The remark I hear most often from our graduates is this: I have become comfortable in my own skin. The paradox of this remark from a Gestalt perspective is that only by allowing myself to be uncomfortable in my skin am I truly living life.
After years of training I still experience feelings that I want to avoid, distract myself from, reframe. When I was growing up the expression “thin skinned” meant easy to react, hyper-sensitive. To be thick-skinned meant one could take any kind of abuse or insult. How early did you and I learn to numb our skin? Or cut our skin? Or scratch away a feeling? A friend of mine uses the expression skin-hunger to describe his felt need to be touched. Masochistic types like me wanted a stronger touch because we do not easily feel. When I began my therapy so many years ago a classmate placed their hand softly on my cheek, and I felt I had been burned. Over the year, in an agreement with this classmate we spent a minute at a time (building to two minutes) with their hand placed on my cheek until I could tolerate and later grieve and finally open to receive the simplicity of their touch which felt nourishing, life giving to my skin. The skin of his hand recognized the shifts and knew that moment in which he received reciprocal nourishment. Such is the skin’s power.
Our skin, the largest sense organ in our body, can be made to be a shield from the world or can be a resonance to the song of our planet, an energy reader of the intentions of the other, a meeting place of I and Thou, a measure of our limits of pleasure and pain. To revivify our skin is to reborn into the senses we had as a child with the possibility of new meaning, new interpretation, new pathways for our brain. Studies in child parent relationships reveal that the signals between our infant body and the world are understood through our parent’s responses to them. Neglect — the absence of a responding mirror — translates to no skin, no me. The answer to “who am I” doesn’t lie in our developed personality over time but in our unique experience of ourselves and the world through our own skin.
Skin doesn’t lie. Under our cosmetic smoothings and our stretchings and tuckings, the story of our life is imprinted in our skin. I will never forget the experience I had in the change room of the “Y” years ago when to undress in front of others filled me with fear of judgment. The woman beside me removed her bathing suit revealing her double mastectomy. In the instant I knew something quite different from my focus on the stereotypical standards of my own body – I saw the power of the human skin to survive and overcome incredible struggle, life and near death. In some societies one creates a tattoo on the skin to signify overcoming a great challenge. It was as if I was privileged to see to her living tattoo. Since then I have seen my own sags and wrinkles as such a tattoo. The record of a life lived.
In the early days of training students look for feelings “inside” themselves. The question how do you feel or where do you feel that is a difficult one to answer and many students and clients struggle with a lack of language. But the language of the skin is always relational – always has a “we” – whether it is the feeling of the wind or the floor under my feet or a cry of animal, bird or human, the otherness of life shivers across our skin and is a measure of who we are in this place, in this time, with these people. Our skin is the doorway into the here and now, irrevocably what is, and in every moment utterly new.