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Welcome to the Skin Deep blog. Our turf will be using psychological techniques to help with a wide range of medical conditions that have not responded to conventional medical approaches.
In my practice, I work most often with medical and behavioral problems of skin and hair, but the same techniques can be dramatically helpful with a wide range of problems including gastro-intestinal, gynecologic, cardiac, and others. I'll be sharing my experience of some problems that are very common like skin picking, eczema, and psoriasis, and others that are more obscure.
I encourage you to write in with questions.
The one thing I say to my patients is: "If you feel it in your heart, you won't have to feel it in your skin (or stomach, or back)."
I use many techniques like relaxation, meditation, imaging, hypnosis, self-hypnosis, and targeted psychotherapy. But the perspective in the following essay is fundamental.
Depression, anxiety, and feelings of isolation are epidemic. One minute we are driven by boredom into a restless search for "the action" but in the next minute, when we find it, the stress triggers a headache or a rash.
Feelings are not the problem, though. They may be uncomfortable -- even painful -- but they are never pathological. The problem is all the things we do to protect ourselves from painful feelings. We exhaust ourselves running around so the sadness won't catch us or we try to dissolve our sense of powerlessness in alcohol or pills. We frantically search for the right car or dress that will distract us from never having felt fully loved or cared for.
Boredom and restlessness are not feelings at all but the smudge left behind when painful feelings are erased: push anger away and what's left is the empty sensation that nothing's happening -- or that nobody is there. As for the stress that causes, triggers, or heightens medical problems: this too is not a matter of simple aggravation, sadness, or frustration but the anger, sadness, or frustration you're trying desperately not to feel.
You know the Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy: they can be neither created nor destroyed, only shifted from form to form. Emotion -- a kind of psychic energy -- obeys the same law. Shut anger or sadness or frustration out the door and it comes in through the window or, often enough, through the body. Your heart "attacks." Your asthma "gasps." Your eczema "weeps."
By the Law of Conservation of Emotional Energy, you cannot erase the fact that a key person in your life didn't love you (or only loved who they thought you were; or the reflection of themselves they saw in your eyes; or a "you" that agreed not to love someone else).
All you can do is con yourself: keep on struggling to do what it seemed would get them to love you; or attempt to rewrite history: find a person or dilemma just like the one that hurt you way back when and convince yourself that this time the story will have a happy ending. When it doesn't, try again. And again. And again.
Try as you might to come up with new plays that will win the game, the season is long over and nothing is going to change the score. Switch jobs. Move to California. Retire. Get married. Get divorced. Get a horse. You still won't be recloned as your ideal self. Your past is nonnegotiable.
My advice: Give up. There is no place to go and there's nothing to do that will change things on that level. Pessimistic? Think of it as liberating. Now you can just do things because you enjoy them or because they catch your fancy. Now you can be nice to someone just to be nice to someone -- not to get rid of the ache that lies buried inaccessibly like the phantom pain in a limb that was amputated long ago.
Give up the fight; accept and feel the feelings. Get off the merry-go-round that is taking you nowhere. One day -- through psychotherapy, perhaps, or through a particularly sobering personal experience -- it gets through that the universe will not be declared a misdeal, so you begin to play the hand you've been dealt. The painful slowness of life speeds up or its frantic, exhausting pace slows down. You become more present and more playful. Relationships go more smoothly. Work is more rewarding. Externally, your life is identical - but incredibly much richer.
When you start to make sense of the past, you stop repeating it; when you stop pretending your wounds aren't there, they start to heal. When you stop repeating battles that have been history for decades, then you're left with ... what? Real life; no more, no less. Maybe it's not the four-scoop, three-topping whipped cream special with the cherry on top, but there will be some magically tasty moments.
For more information see my site and my book Skin Deep: A Mind/Body Program for Healthy Skin. You can download the free e-book edition there.
