3
Why Me?
The Skin Has Its Reasons
"Why me?" Probably everyone who's ever suffered a maddening itch or
plague of warts has asked that question. It can be far more than a cry against
fate. Beneath it lies "Who am I?" a riddle that will lead you to a
fuller understanding of your skin problem and ultimately to relief. It was
Hippocrates, the father of medicine, who said, "It is more important to
know who has a disease than what disease he has."
You already know who you are? Not likely. Few of us have a grasp of our identity
on all its buried levels. The search for self-knowledge is a lifetime task that
goes beyond psychotherapy: it wasn't Freud but an ancient Greek
philosopher who commanded, "Know thyself."
Will self-knowledge heal your skin? It's not that simple, but the better you
know yourself, the more able you'll be to confront your emotional needs with
your head and heart, freeing your skin to carry on its normal physiological
duties, and the better you'll cope with the psychological burden of problem skin.
This kind of self-knowledge, discovering what emotional task your skin is trying
to do is a special challenge. The same fear and pain that kept you from facing
your emotional needs in the first place keep your naked need for love, respect,
and protection deeply buried. Don't expect your inner self to yield up its
secrets without a struggle.
You've seen a minor league version of this struggle if you've ever hunted in
vain for the vacuum cleaner on a day when you didn't really want to clean. Your
heart wasn't entirely in the search: you were the hider and the seeker
simultaneously. A similar process may keep a word on the tip of your tongue but
tantalizingly out of your conscious grasp. There's something within you that
doesn't want the word to be found.
Similarly, when you look within to discover your deepest needs and feelings, you
will find the truth in spite of that part of you with a stake in keeping that
vulnerable side hidden. I recall one patient who grew up with the "I'm-tough-and-I-don't-need-anything-from-anyone"
world view. He had suppressed his need for love until psoriasis, which required
tender care, voiced it for him. Before he could change his life to satisfy these
needs directly, he had to accept them, and this meant wrestling down the
stalwart (but actually terrified) guardian of a macho self-image.
When you start living with the question "Who am I?" you might expect
your pursuit of the answer to be double-crossed by ambivalence as the inner
hider evades your inner seeker. At the outset, commit yourself to pushing toward
the deeper truths about yourself, no matter how uncomfortable it gets. Remind
yourself relentlessly how much you can gain by finding what you have hidden.
Once you get started, you'll probably find the pursuit of self-knowledge less a
trial than an adventure. Many people who begin psychotherapy (a guided,
intensive quest to know themselves) worry about opening a Pandora's box of
dreadful revelations. In my experience, however, no one ever wants to go back to
the status quo once he or she has turned the corner with major discoveries and
the changes they bring. It's not a question of finding out some awful truth
about yourself but of realizing new dimensions of your personality. This is the
essence of growth, the great adventure of explanations in inner space.
Learning to know your inner self and its links with your troubled skin is partly
a logical process, like solving a murder mystery, but more a creative exercise,
like what an artist does in combining the right colors and shapes to evoke the
majesty of a mountain. While logical intelligence proceeds in a straightforward
2+2=4 manner, creative thinking leaps by association, connecting things that
have no apparent link; thus, it is best equipped to grapple with the hidden
parts of your personality that you have tried to bury under the logical facade
of adult life.
There is no road map to self-knowledge; your path must be your own discovery.
The only rule I know that applies nearly universally is this: be alert for
surprises. Be ready to learn things about yourself that you always believed
untrue?things, perhaps, that contradict a family or personal party line. Were
you always the mild-mannered sister, the one kid who never lost her temper? Do
you still think of yourself as a person without an angry bone in her body? Don't
turn away if your self-searching finds a deep reservoir of anger. Many people
are mild-mannered because they harbor anger that they fear is destructive and
dangerous.
Where will you find clues to your inner self? If your eyes are truly open, you'll
find them everywhere. Personality is like biology. Just as each cell of your
body contains a full set of genes?the inherited code that determines what,
biologically, you are?every experience, every introspection, and every
interaction with others bear the unique stamp of your personality.
You may find it useful to keep a notebook. I once asked a novelist friend how he
invented his characters. For months before he sat down to the actual writing of
a novel, he told me, he'd note down random events in the lives of his characters
as they occurred to him. He sketched details of their appearance, imagined
quirks of their conversation. Eventually, from these scattered mental
brushstrokes would emerge full-fledged (but fictional) human beings. You may
discover your inner self the same way. Don't worry about filling pages with
grammatical prose. Just jot down whatever you want to hold onto: the same
forces that buried your feelings of fear or anger once will work double-time to
make you forget them again.
EXERCISES IN SELF-KNOWLEDGE
I can't give you a magic flashlight to find your hidden self because there
isn't any, but I will share some exercises my patients have found exceptionally
useful in illuminating those dark corners of the self most often linked to skin
problems. To begin with, here is a toolbox of techniques to help you glimpse
your inner self through the mask of your everyday life.
What Do You See in Childhood Photographs?
Study these windows on your early world for insight into family politics
and key relationships. Who stands with whom? Who's looking at mother, or away
from father? Are you staring into the camera or gazing away? What moods are
reflected in your family's faces, in your own face? Are you happy? Is there a
surprising hint of anger or sadness?
Particularly valuable are family photographs taken just before or after your
skin problem started. What's going on here? Remember, we're not engaged in
logical analysis. Don't dismiss a mysterious hunch about the picture. It may be
part of the hidden truth.
One of my patients, whose genital herpes recurred constantly and painfully, used
to talk evasively about sexual identity issues,his doubts about himself as a man.
When he brought in a family picture, taken when he was five years old, the issue
suddenly became very concrete. There were his three older brothers?brawny kids
who looked like junior linebackers. My patient was dressed like a darling little
girl, complete with long ringlets. It seemed his herpes recurrences served a
necessary psychological function focusing attention on his penis and providing
reassurance it was still there. His parents, apparently, had unashamedly wished
it were not.
How Do You Dress?
Your second skin may play out the same scenario as your real skin. Become
aware of how you dress. Is the style strikingly older or younger than you really
are? Are you more or less formal than your peers? Some people dress to
camouflage their sexuality, others to flaunt it. A natty dresser may put high
emphasis on his packaging to compensate for doubts about the interior. Others
dress so shabbily as if to say: "I'm nothing. Don't take me seriously."
Choice of colors is more than simply a matter of style. A woman may dress in "basic
black" and other somber shades because her heart is always at a funeral:
a clue to depression so obvious that it's easily overlooked. Bright, cheerful
colors may reflect an authentically sunny outlook or an attempt to mask hollow
feelings of need. Paradoxically, one can dress in orange for the same reason
another dresses in black. Do you feel the way you dress?
Some people are constantly "in costume." Let your mind associate
freely: are you dressed like a doll, like Cinderella, like Dumbo? Do you
look like a bar mitzvah boy, the high school floozy, or a sixties leftover?
A patient once described to me her discomfort at being a woman as she sat in my
office dressed in combat books, baggy pants, and a work shirt. "My
camouflage," she said. Discussion brought memories of her fear at her
father's interest in her burgeoning sexuality and her need to hide it from him
and from other men. Her long-standing rash (which she abetted by lax skin care)
was part of the camouflage, she came to understand.
What Does Your Body Say About You?
In the circles of a tree trunk, you can read not only the age of the
tree but its history. Good years and lean years leave their mark in fat rings
versus pinched, dry rings; similarly, what we live through leaves its mark on
our bodies, on how we stand up to the world and move through it.
Postures, stances, and movement styles express our relationship with others. You've
seen people who walk down any street or enter a room as if going through a
sniper zone, hugging some imaginary wall, trying to be as close to invisible as
possible. The caricature of the dry intellectual, body eclipsed by the head, has
some counterpart in reality. The development of arms, legs, and upper and lower
body reflects heredity but also the physical and emotional habits of years. Your
whole body, not just your skin, tells your story.
Stand in front of a mirror unclothed and look at yourself sensitively. Ignore
your skin but focus on your proportions, your shape, your posture. Do you
breathe fully or tentatively? Do you look frail, brittle, mechanical, angular?
Are you well grounded, solid on your feet, or a bit wobbly? Do you stand as if
the weight of the world were on your shoulders?
It's often far easier to see the inner man or woman within the body of another
person. Practice these observational skills on strangers in the street; look
inquisitively at friends and family. Do you see echoes of their personalities in
bodily shape, stance, and motion? Do they remind you of anything in yourself?
What Tones of Voice Do You Use?
Become aware of how you sound in conversation. Do you always speak with
the same voice? Most of us lapse into different intonations and vocabularies to
fit the occasion. This can reveal our identifications, the aspects of other
people we've swallowed whole. When we listen objectively and sensitively, we
often hear more personality clues in the "tune" than in the words
themselves.
Susan D., for example, was a ship captain's daughter, a successful executive who
had trouble forming relationships with men. I noticed in therapy that she'd
occasionally shift into a brusque, authoritarian voice that said "Don't
mess with me" , a captain's voice. This worked wonders in the boardroom but
apparently it frightened her male friends. She'd shift into her father's voice,
she ultimately realized, in anxious, intimate situations: a clue that her
identification with her father left little room for other men.
On appropriate occasions, your voice may awaken echoes of early life, suggesting
tasks you haven't yet resolved. Another patient, Laura B., realized that when
she asked her husband for favors, she automatically lapsed into a meek little-girl
voice. This realization in turn aroused childhood memories of standing outside
her busy father's study, wondering if she dared disturb him. From this came a
clue to the insecurity behind a tense, miserable marriage and hives that wouldn't
go away.
Psychologists have long recognized special times when the unconscious self
speaks with particular clarity. If you open your mind to its language, you can
learn much.
What Do You Dream About?
Have you left the understanding of your dreams solely to soothsayers and
psychoanalysts? While experts are particularly able to grasp their depths and
subtleties, dreams can reveal the emotional life beneath the surface to anyone
willing to tune in to them. Become aware of your dreams and take them seriously.
You are the sole scriptwriter, producer, and director of your dreams, so you can
begin by accepting responsibility for them. Why do you have your dreams? Freud
suggested that dreams reflect wishes, usually in disguised form. If something
horrible, frightening, or shameful happens in your dream, don't dismiss it out
of hand but ask yourself (it takes courage): "In what sense does this
dream belong to me?" This can spark fertile insights into the paradoxical,
unacknowledged wishes and fears behind your skin problem.
George M., the young man in chapter 2 who was plagued by warts and an inability
to express anger, made good strides in releasing his buried emotions to the
point where he rallied himself to begin training for a career he really wanted:
driving long-haul trucks. Then one night, he dreamed he was driving a big truck
and had an accident in which several people were killed. This clarified to him
the danger of his anger, as he'd always imagined it, and helped him understand
how he'd immobilized himself to protect others from it.
Everyone dreams; if you think you never do, it's because you resist the self-knowledge
in your dreams. Dreams are freshest and clearest right after you have them, so
keep a notebook and pen or tape recorder at your bedside to jot them down
immediately on awakening.
What Are Your Daydreams and Fleeting Fantasies?
More accessible than dreams, these often express the same unacknowledged
wishes. Daydreams may attempt to solve the same tasks you're giving to your skin,
but free from real-life logical constraints. Frequently recurring fantasies and
images have special importance.
Often the wish behind the daydream is clear enough: we fantasize about
wealth, success with the opposite sex, fame, and achievement. Not as obviously,
frequent daydreams on such subjects suggest a feeling that you lack something in
those particular departments. People who feel secure in their financial lives
may not object to winning the lottery but they rarely daydream about it.
Unpleasant fantasies of being chased, attacked, or humiliated are paradoxical.
What kind of wishes are these? They may represent an attempt to master a
particular fear, the same way you go over a near accident for days afterward in
an attempt to come to terms with the experience.
You must take the idea of "wishing" , in both dreams and daydreams,
broadly. A young man who often fantasized about being chased and shot at,
escaping just in time, expressed a wish to escape, not to be threatened.
It was an attempt to rewrite history: a childhood in which his father
constantly took verbal potshots at him and otherwise belittled him. His
fantasies also satisfied the wish to be loyal to a family party line that had
cast him as a target. Tuning into the trauma that he repeated endlessly, he took
a step toward challenging it.
What Causes Your Flashes of Thought and Flashes of Feeling?
Have you ever walked down the street and felt an unaccountable twinge of
sadness or surge of joy? Like daydreams, isolated thoughts and feelings seem to
arise out of nowhere but in fact come straight from your inner self; respect the
fact that they have roots and you may come to understand them.
One summer day when I was hiking, I stepped around a rock and was struck by a
mysterious wave of sadness. Following the experience back, I realized that in
stepping awkwardly I had planted my toes outward, and that had been an eerily
familiar sensation. As a child, I recalled, I'd been pigeon-toed and teased by
other kids. I was told to fight the habit by walking with my feet planted
outward, the same way I had walked moments before. This helped tune me in to a
reservoir of negative feelings about my body, which wasn't what others wanted it
to be.
Hunches and intuitions that pop into your head are similar. They come out of
context with no apparent logic because they're the product of intuition. No
matter how bizarre they are, think of them as metaphorical hints and they may
give you insights that logic will take forever to reach.
What Causes Your Slips of the Tongue?
There is much to the idea that "Freudian slips," misplaced or
mispronounced words, are messages from the unconscious. Tune in to them and
allow yourself time to wonder what they mean. One of my patients was talking
about family pictures when he referred to a"phonograph" of his mother;
he came to realize that he avoided looking at her and thought of her as an
endlessly nagging broken record.
Similarly, try to be sensitive to the images and recurring phrases of your
personal language. A patient of mine always referred to his latest project as "this
baby." When we discussed this, what emerged was striking envy of his
pregnant wife because he himself couldn't bear a child. Another patient
expressed himself dramatically: "Here's a real killer for you,"
he would introduce his stories. "I blasted out the office . . . but the
traffic on the expressway was crushing." He was unaware of the constant
undertone of mayhem in his conversation. Bringing this up helped him to
appreciate his buried concerns about anger and safety.
What Do You Forget and Why?
It's a psychological axiom that you forget what you want to. Perhaps one part of
you resists actions that are out of tune with your inner needs. Your party line,
the idea of yourself that you received years ago from your family and still
confirm with friends,may blandly assume you like to bowl, that "I'm a
person who loves bowling." If so, why is it you never can find your bowling
shoes? It may be that your inner self really doesn't care for bowling and is
rebelling against the force of loyalty that allows you to be trapped into doing
what you don't much want to do.
Do you often forget your keys, meaning you must bum a ride? Do you leave your
wallet home, forcing you to borrow lunch money? It may be that the payoff,
perhaps getting others to take care of you, ?more than makes up for the
inconvenience.
What Troubles Do You Have with Other People?
In the reactions of others, we see ourselves. Are you mystified by the
way friends and acquaintances react to you? Do they seem unaccountably angry at
times? Do they turn morose or lapse into teasing sexual innuendoes? Do they
never seem to hear what you're saying? Your buried emotional life may come
through your behavior to arouse reaction more appropriate than you know. For
example, others may tune in to your hidden anger and respond with anger of their
own.
Conversely, you can learn much about yourself by becoming more aware of your own
reactions. Does weakness make you especially angry? Duplicity? Arrogance? We
often accuse others of things we fear finding in ourselves, and any
disproportionate response suggests emotionally charged issues. One of my
patients often spent therapy time railing angrily about "freeloaders"
and "welfare cheats." It eventually came out that his family had been
on relief when he was a child. His indignation was a reaction that walled up the
anger, pain, and humiliation of poverty.
Paradoxically, the things that bother you most about friends and family may
alert you to what you find attractive. The woman who is first attracted to her
husband because of his even-tempered consideration may later complain that he
lacks spontaneity and seems "wishy-washy." She may marry a man who is "dynamic
and effective" and divorce him because he's "driven and insensitive."
The vices are relabeled virtues.
Other people can actively assist your quest for self-understanding. Feel
free to ask selected friends and family for help. They won't have the same stake
in keeping the roots of your problem hidden. Test your perception of yourself
against theirs. If someone says something about you that seems farfetched,
completely at odds with what everyone knows is the "real you,"
give it a fair, open-minded hearing. Perhaps there is something "constantly
cheerful," "morbid," or "flirtatious" about you,
something with an important bearing on your skin problem.
In a herpes treatment group that I directed, one man announced that he was ready
for a serious romantic relationship. Members of the group pointed out that
whenever his involvement started becoming more than pure sex or pure friendship,
he'd get a herpes recurrence. This was a pattern he couldn't see, but after
repeated emphasis by group members, people he'd grown to like and respect, he
finally opened himself to this insight about his fear of intimacy and its role
in his disease.
SUN ADDICTION
Sadie L. was living what many people would call the ideal retirement life-style.
Fit, active, vivacious, her winters in Florida were full of friends, adult
education and aerobics classes, and the pursuit of her love of nature. Summers
she'd be back in New England enjoying her grandchildren and philanthropic
activities. Widowed some years earlier, Sadie had enough money and other
resources to feel as secure about the future as anyone can in an unpredictable
world.
However, there was a darker underside to her yearly routine. In the winter, she
would enjoy long walks on the beach and sitting in the sun. In the summer, she
would return north to the dermatology department of a teaching hospital where
some of the world's best doctors would cut off small parts of her body.
Conferences beforehand were devoted to the details of the surgical procedures.
The stock ". . . stay out of the sun; use sunscreen; you have malignant
melanoma; you are destroying your skin; untreated this will kill you . . ."
lecture was dutifully delivered afterward. Then the whole yearly cycle would
begin again.
Sadie heard them, she knew they were right, she resolved to stay out of the sun?then
didn't. She knew what Mark Twain meant when he said of smoking, "It's easy
to stop. I've done it hundreds of times." Her doctors knew that they were
bailing a boat with a hole in the bottom but were also resigned to the cycle.
It didn't take long for us to discover that there was more to her addiction than
enjoying the sun. She had always been proud of her body; it had gotten her
attention that was sometimes hard to come by growing up. Her life, though, had
taught her that when her body was involved, pleasure came packaged with loss and
gain. Her lovingly devoted grandfather had on several times moved disturbingly
toward molestation. Her marriage had been pressured by a too-early pregnancy,
and she had felt that the price of keeping the generally good relationship
intact was tolerating her husband's occasional infidelities.
No one had ever said it to her and she had never said it to herself but the
clear message of her life was that warmth and pleasure had to be paid for with a
bit of her soul or a bit of her body. It had all fit so well with the sun and
surgery cycle that it seemed as natural as night and day.
As this pattern emerged, she resolved to break it. Clearly, the answer was not
to forsake the pleasures of the flesh. She came up with getting massages (in the
shade) and saunas as the beginning of what she called her "No Pain--Lots of
Gain" program. It looks like the surgeons may have, to their delight, lost
a good customer.
PERSEVERANCE
There's more than one road up the mountain to insight, and knowledge of
your inner self will emerge in its own time and in its own way. Perseverance is
a must, not the kind that beats its head against a brick wall but the kind that
is willing to leave things alone for now and come back later. Many people find
that they are ready for self-knowledge, and as soon as they open their
minds to it, they receive insight in an exciting flood.
Try to exploit the times when you're most likely to gain glimpses into your
heart. I always found a visit to my Great-Aunt Annie put me back in touch with
my childhood. As the last survivor of my grandmother's generation, she made me
remember the little boy I once was and the feelings that made me the man I am
now. Her stuffed cabbage was an elixir of memory that awakened the child within
me!
Many people find physically demanding activities, such as dancing, running, or
climbing mountains,loosen their minds and put them into a receptive state where
they see the world and themselves with visionary eyes. For me, the days when I
can get out of the city and hike in the hills seem filled not only with the
magic of trees and rock outcroppings but a specially lucid state of mind in
which knots untie of their own accord and things I'd found perplexing suddenly
become clear.
The key is deautomatization. So much of our lives runs on automatic pilot:
anything that takes you out of the rut of custom and habit can help you to see a
new world with new eyes.
Stir up your feelings by putting aside the usual security blankets that soften
your perception of life. For a few evenings do without alcohol, without the
radio, without your cigarettes. Make it a point to try things that take you out
of your usual routing; if you customarily drive to work, for example, take the
bus. You may find yourself with eyes open in new emotional territory as well.
This is why vacations are so invigorating.
My mother has her own way of dealing with the crisis: any time she has to
make a perplexing decision, she shakes up her usual routine by doing things
differently. "If my inclination is to zig, I zag," she said. "If
I invariably say no, this time I say yes." What you need most in this
pursuit of yourself are flexibility and a readiness, an eagerness, for
surprises.
The journey to self-knowledge is long and full of stops and starts, a
frustrating journey if you're anxious for relief of tormenting skin disease.
Most of my patients keep up an encouraging pace of progress by combining the
exercises in this and the next few chapters with relaxation and imaging
techniques (which will be discussed later in this book) that aim to relieve
symptoms directly.
Working with self-discovery and symptom-relief exercises simultaneously or
alternately, my patients find their own rhythm. Going back and forth from one to
the other is like walking: one foot's advance enables the other foot to
take the next step. Reducing symptoms directly with relaxation, for instance,
often increases self-esteem (you've shown yourself that you can control
your body), which gives you courage to face buried needs more squarely. A little
improvement begins a cycle of change.
Even when your skin seems firmly on the road to recovery, keep on pushing for
more self-discovery. If you simply clip a weed, it may or may not return. You're
far more likely to be rid of it for good if you pull it up by the roots.
THE ANIMAL TEST
Self-discovery is an ambitious undertaking, but it isn't all hard work. In
fact, the most useful thing you can bring to the task is the spirit of play.
When you use your imagination, to daydream, to tell stories, you step out of the
logic-bound world and into a reality of your mind's creation where you're most
likely to glimpse your inner self.
One of the best ways to discover the inner you is actually a game, the sort kids
play when they ask each other, "If you had to be an animal, what would you
want to be?" The answer to this lighthearted question can be most revealing:
it's not always easy to guess who would want to be a tiger and who a cuddly
puppy.
A few years back, a psychologist named Cole was leafing through a newspaper
magazine supplement while enjoying his Sunday morning coffee. This issue
featured one of those popular quizzes that invite readers to do a bit of instant
self-analysis. "What animal would you like to be?" it asked, providing
a system to translate answers into a quick personality readout. Such simplified
self-tests offer little beyond a few minutes' diversion, but Cole was intrigued.
He worked the notion up into a concise but searching psychological test, which
has become known as the Cole Animal Test.
The Cole Animal Test consists of just three questions: What three animals
would you most like to be? What three animals would you least like
to be? Why? It's hard to believe that such a simple exercise can reveal much of
the mind's complexities, but I've found that it gives enough information in a
few minutes' time to hold its own amid a battery of fancy diagnostic testing. It's
a real shortcut to emotional issues.
Since the dawn of human consciousness, we've seen ourselves and our lives
reflected in the animals with which we share the earth. Primitive people
identified their tribes, their gods, even the good and evil forces of life with
totem animals, such as the bear and the fox. Animals and people who change into
animals figure prominently in folk tales and fairy tales. Our deep kinship with
animals is expressed in poetry, in the signs of the zodiac, and in our affection
for and identification with cartoon characters such as Bugs Bunny and Donald
Duck.
Animals seem to embody our emotions, fears, and fantasies. The deer doesn't
strike us as a shy animal but as shyness come to life. The tiger of William
Blake's famous poem "Tiger! Tiger! burning bright/In the forests of the
night" is a symbol of pure energy and rage.
The word symbol may have a dry academic sound but, in fact, we think in symbols
all the time; the ability to do so comes as naturally as the ability to think in
words. Symbols express ideas and feelings that otherwise elude us. A man who
struggles with pent-up anger that he's afraid to express (or even admit to
himself) may find it impossible to say: "I wish I was powerful. I
wish I could be angry and unafraid of the consequences." He can say it,
though, all in symbolic form: "I wish I was a tiger." This is
the beauty of the Animal Test.
Looking sensitively at fantasy symbols opens up a channel of communication with
that inner you that seems determined to remain hidden (that's why I stress
becoming aware of dreams and daydreams). The Animal Test is an invitation to
daydream in an organized way, to wander like a child in an imaginary world where
people change into animals and back again. It's a simple exercise. Just answer
these three questions:
What three animals would you most like to be?
What three animals would you least like to be?
Why have you made each choice?
This is not an exercise to ponder and mull over. The three "most"
animals and three "least" should come quickly to mind?after all, it's
only a game. Just think about it and write them down and then come up with some
simple, direct explanations for your choices.
The work comes when you sit down to figure out the meaning of your answers. Here
is more raw material for self-analysis: just as you've been working on the
messages carried by your dreams, daydreams, and fleeting feelings, you can look
to your Animal Test answers for clues to your inner self.
This test has no simple scoring key, no turn-to-page-163 answers. What kind of
person would like to be a beagle or an eagle? Be alert for surprises.
One of my patients, a doctor's wife, chose only one animal that she'd most like
to be: a tiger. A tiger was powerful, proud, and independent, she said. It had
claws to strike out. Her answer emphasized concern with two of the primary needs
we've discussed: respect and protection. A tiger is beautiful but not
cuddly; its beauty is appreciated from a distance. This need for "hands-off"
respect may have been the legacy of a childhood with an overbearing mother who
constantly inflicted her own needs and beliefs with no respect for my patient's
boundaries.
The animals she least wanted to be were worms and bugs, because they are "small,
helpless, and disgusting . . . they can be too easily stepped on and snuffed out."
What was striking here, what is often striking, was how the two sets of answers
complemented each other. If the tiger symbolized protection, respect, and
effective anger, the worms and bugs suggested a frightening life devoid of both.
In my patients' words, these creatures are beneath contempt and unprotected
against extermination.
Put very simply, the positive choices in the Animal Test, the animals you'd most
like to be, symbolize wishes; the negative "least like to be" choices
symbolize fears. For this patient, the wish was for protection and respect; the
fear was of being contemptible and vulnerable. Positive and negative choices,
like wishes and fears, are two sides of the same theme.
A twelve-year-old girl who suffered from warts most wanted to be a monkey "because
they're cute and fun." She least wanted to be a pig ("They're dirty
and yucky") or a frog, whose warts are "repulsive." Here the
theme is lovability. The cute monkey is lovable and the pig and frog are
repulsive: they repel love. The warty frog is a particularly poignant choice,
all too clearly reflecting the girl's self-image. I found these choices
revealing in a twelve-year-old, on the edge of adolescence. The monkey is
lovable in a childlike way while the pig is repulsive in a down-to-earth, dirty
way, suggesting a frightened view of the sexuality awaiting her. Passing from a
cute childhood to sexual adulthood threatened the loss of love.
Responses rarely pick out a single theme: love, protection, and respect
are usually mixed in combinations as unique as the people who take the test. A
California woman, a very successful business executive troubled by recurrent
eczema attacks, said the animals she'd most want to be were a panther, "strong,
smart, and fast" ; a lion or a racehorse, for the same reasons; or an eagle,
which "flies free, has flights of fancy." She least wanted to be a
monkey "because I don't like to be laughed at or to mimic others" ' or
a giraffe because it was "awkward and tall. It stands out and looks funny."
The issue of respect stands out in her responses. If you're not thoroughly
admirable, you'll be an object of ridicule. Protection is an important sub theme:
the panther, lion, and eagle are powerful creatures, well protected with claws
and talons, but the choices suggested some conflict in her quest for respect and
protection. The giraffe is a large animal and definitely one that stands out, as
did my patient in her own field, yet it was a negative choice: standing
out too much or in the wrong way makes you laughable.
A sub theme implied here, one that arises frequently, is anger and
aggressiveness. The physician's wife similarly chose her tiger for its
independence and protection, she said, but her emphasis on claws brought out its
potential to strike out. It was her inability to find the tiger within that
brought this woman to see me. Instead of striking back at her infuriating mother,
she constantly clawed her own skin.
In interpreting your answers, don't concentrate on meanings at the
expense of themes. What common chords unite the animals you've chosen?
This is not an exercise in logic: the wishes and fears beneath your symbol
animals may be expressed subtly, even backward, and working them out demands
more creativity than rationality. The person who chooses a tiger as an animal
because the tiger is allowed to be angry and no one can stop him and the person
who wants to be a lamb because lambs are never angry are not opposites at all.
To the contrary, they both need to work through the task of expressing anger,
one of the eleven tasks discussed in chapter 2.
Instead of asking what the test shows about your wishes and fears, a more useful
question is where the emotional action is. The person who fears losing
control and the person who craves freedom are dealing with the same issue but in
different ways. They are both grappling with autonomy. The area of
conflict and confusion is more important than the specific wishes and fears that
define it. Try inverting your answers: imagine for a moment that the
animals you chose as most desirable are actually the ones you least want to be
and vice versa. Play the game with an open mind and you may stumble over some
very suggestive surprises.
The ultimate question, of course, is: Why should the person who emerges
from the Animal Test, who wants to be a dog but would hate to be a weasel, have
your skin problem? Connecting your fantasy animals and your skin is a creative
process, and I don't want to prescribe a rigid method. I would suggest being
systematic, however.
In the first stage of the test, picking animals and saying why, don't even think
about "what it all means." Just be spontaneous and honest with
yourself. Wondering whether you're saying the right thing, self-editing, shuts
down the creative process, as anyone who's struggled with writer's block can
testify.
Once you've written down the raw material of your answers, look for themes, the
ways in which positive choices and negative choices group around the same issues.
What motifs recur? Then try to connect these themes to the three fundamental
needs for love, respect, and protection. How do these unresolved needs suggest
emotional tasks? How might your skin be working to accomplish these tasks?
In actual practice, interpreting your answers will not be such a straightforward
process. Possibly, as soon as you start thinking about your reason for choosing
a wolf, the need to express anger will come to mind, and you'll recognize this
task in your other answers, too. Don't expect all your choices to focus on any
one need or task. They may come from different corners of your complex
personality and thus arrange themselves in parallel, not converging, lines. Your
answers will very possibly suggest three, even four tasks.
One question that some find fertile is: If you were any of these animals,
what tasks wouldn't you face? The animals you'd like to be have what
you wish for (as least in fantasy)? they've won the game just by being eagles or
tigers. The ones you'd hate to be can't have what you wish--ants and
cockroaches can't be loved, respected, or protected (at least in our human minds)
so they needn't str
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