Getting Your Child to Stop Pulling Her* Hair Out
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Dear Abby,
Ok so I have this hair pulling problem and it bothers me so
much!
know I don't want to do it but I just can't stop. I thought I
was the only person in the world who did it. It's also sort of
nerve-racking when you go to school and see all these girls who
have long beautiful hair and care about it, but then you look at
yourself, and you finally realize what you are doing to yourself
and you wonder if there is some way you can stop.
It is really hard. My parents try to help me, but sometimes they
can be mean about it, because they want me to stop so badly. But
really what they have to realize is that it is really hard to
stop because now, I have turned it into a bad bad habit. But I
guess why they get mean about it is because they are only
thinking about there own perspective, so they think it is easy.
I need some help bad! Please help me!
"Mary" |
By far, the most
common question that I receive from parents is, "How do we get her to
stop pulling her hair out?"
This question bothers me
more than any other. To me it implies that your child's hair IS the problem and
that if you can only GET her to stop, everything will be great. If you approach
the hair pulling issue in this way, whether you mean to or not, you are giving
your child the message that her hair is far more important than what's going on
inside of her at the deepest level.
My work is about going
deeper to discover the hidden reasons why people pull their hair out. I teach
parents to view their child's hair pulling in a different way than you may have
encountered in the past. In my experience, your child's hair pulling is just a
SYMPTOM of a larger problem in your child's world. It's like a warning beacon
signaling that something is amiss or is going awfully wrong.
We could say that the
larger problem stems from the way that your child deals with and processes her
feelings but it's important to go even deeper than this, to a level or two below
this simplistic explanation.
Why go deeper? Because
it's not just a matter of getting the pulling to stop. I don't mean to minimize
the social impact, but hair is just hair, after all. The crucial thing is your
child's deeper mental and emotional state as she progresses through life, isn't
it? Not only must she learn better ways of dealing with stressful life issues,
but WHY isn't she coping in a more self-empowering way? All of my books and
healing materials are focused on going beneath the surface to identify and solve
these larger system problems.
As an ex-hairpuller and
mentor to hair pullers working on healing, I have adult students whose parents
tried everything on earth to try to get them to stop hair pulling. One
particular student comes to mind as I write this. A hair puller from the
earliest years of life, her parents took her to every imaginable practitioner,
from therapist to hypnotist, from medication to wearing band-aids on her fingers
and counting hairs pulled for more than fifteen years, but none of this family's
investment in time or money paid off or addressed the deeper issues involved.
Other
parents see the problem as "trichotillomania" and a dreaded, possibly
"hereditary"** disorder. This sends them endlessly looking for medical
solutions which can become very demoralizing to a child.
My own parents took the
opposite approach and ignored my pulling altogether. Pretty soon I hid it from
everyone. As soon as I reached adulthood, I began trying nearly every
imaginable solution.
I have logged many
hundreds of hours on therapists' sofas but that never solved my hair pulling or
my inner emotional pain.*** Eventually, I found my own solution and began to teach
others how to solve hair pulling by looking beneath the "stigma" to the deeper
issues involved.
You Have The Power
What I discovered in my own healing is that ending trichotillomania is an inside job. No
solution can be found outside the sufferer. But, every parent has
the power to help their child end hair pulling given the right perspective, an
open attitude, and a few good tools. Depending on your child's age and how long
she's been pulling, some or all of that inner work can be accomplished within
the family system, by one or both parents. My advice to you is to start TODAY to
consider the deeper, more systemic issues that may be troubling her.
I've written a special in-depth guide for parents to understand the deeper issues of compulsive hair pulling, "Why Won't My Child Stop Hair Pulling? The Inside Truth About Trichotillomania in Children and Teens." To find out more about this truly amazing resource, visit www.hairpullingchild.com today.
*For the sake of ease and because most parents write me about
daughters, I use the feminine gender in my writings. If your child is a boy,
please know that I am also thinking of him.
**To date, trichotillomania, or compulsive
hair pulling, has never been proven to be hereditary.
***I believe that therapy could have been
much more effective in helping with my hair pulling. I'm writing an article
to explain this in more detail. Please check back at:
www.pullfreeatlast.com to read it.
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