So I don’t know about you, but I loved Celine’s article from last week!
She probably hit on every single emotion that you’ve felt about yourself and your acne on this journey.
Let’s recap. In Celine’s words, she:
- Felt that my body was failing me;
- Felt frustrated that I still wasn’t clear, even after all the work (and the money) I had already put in;
- Worried about going to the shop without makeup;
- Was terrified of going out of the house at all;
- Felt stuck in my own head;
- Hated all mirrors, all windows, all cameras, and generally speaking, all things where I could see my reflection on.
- Felt guilty that I had let my skin get so bad;
- Worried that I was spending way too much money on makeup, supplements, and acne healing programs;
- Stressed about post-acne breakouts;
- Felt constantly afraid of new breakouts, especially in the morning;
- Worried about my skin, that it wouldn’t heal before my boyfriend came to visit, before the holidays, before my wedding day… That in fact, it would never, ever heal.
Your Emotions Play a Big Role in Breakouts
So, you might be on this journey, and like Celine, you’ve heard that emotional stuff and stress is probably a big factor in your breakouts.
Ugh but whatever… you get it… but “healing your emotional world” that just feels confusing and impossible … like pushing a boulder up a mountain.
And like… what does “healing your emotional world” even MEAN, anyway?
So you keep waiting, wishing, hoping, for that miracle product, or food, or supplement or whatever else. Something you feel like you can actually control.
But now you know emotions are a part of healing your skin, yet you can’t seem to control them, so now you beat yourself up for feeling shitty or not being able to stop feeling bad.
You’re Not Weird or Broken
Well first of all… you’re normal.
Almost everyone who has acne feels bad about it. We all feel embarrassed and ashamed. Even if it’s mild.
And guess what… trying to stop or avoid your feelings is the exact opposite of what we want to do in order to heal emotionally.
Yet it’s the one thing that every body does!
In fact, what we want to do is….
We want to feel them!! More feelings!
(now hear me out before you run away screaming)
Change Your Thoughts, Feel Your Feelings
Look.. here’s the straight dope…
Thoughts and beliefs can be changed… often we think and believe a lot of things that aren’t necessarily true, and lead to us having the emotions in the first place.
We can practice catching those detrimental thoughts, interrupting them, and replacing them with something more supportive… then we can often circumvent the negative emotions from generating in the first place.
So we can work with our thoughts to change those, but if we’ve already blown past that and it’s too late….
Well,when we try to actually stop the FEELINGS when they arise, wherever they arose from, that’s when things get messy.
It takes an ENORMOUS amount of energy to repress and push away those feelings.
Think about how friggin insanely hard it is to stop from crying when you just want to break down in tears.
Yet if we don’t let em flow, the feelings don’t ever really go away… they just get pushed down deeper, and then your struggling body cries out through your skin.
But I Feel Lots of Terrible Things…
You might be saying right now….. well no. I feel lots of emotions. I feel SO many bad emotions. I have never once succeeded in stopping them, so why aren’t I cured?
And I would say to that…. no. You aren’t REALLY feeling your emotions.
Yes you are “feeling” them in your head. You are stuck in feeling the story of the emotions in your head over and over again.
You’re trying to either get rid of them or distract yourself…. by, pick your poison:
- Worrying
- Ruminating
- Analyzing
- Judging (self or others)
- Searching/Researching
- Looking for advice/the magic answer
- Buying stuff (usually a new skin care product or supplement)
- Planning (to cancel all your plans)
- Being really busy
- Controlling
- Picking
- Numbing out
- Blaming
- Thinking about the future
- Thinking about the past
- Victimizing
- Endlessly talking it out, over and over
It never really works. Temporary relief maybe, but just more problems in the long run because they are not really getting processed.
So What Do I Actually Do!?
Well for one, understand that there is a part of your brain that is just constantly trying to make you anxious about everything… what we call “the critter brain”.
It’s scanning your environment looking for potentially “dangerous” things to make you worried about in order to keep you safe.
When it identifies a ‘threat’, it gives you anxiety to make you fight, flight or flee.
It hates change, and it doesn’t care if you’re happy, it only cares if you’re alive.
So if you constantly fear your own emotions and refuse to feel them (maybe because we’ve picked up the message along the way that it’s not safe to feel them)…
Then this part of your brain will learn that it’s doing a good job….. emotions must be dangerous… so let’s keep making you afraid of them.
Yes. That’s right. “Let’s make you fight or flee them at all costs”, it says.
Now you’re just a big bundle of emotions, fear, and self loathing because you couldn’t successfully make the pain go away, and you feel like there’s no way out.
This is how everything spirals out into this big emotional mess.
So… Wait…. What Do I Do Then?
So again.. what do you actually do when you start to feel the dreaded “emotion”?
You just feel it.
But not in your head.
In your body.
What are the actual physical sensations of this emotion?
Does it feel like a lump in your throat?
A tightness in the chest?
A brick in the belly?
Focus on the physical, not the mental.
Name it. Feel it. Let it be there. Breathe into it. Allow it to flow through you.
Counter intuitively, you may actually invite the feeling to get stronger, which is my favourite trick.
(That essentially shows your brain you aren’t afraid of it, and you’ll find the emotion tends to actually decrease in response!)
Observe it all with curiosity, not judgment.
The more you get in the habit of focusing on the physical sensations (ie. getting out of your head and into your body) as the emotions come up, the healthier your emotional world will become.
You will actually process them and allow them to move through you, rather than get stuck in you, or end up coming out through destructive behaviours.
You might feel more emotional at first when you start doing this…
But as you process all that stuck emotional junk whenever it surfaces, eventually you’ll feel lighter, brighter, energized… and very likely clearer.
Tracy Raftl is just some guy who used to have acne and a barrel full of bad feelings about it, and now she writes things for this website. Also, she created the Naturally Clear Skin Academy.
Check out the About page to learn more about her!
12 Responses
Hi Tracy!
Very well explained! I have read many articles and books in this topic and even done quite expensive workshops, but in this article you explain this “emotional work” simply but very profoundly, I think this might be the best article I´ve ever read about this matter! 🙂
Indeed I´ve spent so much time “analyzing” and “endlessly talking” etc., thinking that it means “taking responsibility” but that does not really solve anything!
Hi Elina!
Thanks, I’m really glad you found this useful, because I agree that the whole emotional healing thing is friggin confusing. Especially to someone who loves to spend time turning things over and over and over in my head. I can talk for HOURS about my problems! hahah… (reason I have a blog), yet I will do anything to avoid having to actually sit and feel them. Big lightbulb moment when I finally found out this was the secret to the whole thing.
I especially love the “invite the feelings to get worse” trick… it just works so well, because it is the most effective thing to move you out of resisting the feeling (and into the space where you are signalling to the critter brain that it’s not dangerous, so it can just go away). What you resist persists, what you face dissipates!!! It’s so frickin true! I was having panic attacks for more than a year and that trick effectively stopped them in their tracks and I haven’t had one since.
Hi Tracy!
I have followed your blog and advice about two years. My skin has improved greatly! Something as simple as stop picking and no talc-based make up makes a visible difference within a just couple of days!
Healthy lifestyle leads to healthier skin, of course 🙂 But I have always wondered, how some girls smoke, drink, eat junk food and still have always amazing flawless skin! (At least now in their 20’s…)
I’ve become very interested in emotional (energy) healing, and work with a professional healer, I don’t “dare” to deal with all the deep stuff on my own. I started to do this, not so much because of my skin issues, but because I started to notice, I seem to have some unconscious repeat, always having very troubled and disappointing relationships.
Just yesterday I had an enormous aha-moment! This slogan on your website:
“Is acne making you feel unattractive, unloveable and ashamed to shine your true light?”
…which is something I have seen/read a hundred of times already and without not really paying attention to the words…suddenly I felt almost like an electric shock and I realised: Because I feel ashamed of myself and I feel unloveable, IS making me to have acne!!!!
This was such a powerful realization! This “I’m unloveable” -belief, which is traumatic/ancient belief about myself, was also creating all these bad relationships, because other people always mirror back to us what we feel inside. Isn’t that amazing!
I have had skin issues like 20 years. Of course all the external skin care and supplements etc. are very good, but I always felt there was also some emotional issue driving my skin issues. It’s awesome, when “stuff” suddenly comes to surface! (=to the conscious mind) Thank you, and happy new year! 🙂
The mind body connection is insane — it’s crazy what our minds can do and create physically. But it’s a really tough thing to face and an even tougher thing to get people to believe that it’s just as important, if not much more so, than diet or supplements or whatever else. But our internally generated stress.. the repressed emotions, the self criticism, the lack of support for ourselves… that is intense stress that affects the HPA axis, which affects the sex hormones, it affects the digestion, it affects inflammation, it affects the skin itself through neuropeptides. It’s real!
Well I’m glad you are finding your way along this confusing path Elina. Sounds like you’ve had some pretty insightful insights .. keep going!! Happy releasing!
Insane, indeed! 🙂 I had never known these kind of issues create stress in the body too, and a lot of it! I always thought stress is (only) something concrete, like “I must pass the exam”, “I’m in hurry”, “I can’t arrive late” etc.
All these years I’ve been complaining about my skin, obsessing about it, taking care of it, trying to heal it…and then this healer said: The problem is not in your skin, at all! And what the dermatologists and doctors do? They listen emphatically…and then just prescribe some antibiotics. This continues to upset me 🙁 Antibiotics are good and can save the life in some cases…but they have no power to heal emotions and the past! 😀
Hi Tracy,
I actually deal with both acne and recurrent yeast issues (sorry if tmi). I’ve had a lot of people recommend the candida diet, but they make it seem like if you don’t stick to it that your body’s immunity will fail if you slip up :/ Or that a little sugar will let the yeast completely take over. I’m just wondering how long you’re supposed to follow it, because I know other things can cause YIs other than sugar (synthetic fabrics, bc pills, allergic reactions, etc.) I’m also very thin and would hate to lose a ton of weight on this, and I wonder how the yeast won’t come back if you later reintroduce some carbs/sugar?
On the note of bc pills, I’ve also been told on forums to use non-hormonal bc to prevent issues, but docs won’t consider me for the copper IUD 🙁 they say that I’m too small and haven’t had children. If bc is really causing me infections, does that mean I just have to live with it? Do all hormonal forms cause this?
Sorry for the unrelated topics, but acne and health can be confusing. Thanks!
Hi Amy,
What does your doctor mean when he/she says you’re too small and haven’t had children yet? Does he mean your cervix is too small for insertion? Whatever it is, it’s ridiculous. Women that have not had children are able to have a copper IUD inserted. Please refer to Lara Briden’s post on her blog (a Naturopathic doctor specializing in women’s health), in particular this line:
“It is now officially deemed suitable for women of any age, including women who have not yet had children, and teenagers.” Perhaps your doctor is out of date with their knowledge (completely possible):
http://www.larabriden.com/pros-cons-copper-iud-natural-health-perspective/
Okay, thanks Tracy! 🙂
Agreed with what Meagan said about the IUD.. I am a very tiny person and haven’t had children and I’ve had one for years, it’s an outdated idea that you can’t. Some doctors just haven’t caught up.
As for the yeast thing — I can’t say for sure one way or another and I’m sure that everyone body’s are different… but in my experience you don’t have to stay on a candida diet forever. The candida diet is temporary, you do the diet, kill the yeast, and make sure you are replacing it with lots of probiotics, and then your gut is more balanced and able to handle more especially if you keep up with probiotics. Of course if long term you go back to eating a shit ton of sugar, yeah eventually things may imbalance again. But the benefits hold over for quite a while.
If there’s one thing I know — everyone on the internet makes things seem like you have to be perfect, follow all rules exactly, and that every malady you have is drastic, fatal, and permanent. People are melodramatic.
Hi Tracy!
I wanted to ask what does it mean that the Academy is closing soon? No possibility to use it anymore at all?
Hi L! If you’re already in it, you will still have access to it, but it will not be for sale anymore!
hi Ms. Tracy….do you have any idea….how wrinkles to be dissappeaar????? thanks 🙂