A common scenario I’ve encountered in my practice is individuals who, starting a day, ending a day, or returning home after an extended period away, feel compelled to “check in” on their skin. Taking this measurement feels like a grounding ritual of sorts, but this need to know how we are doing (e.g. behaviorally) has seemed to take the place of who we are and how we are. In our society, our means of knowing ourself feels dependent on and limited to who likes us, who agrees with us, how many “likes” we get, how much we are getting paid, what invites we get, etc. We all need some baseline sense that we can be successful in this world, but this was always meant to be a stepping stone in our development. “Industry vs. Inferiority” was identified as only the fourth stage in Erik Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development. This stage is all about growing feelings of competence (our ability to feel “good at” things). There are eight stages total, however our society is largely stunted here! What was supposed to come next? Development of a personal identity, which can then fuel intimate relationships and creative instincts. Achievement was never intended to sum us up, it was meant to give us the confidence to keep on exploring.
We are a society that tends to overemphasize achievement. As a result, it makes us reliant on some external marker to tell us how we “should be” doing. Why, when we wake up in the morning, do we need to know the status of our skin to know if we can feel good or bad about the day? Can that not exist on its own? Do we not have internal sources for determining this?
I think the simplistic answer is “no.” I think our sense of ourselves is impoverished, so we are constantly, frantically looking for definition. We are so out of touch with innate feelings that we seek external indications to inform our well-being. When we pick in the morning/at night/after a vacation, we are saying that we feel unbounded. We feel lost and unsecured. Knowing the state of our face gives us some reassuring feeling of knowing our place again. When we want to check in with our skin condition, this is not the same as checking in with our actual self. This is not the question of, “Am I feeling unsettled right now?” or “Am I feeling an urge to pick right now?” It is simply the need to know how we are literally doing - our relative success. It’s like we need to know our skin condition to tell us if we’re allowed to feel good about ourselves or our life at the moment - [scans face immediately upon waking up] “Oh yeah, last night was a bad night…” If you just came back from a wonderful, pick-free vacation, why is your instinct upon returning home to plant yourself in front of a mirror and assess the clarity of your skin? It’s like we can’t trust that we can keep those good feelings about us unless it is verified by our face. Even then, our sensitivity to performance makes it so that we always fear failure and often pick just to preempt potential feelings of disappointment.
It is sad that we can’t connect with or hold onto natural feelings about ourselves above and beyond external circumstances. For example, instead of determining whether we care to read that book on our shelf, we surround ourselves with acute and painful awareness that we haven’t read it yet (FAILURE). We accept a position with an organization simply because the president tells us they think we’d be great at it (SUCCESS). We feel inadequate because we can’t hold conversation about film, even though our passion is really for poetry (FAILURE). We are being depleted by our job, but feel superior because most folks couldn’t last one month (SUCCESS). It is these incongruencies that point to our difficulty hearing (and responding to) what feels personally relevant vs. reacting to suggestions of success/failure. When we believe accomplishment is the key to acceptance, we become attached to measuring ourselves. However, once we can develop a relationship to ourselves that is personal, we can go to bed peacefully even if we picked ten scabs that day. Living without the need to regularly evaluate how we are doing is to live with exponentially more room for being freely and intentionally.