How Much are You Willing to Pay for Change?

Of course, I am not talking about money. I am talking about the psychological price of change, what you need to give up on in life to make your BFRB unnecessary. Just recently, I received a comment from one of our members and this comment encapsulates a lot of what I feel creates difficulties for people who are trying to reduce or eliminate picking/pulling from their lives but do so in a way that consciously or semi-consciously involves spinning in circles and finding ways of changing without actually doing what it takes to change.

I am sharing the comment with permission:

I lurk around the BFRB Club quite a bit and it really means a lot to me to read what other people write. I will be the first one to admit that I am a coward and I don’t feel like sharing. At least not yet. I write out each prompt in my journal and I often reach the same depressing conclusion. I can’t really change. It seems like you are often hinting that while all these techniques are useful, there’s much more to the problem. And I sadly reach this conclusion myself. Recently, your series of storytelling prompts really highlighted that for me. I feel like my skin picking will remain a part of me for as long as I pursue my career and work with the zest and intensity of the involvement that I do now. I don’t want to go into the details of how this relates to my urges because that would be a detour from what I really want to ask. What if I don’t want to give up my career or work differently and what if I am not ready to change? Can I stop picking nonetheless?

First of all, I applaud the honesty here, because it takes guts to be this honest: the price I have to pay to give up my skin picking is giving up my work ethic and career goals and this is not the price I am willing to pay.

I often feel like many people I work with tend to dance around this problem, but rarely say it so clearly – “If that’s what it takes, I’m not interested.”

I don’t know if I ever said it as clearly, but here I am saying it: different coping strategies and replacement techniques won’t resolve your problem permanently. The problem is not that simple. They are helpful and important and perhaps even necessary, but they are never the whole story.

Most psychologists will talk about functions of symptoms or “secondary gain”, and as soon as we introduce such concepts, we are basically saying that the symptom isn’t the problem, but an imperfect solution to a deeper problem. This is rather easy to demonstrate even without going into any kinds of deep and technical psychological analyses. If you think of BFRBs as mechanisms of emotional regulation, that means that there’s either a vital set of skills that you didn’t develop or that you are living a lifestyle that leads to quite a bit of emotional dysregulation. Both of these require lifestyle changes. You can’t choose Wednesday afternoon to emotionally regulate yourself and be done with it for the week. This is a process that is meant to be a part of how you live your life. Every day, every minute. Breathing exercises or grounding or mindfulness-based techniques like RAIN or SSA are all effective, but they are distinctly different from Tylenol for headaches insofar as they are meant to be incorporated into your life and change it. This requires a lifestyle change to be actual change. It means that you will start approaching work and relationships differently, that you will start paying more attention to your emotions and learn how to differentiate them, that you will, overall, develop a more compassionate approach to yourself, if nothing else because you will monitor your feelings and self-soothe when you need it; that is a compassionate act. It’s hard to think of a change of this magnitude as being anything other than a major change. It may start with RAIN but it naturally has to evolve to a place where you will be able to look at your life and say: “Oh, maybe I’m paying too high a price for this. Maybe this needs to go so that I can lead a happier life.” Ultimately, a breathing exercise will take you to these big questions if you are to approach emotional regulation in a thorough way.

If you want to lead a life that will have less stress or fewer triggers that dysregulate you emotionally, you will likely have to shake up your life quite significantly. The longer your picking or pulling are present, the bigger the changes that might be necessary. As painful as that may be to hear, but yes – perhaps your lifestyle isn’t sustainable. Perhaps you can’t work 17h a day and not pull your hair. Maybe the price of staying in a toxic relationship is picking your skin. What if you must give up on your perfectionism to be less stressed?

Change is hard. Change means that we sometimes have to give up on our dreams to be healthy or happy. On the other hand, change isn’t always mandatory. Perhaps you have to give up on your career if you are going to stop picking. Perhaps all it takes is a compromise: I will move slower but pick less. Or: I will take another direction so that I don’t have to pick. The only thing that counts, ultimately, is whether you feel like you’re paying a good price for what you’re getting. It’s perfectly legitimate to choose to continue picking because you don’t want to give up on your career if you feel like there’s no way around giving up your career. If you feel like one day, when you look back at your life, you will say that it was worth it to pick for decades to achieve whatever it is that you’ve set out to achieve, then this is a good decision for you to make.

I don’t think anyone should judge people for making choices they feel are best for them, even if those choices lead to healing from picking/pulling or their acceptance and continuation. Ultimately, every person is responsible for their own life and will live with the decisions they make.

As I was having a back-and-forth conversation with the person who sent the message I began this post with, the end of the initial message proved to be the key. Here’s what she wrote toward the end of our correspondence:

I think I see your point even if you didn’t state it just yet. Your questions are leading me there. You’re trying to say that I am asking if I can change without changing. I guess that’s what I was asking. Can I not change my life and change what is a logical consequence of the way I live my life. That answers my question.

Am I willing to pay for clear skin by changing the direction of my career, something that I’ve been invested in for… two decades now? Is my skin worth it?

I honestly don’t know, but I guess I should figure it out.

That is exactly what I meant: are you willing to pay the price that change requires? Are you genuinely willing to do what it takes? If the answer is yes, then change can begin.

There is no changing and staying the same at the same time.