The part I didn’t tell you…
I told you about the years I picked my skin without realising I was doing it, about the practice that slowly, slowly brought me home to myself and about the question my coach asked me so many times that I lost count.
What I didn’t tell you was why my hands started in the first place.
His name was James. My younger brother.
When he died, my body didn’t know what to do with the size of it.
There was no language for it, no map for it, no woman in my life saying here, this is how grief lives in the female animal body, this is what she will do if you don’t let her speak.
So she found her own way. She put it into my skin.
Hour after hour, year after year, my nervous system did the only thing she knew how to do with the weight of him being gone: she discharged it through my hands.
I didn’t connect the two for a long time. And I thought I was a woman with a bad habit.
I didn’t understand I was a woman in mourning, with no one teaching her how to grieve in her body.
I’m telling you this on a Thursday because I’ve come to believe something, and I want to say it to you plainly:
Grief that has nowhere to go will find somewhere to live. When no one witnesses our loss, it moves into the body and makes a home there. No amount of self-help, no clever technique, no morning routine can reach the part of her that mourns alone.
She needs witnessing, not fixing. Witnessing.
This is the part of the practice I couldn’t do on my own.
The picking softened in the quiet hours of self-compassion, yes.
But the grief—the actual weight of him—only began to move when other women sat with me in it.
✧ When I let myself be seen as a woman in mourning, not a woman with a habit.
✧ When I stopped trying to heal in private and let myself be held.
This is why I gather women in circles.
It’s why I run the retreats I run.
Some weights are too heavy for the female animal body to carry alone. She was never meant to.
She was meant to grieve in the company of other women, around fires, in old stone rooms, with hands on her back and someone humming softly while she wept.
If you are carrying something you haven’t been able to put down—grief, shame, or a quiet unkindness toward yourself you’ve never named out loud—and you wonder whether it’s time to let someone witness it, I would love to have you with us.
Have courage, dear Emily,
Charli ❤️🦁
P.S. I wrote about James and dermatillomania as a wise nervous system response rather than a disorder in a chapter of Chana Studley’s book Beyond Diagnosis. If you’d like to read the longer version, it’s here.
If you love to explore the archetypes, here is a link to the beginning of the 13 archetypes: The Winter Witch
