A Goodbye

This assignment has helped me to learn a lot that I wouldn't have otherwise. I thought it was very interesting to find new information on a disorder that I have experience with. Thank you for reading along, and I hope you learned something as well!

Still Learning

I've recently been lucky enough to do a few assignments for different courses using the topic of trichotillomania. While doing this, I've been able to find a little more information to help me understand what it is I'm dealing with.

For example, I learned that a condition called alopecia, or alopecia areata, is often tied with having trichotillomania. Alopecia is the absence of hair on the body in an area where hair would normally grow. Alopecia is also described as baldness. It is an autoimmune disorder where the immune system attacks a person's hair follicles. There are some instances of trichotillomania that leads to alopecia where a person's hair begin to grow back after a year or so, but it's also pretty common for the baldness to be permanent.

Trichotillomania is also frequently mistaken for OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder). Trich is compulsion disorder, but it is not the same as OCD. However, these two conditions can co-exist within a person.

It has been estimated that roughly 2% of the general population of Americans have trichotillomania, and many of them have no idea what it is.

Childhood trauma, high stress levels, and neurochemical imbalances have been discovered to be some of the top causes of reported trich cases.

The top treatments for trichotillomania thus far are just general behavioral therapy, psychotherapy, and emotional support.

the feelings trich has brought to me

This post does not mean that everyone with trich feels this way, but I thought I would share some of the ways trichotillomania makes me feel.

• Shame: Pulling out my hair has always made me feel ashamed of myself. I know it can make me look "crazy" to some. Every time I pull my hair I want to hideaway in a corner of my bedroom forever

• Anger: I'm angry that I can't control it, I can't stop ripping my hair out. I even pull without knowing that I did and the only giveaway is the new bald spot on my body, one of the most frustrating details of my day-to-day life. I'm angry that I can't just make myself stop. It feels like someone else is controlling my hands and I can't smack them away.

• Regret: I regret ever touching my hair in the first place. I regret pulling the first hair, and I regret pulling the thousandth hair. 

• Sadness: I'm sad that my hair isn't there anymore. It's sad to think that there are spots where my hair may never grow back. It's sad that I need to pull my hair to calm my nerves and feel okay. It's sad to think that I may never be able to fully stop. 

As I said in the beginning of this post, not everyone with trich will feel this way. These are common emotions tied with trichotillomania, though. There are also plenty videos about emotions and trich on youtube if you were ever wanting to compare how people with trichotillomania think and feel about it. 

Understanding... well, kind of.

I won't deny that trichotillomania effects the people around you, but in most cases the other people don't see how much worse it is for the person who actually has trich. It's a hard thing to explain, and it's just as hard to understand it. I was recently shown a video that I would like to share with you. This video includes some fathers of people with trich telling the audience how their child's trichotillomania made them feel and how they came to realize that their child isn't doing it on purpose; tirchotillomania is not a way of rebelling, it's not a way of "sticking it to the man," we don't have one hundred percent control over our trich, it tries to control us. 

We all just need to sit back and try to grasp an understanding of what trichotillomania is and how it effects us. We are not our trichotillomania, we are still people.