What can I do to stop picking at my skin

Hello :) I'm very thankful that I found this site. Joining and posting is part of my effort to stop picking at my nails. I'm 21 years old, super busy, and a little obsessive about hygiene. I think the root of my problem began when I was very young. Like most girls, I wanted to be just gorgeous. I come from a family who is very "natural". My beautiful mother never wore make-up and her skin looked fabulous no matter what. Since she was so natural, she didn't groom all of the hair on her face or legs regularly. I remember thinking that I wanted to be beautiful like her, but groomed to perfection. I became utterly obsessed with skincare and hair plucking. I gouged at my face to get hair root specks out. It was bad and made me look awful. Eventually, I got away from that, but I've moved to my nails. I don't bite my nails, but I pick at the skin underneath my nails in an effort to get out all of the crap. I pick at my cuticles and the sides of my nails. They bleed, hurt, swell, and look bad. I do the same to my toes. I think this habit started with an ingrown toenail I got that had to be removed. After that procedure, I began picking at my nails trying to get anything on the sides out and off. It leads to severe infections even though I sanitize all of my "tools" beforehand. Now it's summer and I'm embarrassed to show my feet... again. This is my second summer hiding my feet. I just need to let them heal and allow the nails to grow in. Stress definitely triggers my picking. Somehow, I think that if I'm clean and hygienic, everything else will fall into place. But I'm no doctor and I keep injuring myself. I think part of the reason I've struggled to stop picking is that I've told myself that once I heal, I'll be happy and pretty. But that kind of thinking is why I picked at my skin in the first place!!! I just want to stop and I hope posting here will keep me accountable. Thanks for your support. I really appreciate this website.

im 16 and im a female. i started noticing that i get little bumps on my arms and shoulders and chest and face. sometimes they are sits and sometimes they arent. i became obsessed with popping them and then noticed that i can squeeze (what i assume is puss) white crap out of them most the time. then i noticed different little things that arent bumps but look like my poors or hair folicals or what ever you call them go in and i started squeezing them to. no i squeeze like every poor or what ev there called on my face arms chest ect. i cant stop no matter how hard i try. i know im scaring my body up and it gets really embarrassing. my arms are the things im worse at and now ive noticed that under the skin it looks a little darker and when i squeeze them, instead of white stuff sometimes i get blood and sometimes i get this black crap sometimes i get a mixture of them all. i dont know what is coming out of the poors and it freeks me out. i also dont know how to stop but my ex hated me without a shirt on because of it... what do i do and what is this colored crap??

I'm 15 and have been picking at my skin as long as I can remember. Ever since I was little, I would pick at scabs and peel them off. It wasn't usually of too much concern, lots of kids picked at scabs. But when I got older and started getting acne, it only got worse. Growing up, I had a lot of problems with my mom and trying to win her over. I never felt worthy of her acceptance and always tried so hard to win her approval. My younger sister was the angel of the family with all excelled classes, a private school entry, and good behavior for someone so young. I always felt like I was competing with her. I hated the acne because I felt like they were just more imperfections for me to deal with. I began picking at it because every time I popped them or picked them away, it felt like I was getting rid of an imperfection when, in reality, I was just scarring and ruining my face. I want so badly to stop but every time I pass a mirror, I sit there and pick for at least 10 minutes. I scream in my head, "Stop!" but I never can. I want help and I think I probably have some sort of anxiety disorder for anxiety runs in my family and what with all my mother-daughter issues, it seems logical. I want to tell my family, but I'm so afraid of disappointing my mother yet again, that I just don't have the heart to do it. I didn't tell anyone about it until now and only recently came to terms with it, since I have begun to pick the skin around my fingernails, off my lips, and the in-grown hairs on my legs. I don't know how to tell my family without them just laughing it off as me being over-dramatic. I'm thinking of telling my friends first because they'd probably be very understanding of my situation.

I'm 40 and for as long as I remember I have picked on my scabs, messed around with my hair, pulled skin of my feet and picked on my nails and the skin around then. I damaged some of my fingers so the nails just don't attach to the skin anymore. My hair gets uneven because I break the strands since I constantly mess with my hair. I have soars on my body that I had for 2 years since I always pick on them. I don't think other people know about this, but i got some comments about my soars: "you should check so it's not cancer" and about the hair thing. I'm really sickened by my own behavior, but I just can't stop. As I was reading your posts I was picking. It's really OCD and I just can't stop. Not even for 10 minutes. I'm a recovering addict and alcoholic and big nicotine user and obsessive in many other fields. I have a lot of anxiety issues and when I read another lady's post here something clicked. I finally understand why I'm doing this. Because when I do it, I zoom out. I'm numb, my mind is still, I don't feel anymore. Skin picking truly is a drug. I have to quit. I'm writing here to be accountable.

I PICK MY SORES I DON,T KNIW I AM DOING IT

It's really about time that I looked into one of these forums, and I'm glad I finally did. I am 22, and I'm going to be having a son soon. I don't want him to be embarrassed when he introduces me to his friends, but I'm more afraid of passing along my nasty obsessions to him. I've had obsessive habits since I was a child. When I was 8 I would have these nasty looking scabs on my arms. I also would pick my cuticles and nails down to a stub, and they very often hurt and bled. My family would tell me to stop, but I couldn't. This continued on into jr. high, except now it was right on my face because I had really bad skin. I'd also pluck the middle of my eyebrows too much, but thankfully not the whole thing like my mother did (she plucked all of hers away). There was a period where I had pretty good skin and was able to stop, but once my skin broke out again, that was it. That period was when I was 16, and lasted for maybe 6 months. Since then I've been picking, picking, picking on pretty much anything from my lips, to my neck. I've been reading about BPD, and think I may have it. I'm very interested in anything that could help me stop. I was thinking that hypnosis might be a viable option, though I tried looking it up and couldn't find anything.

Hello everyone, I'm 19 and I finally stumbled onto this page after 4 years of searching the internet for answers as to why I had scabs and cuts all over my face. I figured this would be another forum that suggested moisturizers or some kind of clinical treatment, but as I read some of your posts, I was overwhelmed. I realized that I had been reading for over an hour and was in complete tears. I thought I was alone and have felt that way for a very long time. I've never had the money for a professional examination so I wasted the majority of my late teenage years picking at my skin, then cooking up some crazy home remedy to try and make the skin heal faster. My home is my haven. Here no one can stare at me, treat me differently or ask the stupid question I'm sure all of you have heard, "what happened to your skin?!" Over the last few years I lost everything from my family to my job and this "skin condition" (or habit) was the final straw for my depression. With all that said, thank you and good luck to every single post on this site because for the first time in years I'll be going to sleep knowing that I have identified my problem and tomorrow will be the first day I work towards putting this behind me. No more picking.

I'm 16, and I have been picking my face, scalp, and around my nails since I was 13. The reason I decided to make this account is because lately it has escalated to the point where I have to wear a bandaid on 7 fingers because the skin is so severely picked and bloody. I have permanent scarring all around my nails, I often pick my face and scalp, but not nearly as violently. When I'm doing it I just zone out and forget everything, it's like a trance, and I can't stop until there's no loose skin or scans left on my hands. It started when I was 12 and go acne, and my mother would always pop and pick my face, and I just kind of started following suit. This is humiliating but I have a twin brother, and sometimes I even pick and pop at his acne or sunburn (though it drives him nuts and we often fight about it) but when I see anything that can be picked I just feel like I have to get it. Even if it's a complete stranger in the lunch line, I have to fight the urge to pop his zit or scratch his skin, it's sick. I think what would be helpful is therapy, because I've always felt inadequate next to my older sister who is a beautiful dancer/model, and my other has always puts on various diets for as long as I can remember (though I'm not overweight). Just based on this I can guess it stems from some kind of emotional feelings of inadequacy, but knowing that doesn't really do me any good. I am absolutely ashamed of my fingers, and hide my hands whenever possible because people are always asking "why do you have all those bandaids?" or "what happened to your hands?" and I just can't answer them. My mom occasionally notices it and yells at me for it, and my father rarely notices but just tells me to stop. I don't know what to do because I have tried to stop, I think therapy would be very helpful but I don't want to ask my parents because they believe I can stop if I try hard enough. I'm so glad I found this supportive community and if anyone would like to email me at ariel_rose@aol.com I'm always willing to talk.

i had no idea this was such a prevalent issue or even a thing, but i am quite happy to have found a group of my compulsively self spelunkers. i am 29, soon to be 30, and have been picking since i could look into the mirror that was mounted to the wall next to the window in the bathroom in the house i grew up in. it didn't start off this bad. it used to be that if i had a pimple on my face, i would get what was in there out so i wouldn't have a big ole bump on my face and then i could easily claim "bug bite" or some other cop-out. if i didn't come out of the bathroom in a certain amount of time, my mom would knock on the door and tell me to hurry up and get out. i just kind of let her assume that i was doing what most young teenage boys do with any amount of time behind closed doors. when i got to high school, it kind of tapered off a bit. then when i graduated and got thrown by the waist of my pants into the real world, that is when it steadily began to get worse. it moved from the "necessity" of smoothing out the random blemish on my face to tweaking out on my elbows. then my chest. then down to my nether regions. i am now married and trying to deal with this insane compulsion that i have. i try to keep my fingernails cut to the wick to try and "de-claw" myself, which works for about a day. i still get sucked into excavating my skin on a regular basis. i will systematically hunt down every smallest bump, real or imagined, and turn it into a bloody crater. i have to regularly clean the build-up of dried blood from my fingers so my wife doesn't freak out on me. during the worst times, usually the wee hours of the morning battling insomnia, i can go into the bathroom, sit on the floor mat, and when all of the new injuries finally stop juicing and i go back to bed, two freaking hours have managed to go by. my chest and what i can reach of my back look like i've took both barrels of a 12 gauge loaded with bird-shot from 15 feet. my wife has gastrointestinal problems related to stress which prevents us from romping in the sheets enough as it is, with out me being forced to "opt out" because two days prior, i got it into my head that my dick would look a hell of a lot better with a pea-size chunk of flesh missing from the lower right-hand shaft surrounded by smaller indecencies to keep it company. i know damn well that i like sex a whole lot more than i do picking, so why in god's green earth would i let my picking habits prevent me from having it??? i try to stop and think about what i am doing, but as i am trying to convince myself that a small tiny, not-even-a-pimple, bump is exponentially better looking/ feeling than a big honking gaping wound, my fingers are slowly moving over my skin hunting for the next perceived insult. the one thing that i have found works sometimes is closing my eyes. unfortunately, mirrors are all over the damn house, and i swear that one of these days i'm just going to straight up tape paper over all of them, leaving only a little bit open on top so i can brush my hair when i need to get fancy, or stand tip-toe to see my face when i need to shave. this was a good purge and i heartily thank those who make this website possible. if anything else, the time spent typing this out was not time spent picking and that endears you to me. thank you. ~Josh Roberts

I'm 18 now, and ever since i can remember, I've had bloody spots all over my arms. Within the past few years, this has moved down to my legs and my private region. It seems like this is a comfort thing for me, and i don't even know that I'm doing it. I'm relieved that I'm not the only one... I remember when I was in elementary school...the school often called my house and asked my mom if I had chicken pox (which I have never had). I was so ashamed to tell people that I would squeeze the skin on my arms so much that i would break the skin and start to bleed, that i told them that all of the scabs were because my cats constantly scratched me. I've said this so much that I actually started believing it at one point. When I got my school picture taken one year, all I could see was all of the scabs all over my arms, so I secretly got my picture retaken, and it isn't much better. I'm leaving for college soon and I really don't feel like being known as the girl with scabs everywhere. It has even gotten to the point that my boyfriend makes remarks about it. I know he's trying to be funny about it so it doesn't hurt me, but it still does. I am so ashamed and disgusted about this "habit" of mine. I just want to stop it. There are points when my arms and legs START to clear up, but then in about a week, they're back to being covered in dry blood, I hate this so much =(

I'm 20 years old and have a horribly habit of picking my arms face legs and anything that looks pickable. I have always liked picking zits when I was younger but never this bad. I noticed it took a complete turn for the worst when I started doing drugs. I started using injecting heroin daily at age 18 and when I was high I would completely zone out for hours in front of a mirror and pick at every pore on my body. I would be in the bathroom for hours and not even realize how long I was in there. It started with my face then progressed to my arms and I've started on my legs recently. I did a little bit of crack/cocaine and thought that it was the reason I started but now that I've been off heroin and cocaine the picking still continues. I noticed that if I take any type of opiate such as Lortab, Oxycontin, Opana's or even Suboxone (helps you get off heroin) I will go into these picking rages and just go crazy on my arms but when I'm completely sober I find myself just picking at the big scabs or white heads and not notice I'm doing it. I feel absolutely hideous with these quarter sized open wounds on my face arms and legs and it doesn't help that I have to wear long sleeve shirts to work in 100 degree weather. I went to a dermatologist who gave me some cream and an antibiotic which didn't really help because he doesn't realize that my skin will never heal if I don't stop picking at it. No amount of medicine will make me stop picking. My Dr. prescribed my hydroxyz for anxiety but I refuse to take them because they make me tired and I hate it. Glad to know that there are other pickers out there besides me because people in public, my family, guys that I date, they all look at me like I'm some walking disease and it kills me. I would do anything to make it stop. I just recently got dumped and I honestly think that my arms are a big reason it happened. I know that it's not appealing and that people stare but should I have to hide my body and stay at home for something that I have no control over? My brother and dad always ask why I can't just tell myself to not pick. It's absolutely impossible. They don't understand. I have horrible anxiety. OCD depression drug addiction, I'm a mother and have been since I was sixteen I've been through hell and back and I know this is a big factor in my picking but I will forever have a memory of what I've been through with these scars on my face arms and legs. Feels great to not be alone in this.

Hi everybody. I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who has this issue. I started picking my arms soon after my parents divorce. They would always tell me to stop and I would but only for a day or two, and it continued to where I would pick my face and legs as well. I keep telling myself that " I'll stop tomorrow" but it never happens. Sometimes I sit in the bathroom for an hour or two ( I'm exaggerating a little ) but still and I'll walk out and look like I have hives. i think it's like a stress reliever to me, when I pick it feels like theres nothing going on, or there's nothing to stress out about. I get so embarrassed when people ask me what happenend to my arms and I say I have a rash as an excuse. Im hoping that writing this will kind of help relieve some stress from picking. I found it helps to keep myself busy so I don't stare at my arms like an animal staring at a raw piece of meat. Good luck to everyone

I am 24 year old woman and have been picking my skin for about 10 years now. It runs in the family, my mother used to do it but grew out of it in her thirties, my sister also has it but nowhere near as bad as me. For us it starts with a skin condition 'Keratosis Pilaris' which is when hair follicule is trapped under the skin making a raised rash like surface on my skin with mini pimples with white stuff inside. I usually pick for about an hour or two a day and only late at night in bed unless in the weekends and will pick at random. I go into a daze like state and time just seems to fly by. I think, I'll just get that bad one then all of a sudden it's been an hour or two. It really cuts into my sleeping time. I enjoy the calming effect it has on me but feel guilty as soon as I stop and I'm sore, have drawn blood and super tired because it's 3am and I have work at 9am. I am a really out-going person and wear stockings and tops that cover up the scars and bumps. I get self conious with guys when they touch me because I know my skin is rough. I showed my doctor and I also told him how I get anxiety and gut aches and about my picking for hours and he wanted me to take anti-depressants, but I don't feel sad I just worry about stuff a lot, I thought I don't want to take medication for the next two years or more because of bad skin and a sore tummy! I also went to a dermatologist but the creams didn't work for me and my skin is too sore to exfoliate. I feel stuck in a rut, I managed to leave my skin alone for my sisters wedding but couldn't wait to start picking it again, it just takes so much self control to not do it and I get pleasure from doing it which is embarrassing. I even get a kick out of squeezing other people's pimples. I'm a sick one! I love the idea of a quick fix, like getting hypnotized or something, has anyone tried that? Reading everyone's stories is really comforting. Maybe it's time I took responsibility for my actions and find the will-power to stop by avoiding triggers and start keeping a pick diary. I think I can do it with out medication but may have it as my back up plan. Hopefully the urge will fade away completely in a year or two. Today can be the last day of picking myself to pieces, and maybe yours too. Eye on the prize!

Really interesting reading the comments... describing it as trance-like sums it up. Has anyone here 'recovered' from this? Or currently trying? I'm 22 female and have mainly been an arm picker (same symptoms as people mentioned here) my face usually has a scab or 3 and sometimes get infected but its slowly progressing to my chest and elsewhere. When I was 16 I went to the doctors about it and there's a name for it, sorry it was two words with 5 syllables each, but the main thing I took from it was that it's a form of acne, kind of mild in comparison, he said I could either take acne pills (a bit extreme in his opinion) or a creme called duac. He asked 'could you stop picking if you wanted to' I replies honestly 'yes', 'do you think you're going to?', 'um don't think so'. The cream worked quite well but it needs constant maintainance, being a teenager I either forgot or couldnt spare the 30mins of application time, and like most of you here, I enjoy it... The cream kept it localised I guess. Anyway, I've finally decided to man-up with the willpower to stop. Cut my nails (short as possible!), wearing long sleeves, avoiding looking at my arms when exposed, changing my pillowcase every other day at least, drinking water, washing my face twice a day and sometimes steam it. I've done this for a week now and I'm nearly healed... Ive always healed quite fast but never have clear skin for more than a day, I know it's going to be a constant thing and take effort to do this every single day, but in the end i'll feel so much better than scab-zilla. I nearly slipped up in the bathroom by looking in the mirror too closely..... I picked the one that needed it then washed my face and found this forum. We're getting there.