TO FIRST EDITION, 1986
I am a clinical psychologist: people knock on my door because they are in emotional
pain. So you may well wonder what my name is doing on a book about skin disease.
Emotions cause many skin problems and aggravate others. Hundreds of people have
been helped by psychological approaches, often after years of frustration and
disappointment with conventional treatment. I have written this book to help you.
Don't get me wrong. Dermatology has made remarkable strides in recent
decades, with the advent of high-tech aids such as lasers and cryosurgery and new
wonder drugs such as steroids and vitamin A derivatives; thus, many skin sufferers
have been cured by their physicians.
Yet many have not. If you have brought your persistent eczema, your stubborn
warts, your psoriasis, or your recurrent herpes to specialists and superspecialists,
and if all the creams, lotions, and medication failed to help, you must wonder if there
is something else – and ardently hope that there is. This is exactly what I want to
share with you.
For the last eight years, I have brought relief to skin sufferers by applying a
principle both ancient and often forgotten: the mind and body are one. Sure, the skin
is an organ, as physical as your heart or liver, and a rash is as physical as a heart
attack, but the skin is also an exquisitely sensitive responder to emotions. Just as
stress makes your heart beat faster and your blood pressure rise (and may
eventually give you a heart attack), fear can make your skin turn pale,
embarrassment can make you blush, and emotional conflicts, anxieties, and other
stresses can trigger or aggravate skin disease. Just as doctors have learned to lower
blood pressure psychologically, I can teach you to make the mind your skin's ally
rather than its enemy.
If someone had told me early in my career that I would someday be a sort of
skin specialist, I'd have referred him to a colleague for psychotherapy. What I had
learned was probably what you've been taught to believe: skin disease meant viruses,
bacteria, inflammations, and such medical stuff and were thus well off the
psychologist's turf. I could hold someone's hand while he waited for next year's
wonder drug, but that was it.
In retrospect, however, my special calling (and this book) had its first glimmer
of life way back in graduate school. The professor in this instance was as formidable
in looks as in temper; his seminars featured a student's case presentation followed by
his own ruthlessly critical appraisal of the patient's true problem and the student
therapist's dire shortcomings. Here was not a sentimentalist.
One evening, he presented a case of his own: a consultation with a man
hospitalized with severe eczema beyond the help of conventional dermatology. He
had put the fellow in a hypnotic trance and had him imagine floating in a pool of
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soothing oil. Like a leper in the Bible, the man had risen from his bed a day later, his
skin clear.
What to make of it? The professor's psychotherapeutic skills were great, but so
was his ego. More to the point, neither my fellow students nor I knew anything about
hypnosis, and the professor's story seemed to violate everything we'd learned about
how psychotherapy works. I couldn't dismiss the case out of hand but I also couldn't
fit it into view of what the mind, the body, and psychology were all about. The truth
was there, but I wasn't ready for it.
It was nearly a decade later that I learned about hypnosis, privileged to attend a
seminar with an international authority in the field, Dr. Fred Frankel, then of the
Harvard Medical School. After six months of training, we started to practice what
we'd learned with clinic patients. My first was a woman referred from the
dermatology department for severe itching and scratching. Our success was dramatic
and almost immediate.
Beginner's luck or not, I was hooked. I set out to learn as much as I could about
skin problems and to gather experience in working with skin patients. In the years
that followed, I developed a blend of psychological techniques, including hypnosis,
relaxation, imaging, and the kind of psychotherapy that helps patients understand
their conflicts about sex, identity, and relationships. I shared with colleagues my
successes in working with eczema, warts, hives, and herpes, and they responded,
"You really ought to write this up."
Looking over the medical and psychological journals at the Harvard Medical
School library – going back more than a century – I saw such results had been written
up. Physicians and psychologists using similar techniques had achieved similar
success – but no one had noticed. Other professionals had read these case reports and
shrugged shoulders, as I had at the graduate seminar years before. They weren’t
ready to understand, and the public – the long-suffering patients who needed to hear
about what had and could be done – didn't even know such scholarly journals
existed.
So when I wrote about my work, it was for a popular magazine. "Bringing Peace
to Troubled Skin" appeared in Psychology Today in 1982 and evoked a flood of letters
and phone calls from across America as well as from Canada and Europe. I had
obviously touched people deeply. Doctors called in, eager to learn my skills and share
their own, but most of the flood was from people in pain. They wanted – desperately
– to learn the techniques I described. They were willing – anxious – to work hard, but
they didn't know anyone, a psychologist, a dermatologist, or an Indian chief, who
could teach them.
I wrote this book for them and for you.
– Ted A. Grossbart, Ph.D.
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