The Pleasure and the Pressure

Posted on February 5, 2006 in OCD

Inspired by shrinkette’s blogging about those who cut themselves, I started writing about the sensations that accompany my compulsive skin picking, that habit of a less florid order than taking a razor blade or knife to my skin. Most outsiders — including my bipolar friends who don’t share the compulsion — don’t get what makes me do it.

One element of the picking which attracks me is the “Squeeze”. I don’t know how else to put it. You have to pick or press the skin in certain spots to get the sensation. It often starts as a scratch and then continues as a scratch atop another scratch because the itch doesn’t go away. To scratch the itch gives pleasure. A few special spots produce itches of the most exquisite order. They’re nothing like the itches that afflict you when your clothes rub a grain of pollen into your shoulder or the itch from a rash. These itches nestle, for me, on the bridge of the nose, the vale of the chin, the fingers, the navel, and the toes. White tactile light shoots though flesh and bone up to the brain when I pinch these places.

The most pleasureable and sensuous zones are the fingers. When I bite loose bits and swallow them, I do so not for the flavor, but to discard them. I heard once that the reason why one bites is because of a vitamin deficiency. That may encourage me to continue (though Risperdal has curbed this appetite.)

I can only imagine what the knife must feel like when sharpened and pressed into the skin. If I can extend my own experience, it’s not the pain which turns you on, but the pressure. And the only way to feel it all is to push through the skin until you break it and the nerves beneath it shout their distress. Then you stop as I stop when I remove epidermis from my fingers. There’s never any intent of self destruction: what you desire most is to feel that white night intensity. Yes, it is a drug of a sorts — an altered awareness. When you do drugs you may wish to hallucinate. When you pick, you seek a tactile equivalent, the beauty of your arm feeling the very first echelon of an ant-army of sensation.

I know I can’t possibly get it right because I don’t cut. Cutters are welcome to share how they feel it.