, of course you have to assess your own situation, but I think that beating Trich is something to celebrate loudly, and if you reward yourself with expensive or elusive things, then you’ll reinforce to yourself that you totally committed to stopping.
Whew.
Soo, if you trudged through all of that then you’re a very brave soul, I am so sorry for the length of this post, but I really hope that it helps some of you out if you do decide to try the method. I myself am about to start a new cycle of this, mixed with a few new techniques that I’ve decided to throw in to try and keep the relapses away for good. I intend to review these new techniques later on down the road after I’ve tested them out as well.
I know we can do it. Best of luck!!
Katy <3
