Rodger Douglas
Doctor of Medical Heilkunst
Ted Grossbart
The Emotional Life of the Skin
What if our skin has an emotional life of its own?
This intriguing question lies at the heart of Skin Deep, a book by clinical psychologist Dr. Ted Grossbart. Grossbart spent years exploring the relationship between psychological experiences and chronic skin conditions, including psoriasis, acne, eczema, and rosacea.
Our skin is much more than a protective covering. It is intimately connected to our nervous system and responds continuously to our emotional lives. We blush with embarrassment, perspire with anxiety, and grow pale with fear. Grossbart believed that these everyday reactions offered a fascinating starting point for understanding the relationship between emotional distress and persistent skin problems.
"Your skin, in fact, leads an emotional life of its own."
When Feelings Remain Unexpressed
One of Grossbart's central ideas is that difficult emotions are not necessarily the problem. Rather, our attempts to avoid or suppress them may create additional psychological and physical tension.
Anger, sadness, fear, disappointment, and the longing for affection are natural human experiences. Yet we often learn to conceal these feelings, sometimes so successfully that we are barely aware of them ourselves.
Grossbart suggested that unresolved emotional conflicts may sometimes contribute to the onset, persistence, or aggravation of skin symptoms. He was particularly interested in the ways our personal histories, relationships, and habitual emotional responses might influence our experience of illness.
His advice was surprisingly simple:
"Give up the fight; accept and feel the feelings."
For Grossbart, this was not an invitation to surrender to illness, but to stop fighting emotional realities that cannot be changed. By acknowledging painful experiences rather than continually resisting them, we may become less burdened by old conflicts and more fully engaged in the present.
The Skin and Our Sense of Self
Grossbart also recognized that the relationship between skin and emotions works in both directions.
Chronic skin conditions can profoundly affect confidence, relationships, and emotional well-being. A person living with psoriasis may feel uncomfortable exposing their skin. Someone with acne may become self-conscious about their appearance, while rosacea can make ordinary social encounters feel particularly exposing.
These experiences can create a difficult cycle in which skin symptoms increase emotional distress, and stress may, in turn, aggravate certain symptoms.
Grossbart emphasized the importance of understanding these experiences without adding guilt or self-criticism.
Looking Beneath the Surface
In Skin Deep, Grossbart introduced practical techniques involving relaxation, guided imagery, emotional awareness, and psychological exploration. His aim was to help people recognize patterns in their emotional lives, manage distressing symptoms, and cope more effectively with chronic skin problems.
His psychological interpretations remain interesting avenues for personal reflection, although they should not be mistaken for established explanations of the causes of particular skin diseases. Psoriasis, acne, and rosacea are physical conditions with complex biological mechanisms, and emotional exploration is best understood as a complement to appropriate medical care.
Perhaps Grossbart's most enduring contribution is his invitation to become curious about ourselves.
"When you start to make sense of the past, you stop repeating it."
Rather than seeing the skin in isolation, he encouraged us to consider the whole person: their experiences, relationships, fears, frustrations, and emotional needs.
Sometimes understanding our relationship with our skin begins with understanding our relationship with ourselves.
Mindful Awareness
To truly heal, you need to understand why you became unwell in the first place. In many cases, the root cause of an illness can be traced back to the mind or emotions. Perhaps you are too nice of a person and let people walk all over you? Maybe you belief you are not worthy of being loved? Or could it be some old forgotten trauma from childhood that is keeping you ill?
Healthy skin has a developmental cycle of around 28 days. Normally a young keratinocyte gradually changes and matures as it moves through the different layers of the epidermis.
In psoriasis this cycle is dramatically accelerated to just 4 or 5 days, so the maturation process is incomplete. The cells reach the surface before they are fully ready. The result is the thickened skin and characteristic silvery-white scale we associate with psoriasis.
The accelerated skin cycle presents an interesting mind/body question. If the cells are being hurried through their development before they have had time to mature, could there sometimes be some kind of underlying rushed or hurried mindset?
The American psychologist Ted A. Grossbart, PhD, author of Skin Deep: A Mind/Body Program for Healthy Skin thinks there might be.
“Fast, Fast, Fast”
Professor Grossbart noticed that people with psoriasis who seemed to live at an extraordinary pace. His memorable description is “Fast, fast, fast.” They were often capable, intelligent and energetic people, but Grossbart felt that some were living not simply in high gear but in something closer to overdrive. They were continually working, achieving, organising, travelling or remaining busy. Although their individual histories were very different, there seemed to be a common difficulty with slowing down.
Grossbart then makes the fascinating connection with the skin itself. Psoriatic cells are also moving too quickly. They arrive at the surface without having had enough time to complete normal maturation, while the rapid production of new cells contributes to the continual accumulation and shedding of scale. Grossbart wondered whether the skin could, in some patients, be doing something remarkably similar to what the person was doing psychologically.
What Happens When We Slow Down?
Grossbart's deeper question was not simply whether a person should become less busy. He wanted to know why the person needed to keep moving. Sometimes constant activity protects us from something uncomfortable that becomes more noticeable when life becomes quiet. It may be anxiety, uncertainty, vulnerability, anger, grief or a need to remain in control.
