2
Listening To Your Skin
Close links with the nervous system make your skin highly sensitive to emotions;
it can be more in touch with your innermost needs, wishes, and fears than your
conscious mind. You may not be aware that tomorrow's conference is
causing deep-down anxiety, but your skin is expressing that tension in hives or
in an outbreak of acne.
A persistent skin symptom is often a message from the inner you: a call for
help. Deciphering this message is like learning to interpret another person's "body
language" instead of simply listening to his words. What is your skin
trying to tell you? It is part of a complex mind-body organism, designed above
all for survival, and survival for any organism means satisfying basic needs.
Skin symptoms may irritate, inconvenience, or even torment you but they are
often attempts to obtain what you need, biologically and emotionally, in order
to flourish.
Emotional needs sound intangible next to biological needs (that is, love versus
food and water), but they're scarcely more negotiable, and it's hard to tell
where one ends and the other begins. In a famous study, the French psychoanalyst
Reneé Spitz observed infants in an orphanage. All their biological needs
were apparently met: they were fed, clothed, and kept warm; but they
received no love--they were seldom picked up and fondled as more fortunate
infants in loving families are. Many of these babies, Spitz observed, did not
grow properly. Without the vital nutrient of love, some physically withered;
some died. Other studies have confirmed the necessity of love and cuddling for
healthy development. Institutionalized babies, for one thing, are far more prone
to eczema than others.
Our needs are most dramatically visible in our totally dependent first years,
but they persist throughout life. Just as we never outgrow our needs for food,
water, and warmth, we always need three kinds of emotional nourishment: love,
respect, and protection.
Love is the emotional equivalent of food, the nurturing gift of a world
that supports life. We also need respect; love, food, and the rest are
given as we require them, not arbitrarily or impersonally. As adults, the
respect of family and friends confirms us as independent human beings who
deserve recognition. We need protection from emotionally intense extremes,
as well as extremes of temperature, if we are to grow and flourish. In time,
just as we learn to keep ourselves comfortably warm or cool, we learn to protect
ourselves against emotional overload.
The world being imperfect, there is often a conflict between what we need inside
and what we get from the outside; it is at the boundary--the skin--that this
conflict is acted out. Unmet needs obey the Law of Conservation of Psychic
Energy: the longing for nurturing love at six months or adult recognition at
forty won't simply disappear if unsatisfied. We try and try again, first one way,
then another, to get what we need. The desperate route of last resort is the
physical symptom.
If a baby is starved for love, for example, it will cry for more. If this doesn't
work, it may have a tantrum, then become lethargic, or finally develop infantile
eczema. The emotional pressure and pain of its frustrated need strain the baby's
young body until it breaks down at its weak point. With eczema, the whole body
cries through the skin.
Even skin problems that strike previously healthy people in their later lives
may have psychological roots in the long-ago days when needs were strongest. In
fact, indications are that the roots of such ills may extend back before birth:
infants born with allergies or eczema may be at risk from heredity or may have
been subjected to unusual prenatal stress.
Troubled skin is like a loyal but not very bright servant who refuses to quit
until he accomplishes what he was ordered to do. The process is hardest to stop
when it works, even a little. One of my patients, starved of emotional nurturing
as a child, carried into adulthood an insatiable need to be cared for. Her raw
inflamed skin got the soothing attention her organism craved but at a high price:
normal life was impossible.
Until you hear what your skin is trying to tell you, it will just repeat its
message--the voice of your deepest needs--over and over. Try to shut it up with
medications or stoic indifference and it may simply cry louder. The alternative
is to give your inner self what your skin is asking for, and when that is
impossible, to face the pain of frustrated needs squarely and work to resolve it
directly. A tall order, but the first step is one you can take right now.
That is to think about your skin problem in a new way. Peel off the medical
label you've been living with--forget you have "shingles" or "hives"
or whatever--and consider your illness as a symptom of a deeper need. Don't
let the physical nature of your symptom, visible, tangible, and painful as it is,
obscure the emotional factor that may be more important. Your shingles may have
more in common, on this level, with your neighbor's hives than with another case
of shingles.
The first step in treating the problem under your skin is relabeling it in
psychological terms. I find it most useful to ask what your troubled skin is
trying to do for you. Is it trying to satisfy the primary needs of love,
respect, and protection or to resolve problems that arose when these needs were
frustrated long ago? To start relieving your skin of its emotional burden, you
must identify and understand the tasks it is laboring to accomplish. The
following eleven tasks are the most common.
1. Your skin is crying out for love and protection
The satisfaction of basic emotional needs is so important that we're
designed with biological mechanisms to get the job done! There's something
inborn that makes us smile at a baby and want to cuddle it. The vast majority of
parents do the best they can in nurturing and protecting their children, but
human beings are imperfect, and life in the world is difficult. A mother may be
the victim of a poor upbringing that crippled her ability to give love. A major
upheaval (death in the family or abandonment, perhaps) may deny the baby
adequate love and protection. Many families are so impoverished that the
struggle for bread makes proper nurturing impossible.
A failure to satisfy these early needs leaves an emptiness within: a
voracious emptiness, in fact; an emotional black hole that absorbs all the love,
respect, and protection we get later and that cries insatiably for more.
We keep on trying to fill this emptiness with misguided attempts at self-feeding
or self-mothering. We buy ourselves new clothes when we're down; we buy "the
right kind" of car or a shampoo that TV commercials say will bring us love.
The alcoholic and the drug addict are mired in a doomed and destructive attempt
at self-feeding. They require the chemical illusions of love, protection, and
respect because they still suffer from an early deprivation of the real thing.
Joan2
When Joan B. was an infant, her father abandoned the family. Her mother,
emotionally devastated herself, simply could not provide her baby with
sufficient love and nurturing. Lacking the words to express her needs, the
infant Joan let her skin do the talking: severe infantile eczema gave
voice to her pain and loneliness.
The adult Joan, married and a mother, remained plagued by troubled skin, which
continued to cry out for the love and attention absent from her earliest years.
It cried stridently enough, at times, to require hospitalization. Being in the
hospital for Joan meant a return to childhood: she was exempted from the
demands and responsibilities of daily life and was mothered by nurses who bathed
and comforted her tormented skin. Even lesser episodes treated at home enabled
Joan to self-mother her skin with cortisone creams and special baths.
A flare-up of eczema, significantly, was particularly likely when a temporary
abandonment by her husband--a short business trip, for example--reawakened the
devastating loss inflicted by the first man in her life.
Joan worked with me long enough to see brief but quite dramatic improvement. Her
therapy came to an abrupt end, however. I went on vacation--for her, a repeat of
her father's abandonment--and she fled.
2. Your skin is raging
Anger is the reaction we often feel when our fundamental emotional needs
are not met. When couples fight, I've found that 85 percent of the time the
anger behind the discord means: "You don't love me" or "Protect
me" or "Respect me as a person."
Anger is a normal, healthy reaction, but many of us were taught to deny it.
Anger isn't nice, so if we express anger, or even feel it, then we aren't
nice. Parents often have a repertoire of subtle ways of telling their children
that they aren't acceptable when angry. Mixed messages from parent to child are
particularly confusing--and far from uncommon. At an extreme is the parent who
beats his child, giving him much to be angry about while intimidating him into
denying his anger. The child may also be so turned off by his parent's fits of
rage that he disowns any of his own similar feelings.
Instead of feeling our anger and expressing it as directly as possible (recognizing
our rage at an unfair boss without punching him in the nose), we often suppress
it or turn it inward. Suicide and fractional suicide--self-destructive behavior,
such as alcoholism, accident proneness, or relinquishing pleasures that make us
feel alive--reflect anger turned against the self. Anger is a common ingredient
of depression.
The "passive-aggressive" person means to feel no anger at all but has
developed the sophisticated ability to arouse it in others. He satisfies his
need to vent anger by provocative behavior that infuriates; not only does this
strike out more effectively than any display of temper, but it induces others to
feel his anger for him.
Unfelt, unexpressed anger is the most common psychological mechanism beneath
troubled skin. Since it is unsafe or unacceptable to feel anger toward
others, the skin is elected to take a beating--another way that anger is
directed against the self.
Alternatively, the skin becomes the voice of anger that the child within the
adult was forbidden to express. A red, angry rash tells the world
what its owner cannot: "Look how I've been brutalized." It may
represent a visual assault or an underground attempt at revenge against an
indifferent parent--a way to let the world know the truth beneath the calm
facade.
George
Twenty-two-year-old George M. came into my office with an edgy, guarded
look and a right hand covered with layers of painful red warts that had resisted
the best efforts of dermatology for months. They had appeared mysteriously, had
worsened inexorably, and seemed determined to stay.
George's early life had lacked nothing but warmth. His parents were responsible
and dutiful, but they both had to work, leaving the task of caring for him and
his four brothers and sisters to Grandma, an efficient but undemonstrative woman.
George recalled no resentment over his chilly upbringing. In fact, he felt no
resentment about anything. The last year, he admitted, had been difficult:
his neighborhood buddies had departed, one after another, for the army, for jobs
elsewhere, for marriage. He had enjoyed his job until he was arbitrarily shifted
to another part of the plant six months ago. Was he angry at the treatment? Not
at all--but it was then that the warts had appeared.
Early in therapy, it became clear that George had never quite outgrown the
common childhood fear that anger is dangerous: if he was angry at someone,
he'd hurt him. The losses of everyday life failed to elicit the anger they
deserved. Instead, anger was turned inward, where George himself would suffer
but do harm to no one else.
It was significant that as George's warts vanished and he worked through his
inability to express anger, he developed a lively interest in the sport of
boxing. When his hands could strike out legitimately, his skin no longer had the
task of expressing his rage.
3. Your skin is trying to control
A child can receive abundant love yet still suffer frustration of another
essential need: respect. From our earliest days, we must be acknowledged
as independent beings, not mere extensions of our parents. Our own selfhood must
be respected and the boundary that sets us off from the rest of the world must
be recognized.
When parents give love and attention on their own schedule, according to their
own needs, they withhold this respect. A classic example is the mother who
forces a sweater on her child when she's cold and hands the child a glass
of mile when she's thirsty. The father who arranges every detail with the
injunction that "father knows best" is doing the same thing:
refusing to respect the autonomy of his child.
Children who are constantly bulldozed by their parents will often fight back.
The stubbornly independent child who digs in her heels and automatically says no
whenever someone else says yes, who insists on doing things her way on principle,
wastes a lot of energy turning daily life into a series of battles. The
desperate quality of her stubbornness suggests a life-and-death struggle. She
fights to secure the boundaries of herself, to protect the basic integrity of
her soul.
People not given respect as children may spend their later lives turning the
tables on the world. From the fear of being controlled may come the passion to
control others. Some turn into bulldozers like their parents. Others develop a
repertoire of ways for getting others to do what they want indirectly and often
are labeled manipulative. This pejorative term is unfair because it
ignores the underlying struggle to maintain integrity as an autonomous human
being. Manipulative people are desperate victims as well as victimizers.
In the effort to control the world around them, they may employ argumentative
verbal arts and such indirect arm twisting as flirtatiousness, intimidation, or
guilt. Chronic or recurrent skin problems can easily be part of this arsenal.
Peter
Peter F., a thirty-seven-year-old laboratory technician, was allergic to
nearly everything, a fact none of his friends or family could ignore. The kids
wanted a dog? Peter was allergic to dogs. A drive into the country? He was
allergic to pollen and field grass. His wife wanted to go to a French restaurant
for their anniversary. Sorry, cooking smells made him break out in a rash.
It was irritating, but no one could get really angry. After all, it wasn't Peter's
fault. He was as agreeable as could be: "I'd love to, but my allergy"
was his inevitable response to other people's plans.
In therapy, I learned that Peter's mother had also had allergies. She was a
fragile woman who loved her son but had found it hard to cope with his
independence and kept a tight rein on his behavior. "Control or be
controlled" was the lesson Peter's early life had taught him. As his mother had
ruled his childhood, Peter tried unconsciously to control the adult world with
his allergies. As ever, it was a hollow victory. Peter was more thoroughly
controlled by his allergies than by anyone else.
In the course of therapy, Peter's skin allergies disappeared entirely. He
remains rather controlling verbally, but his sense of humor about it makes him
easier to live with.
4. Your skin is playing sexual policeman
For the infant, the satisfaction of primary needs is an immediate,
primitive urge--"I want it now!" As we get older, we learn to defer
gratification, to ask for things nicely rather than reaching out and grabbing
them. The ability to temper and postpone our urges is one thing that
distinguishes humans from lower animals.
It is possible to learn the lesson too well, however. The internal policeman
that restrains us from grabbing immediate gratification (what Freud called the "superego"
) can grow so strong that it forbids the satisfaction of perfectly legitimate
needs and desires.
Some of us are taught, by parents' examples and reactions, that needs themselves
(particularly bodily needs) are bad. The needs won't go away; no matter how
repressive our upbringing, something within us strives blindly for love, respect,
and protection, with the frequent result a stalemated conflict between inner
needs, outer realities, and the "policeman" conscience. In a common
version of this stalemate, efforts to get what's wanted and needed are paralyzed
by indecision and anxiety.
The conflict may also be played out in the body, where the skin plays policeman
to the "criminal" heart. What the skin often polices are sexual wishes.
When the heart says " I want mine now," the skin says "It's bad
to want that. You're too greedy, too sexual." Because mature sexuality is
mixed up with our feelings about ourselves, our autonomy and relations with
others, it is a prime target for conflict.
The skin is well suited to resolve such conflict. A major skin problem is an
effective turnoff, a flag that says "Count me out sexually." Broken
out or troubled skin can also be a protective barrier against the threats and
anxieties posed by dating and sexual intimacy.
Derek
A bright, dapper young lawyer, Derek K. had a profound fear of putting
his whole heart into anything--the legacy of an emotionally deprived childhood.
He maintained a dispassionate, cool posture toward his life; his relationship
with his live-in lover was best described as "slightly committed."
What brought him to my office was persistent recurrences of genital herpes.
It didn't take much detective work to discover a distinct pattern: the
illness flared up whenever he or his lover was out of town. He himself quickly
grasped that he'd been unconsciously asking the virus to help him resist the
temptation to seek other sexual involvements. Once he became ready to make these
sexual decisions on his own, his recurrences ended almost completely.
5. Your skin is trying to rewrite history
A persistent or new skin problem is often the echo of a battle that was
lost decades before, the lasting legacy of childhood with parents who, despite
their best intentions, were unable to provide the love, respect, and protection
their children required.
When a major chapter in development turns out badly--a cold, distant parent
fails to support emotional growth with nurturing love, for example--there's a
powerful drive to rewrite history, to replay the same story, this time with a
happy ending. It may sound irrational, but it actually reflects the indomitable
life force that ceaselessly strives to get what it needs--the same force that
drives blades of grass up through the pavement in search of the sun.
Oscar
This was clearly the process that trapped Oscar G., a computer programmer
in his late twenties, in an unending series of eruptions of hives. Oscar's
mother loved him warmly and well when he was a young child, but when her six-year-old
little boy started turning into an independent little man of the world, she
simply withdrew. For whatever reason, she could not be as loving to a growing
child as she had been to a toddler. It was then that Oscar had his first
outbreak.
The adult Oscar fell into a repetitive pattern: he always chose
girlfriends who were affectionate and supportive in the early days of their
relationship but who cooled off rapidly when he started to act confident and
autonomous. Then would come another hives attack. It was as if Oscar had
to reset the stage of his first defeat so the story could be reenacted--this
time, however, with no withdrawal and no frustrated need for love. Of course,
the same unhappy ending was assured by Oscar's choices: young women who
resembled his mother and behaved as she had.
Oscar's skin settled down considerably after some short-term work with me. In
longer term therapy with another therapist, he's continuing to make good
progress in his relationship difficulties.
6. Your skin is suffering for love
Nobody rescues you when you're swimming. If a child learns that the world
supplies love, protection, and support only when she's suffering, she may
unconsciously conclude that pain is the ticket to getting what she needs. A
darker version of the process takes place in the mind of an emotionally or
physically abused child: she learns that the ones who love you are the
ones who hurt you and comes to expect an inevitable link between love and pain.
The pairing of love and pain causes no end of trouble in later life:
chronic losers, the accident-prone, and those who fear success are among its
victims. The early lesson that love can be found amid pain and abuse is the
story underlying masochism.
A chronic skin problem surely causes its victims enough suffering to qualify for
anyone's support. When love and hurt are paired, the skin can take a very
serious beating.
Lorna
Lorna D. was a real puzzle to her dermatologist. The deep sores on her
chest, stomach, and legs resembled no disease he'd ever seen. She could recall
no contact with any irritant that could have produced the lesions.
A discussion of Lorna's childhood revealed scars of a different sort. Her
parents seemed to regard her healthy growth and development as an insult:
it brought out the worst of their abusive tendencies. Only when she was confused
and unhappy--or physically ill--did they come through with even minimal caring
and support.
"Pain brings help" was the lesson Lorna had learned in growing up.
During an intensely stressful period--the breakup of their marriage--she called
for help the only way she knew how: she had damaged her skin herself,
Lorna finally admitted, scarring her body with hair pins.
Lorna is still in psychotherapy, with far to go. With a strong commitment to
therapy, however, the odds of success look good.
7. Your skin is loyal
Our personalities normally evolve like a mosaic; imitating bits and
pieces of persons who have affected us, we build up an "internal library"
of styles, gestures, and attitudes to be integrated into our own selves. This is
a healthy way to form links with those we love and admire. In a tone of voice or
a phrase, our mother or father may remain alive throughout our lives.
We often remain loyal to our parents in other ways, adopting their view of us,
trying to be what we were in their eyes. This can be a positive process:
when our parents thought well of us, loyalty to that view means self-esteem and
accomplishment. However, it is as possible to remain loyal to a negative view,
to identify with the notion that we are ugly if our parents apparently saw us
that way and dressing and acting in a way to make that vision come to life. A
disfiguring skin problem can easily be enlisted in this strategy.
Similarly, the normal, healthy process of identification with parental traits
can lead to trouble. When a parent is emotionally inaccessible or has vanished,
the identification process may take on a desperate, rigid quality: the
only way to feel loved is to "become" the parent.
Children are shrewdly perceptive in identifying and identifying with what's
truly important to their parents. If Dad is a Yankee fan, developing a strong
interest in the team will be a good way to get positive attention. Similarly, if
he devotes a lot of time and energy to the care of his hives, the message is
easily conveyed that hives are the key to closeness.
Some families have picnics together while in others, treating their damaged skin
has assumed the task of keeping everyone close. Certain skin problems do have a
hereditary component--psoriasis is one. Pseudoheredity can exaggerate this
biological factor, though, turning predisposition into certainty. The "pseudo"
in pseudoheredity is evident when the illness is handed down from a figure who,
though influential, is not a biological parent. Frankel and Misch successfully
treated a man with this problem.
Frank
At thirty-seven, Frank was a lonely, isolated man. He was desperately shy,
and the severe psoriasis that had bedeviled the most recent fifteen years of his
life didn't improve his social skills or feelings about relating to others.
The disorder had developed shortly after Frank left college. He recalled that
time as particularly painful because it meant leaving the one man who had ever
been supportive and fatherly--his choirmaster. It wasn't until late in his
therapy that Frank remembered that this man, too, had had psoriasis. By
developing the disease (for which he'd no doubt had a hereditary weakness),
Frank maintained a close, comforting link with this compassionate figure. It
also spared him the risk and anxiety of socializing with others.
8. Your skin is remembering
Normally, we "remember" what happens to us simply by recording
words, images, sounds, and smells in part of the brain where they remain
accessible to the conscious mind, but when something is so traumatic or
overwhelming that it won't fit into one's worldview and sense of self, it is
simply too hot for that mechanism to handle. Driven by our need for protection
against emotional overload, we try to deny it, to sweep it under the psychic rug.
An extreme example is amnesia. When someone is assaulted by a moment too full of
horror and pain--the violent death of a friend, for example--a mental circuit
breaker may pop and all memory of the scene may disappear from the conscious
mind. We also selectively forget less traumatic experiences (including repeated
experience patterns). This happens throughout life, but it is particularly
likely with the events that occurred too early to be remembered verbally.
Still, the memory (and especially the painful emotions that belong to it) will
not go away: it implacably finds its way to the surface. Thus originates
much neurotic behavior; rather than face the emotionally distasteful memory that
his mother was a selfish, frightened woman, a man may remember the truth about
her in action, by finding a series of women who treat him in the same
fashion. Here is another attempt to rewrite painful history with a happy ending.
An unexpressed memory may be visible in postures and movements: the way
that a man breathes can encapsulate the fact that he was "smothered"
as a young child. A psychosomatic symptom may be a symbolic memorial to an event
or pattern of events too difficult emotionally to face directly.
Vic
In his book Hypnosis in Skin and Allergic Diseases, dermatologist
Michael J. Scott describes a veteran airline pilot who developed mysterious
herpes blisters on his forehead each time his flight schedule took him over a
particular canyon.
In hypnotherapy (psychotherapy conducted in a hypnotic trance), he recalled that
the canyon had a special meaning for him. There a friend and fellow pilot had
died in a crash. He himself would have made the flight had he not been kept home
by illness. The herpes outbreaks disappeared as the pilot gradually allowed
himself to experience the buried sadness and guilt he felt over his friend's
death.
9. Your skin is telling forbidden truths
Although blushing is usually associated with innocent maidenhood, it's
something many of us do from time to time. The stereotypical blush occurs when
the young lady overhears an off--color remark or a joke that she, in her
innocence, surely cannot understand. She blushes because she can understand it:
she knows more than she thinks she's supposed to, and the rush of blood to her
face gives her away.
By subtle hints and signs, many parents tell children not to be what they are
and not to feel what they feel. The need for love and respect is the enforcer--we
cover up or face the threat of emotional starvation. If the order to counterfeit
oneself becomes a way of life, we learn to hide the truth from ourselves and the
rest of the world: a feeling or thought that doesn't fit our self-image
vanishes; we refuse to let ourselves feel angrier or needier or more sexually
aroused than we're prepared to admit, just as we learned to hide our true selves
from our parents.
Once more, nothing in the realm of emotions simply dries up and blows away on
command. The truth we deny frequently rises to the surface to speak itself
through the body.
As the body's largest and most visible organ, the skin is a natural nominee for
the task of truth-telling--as is evident when we blush. A person trained to a
personal party line that "everything's fine" may present his inner
turmoil only in his ravaged face. Sometimes, as in the case of Sarah, the skin
delivers its forbidden truth in symbolic terms.
Sarah
Thirty-year-old Sarah L. suffered her first outbreak of "neurodermatitis"
shortly after the difficult birth of her first son. The child had been colicky,
crying incessantly day and night, and her husband, an accountant, made things no
better. His response was to withdraw, pretending the turmoil of his household
did not exist.
Sarah could not break through her husband's passivity or elicit the support she
needed from him, yet her commitment to being a good wife and a good mother left
her with no exit from the situation. She developed a rash on the second to the
last finger on her left hand. Gradually, the problem grew so severe that it
necessitated cutting off her wedding ring: a symbolic fulfillment of the
taboo but heartfelt wish to be out of her marriage and motherhood. Sarah only
understood the emotional logic of her dermatitis years later, when she finally
gathered the strength and awareness to end her unsatisfying marriage.
10. Your skin is trying to stop time
A patient described how her mother received the news that her first
grandchild was on the way: "How could you do this to me? You're
making me a grandmother--an old lady!" Does that graceless lament strike a
familiar chord? Time is the medium in which we realize our dreams, but it is
also in time that we suffer loss. As we grow, we grow older; we die.
The losses of time begin early. Older children lose the close nurturing they
received as young children. Adolescence brings independence and frightening
responsibility.
The fear of time's passage freezes some lives into paralysis. A major trauma may
stop the inner clock as we wait for resources to cope. We feel reluctant to
close the book on a part of life when our needs were unmet. We won't total up
the emotional ledger for an era with a haunting debit still on the books.
All parents feel twinges of regret as their cute youngsters grow up. If they
express their regret persuasively, children may unconsciously oblige them by
remaining "forever young." A child taught that he won't make it in the
tough world of real grown-ups may be immobilized by fear. He may sabotage
promotions because deep inside he feels only good enough for a routine, low-level
job. Out of exaggerated loyalty to his parents, he may unconsciously refuse to
make them old by his own adult accomplishments.
There's often a strange, paradoxical youthfulness about such people: they
seem excessively girlish or boyish, perhaps dressing the part. The skin's
participation in this rearguard holding action is most clearly visible in the
face of a man or woman who suffers from postadolescent acne, whose "teenaged"
skin shows he or she is still grappling with the conflicts of adolescence.
Stella
Warts under her fingernails drove twenty-two-year-old Stella to
distraction and forced her to quit her job as a dental hygienist. So instead of
renting her first apartment, she remained in her parents' home, working as a
clerk in a store across the street.
This was not the only rough patch in Stella's life. She seemed to have a run of
bad luck in relationships: one man after another began as attentive and
caring but soon turned abusive and humiliating.
"I have to live like I'm still in high school," Stella lamented. Not
only was it embarrassing to be still at home, life there meant stepping back
into her adolescent role as her mother's servant while constantly mediating
bickering between her mother and father.
In therapy, Stella quickly realized that her skin was actually stepping in to
satisfy both her own and her parents' wishes--stopping the clock to spare her
the trials of mature relationships and her parents the growing-old pangs of
watching their youngest child leave the nest. With this realization and hypnotic
treatment, the warts quickly vanished.
11. Your skin is telling the world you're not perfect
The gleam in a parent's eye is the raw material of the child's self-esteem-a
solid, healthy sense of his own worthiness. Some parents, however, simply can't
take that kind of pride and thus can't nurture self-esteem: their children
grow up depressed and down on themselves, unable to experience their virtues and
strengths.
Parents who overpraise a child's accomplishments may seem to encourage self-esteem,
but the result is opposite when such accomplishments are demanded to shore up
the parents' own frail egos. Insistence that she be the perfect daughter,
complete with spotless fingernails and straight-A report card, or that he be the
flawless athlete-scholar son deny the reality of the child. He and she may grow
up feeling that if they're not perfect, they're nothing--and no one is perfect.
Children unable to develop healthy self-esteem may become adults who counterfeit
what their parents failed to foster. These are the tiresome characters who
insist on telling you how important their jobs are, how smart their children are,
how fine their house and car are. The performance has a hollow ring; it's a
caricature of true self-esteem.
These people also have a need to subtly communicate that there is much more to
them than the carefully cultivated public image. Their skin may be asked to
carry the message.
Lance
At twenty-three, he was a very successful New York model. His nearly
perfect face, however, was marred by acne that perversely flared up just before
major assignments.
Lance was the youngest of a series of brothers, each of whom had been pressed by
their mother to fill the emotional gap left by their depressed, alcoholic father.
Each had failed. Lance had valiantly tried to be her champion, had excelled in
high school sports and even looked the part, but his acne repeatedly surfaced,
the weakest link under his heavy emotional burden. While his mother encouraged
his success, she also constantly expressed an unspoken reproach: "How
can you be so happy, young, and successful when your poor divorced mother is so
miserable?" Lance's acne cried out a disclaimer: "I'm not
perfect either. I hurt."
I saw Lance only briefly as he passed through Boston en route to assignments in
Europe. His postcard, several months later, reported good results with the
techniques I taught him.
We're all mixed bags of complicated emotional needs, and the skin problem that
can be reduced to a single pattern or task is as fictional as the person whose
character consists of a single trait. A real rash endured by a real person may
involve several of these patterns. In thinking about your own symptom, it's
natural to pick out the one or two tasks that seem most relevant, but don't
dismiss any as having nothing at all to teach.
Just as these patterns never involve growing or feeling in isolation, most skin
disorders are best understood as relationship problems rather than as the
illness of one man or one woman. Infantile eczema, for example, typically
signifies trouble between a baby and its mother; in adulthood, a spouse may come
to play the mother's role. Your skin disease means trouble at the border between
yourself and others: resolving the underlying tasks will require changes
in how you interact with them. First, however, you must learn to see yourself as
you really are: under your skin.
Return to Book page |
