How To Find Acceptance When Living with Severe Acne

When you’re living with acne, it can be hard to find peace of mind. At least that was my experience. I felt like no matter what I did (eating clean, exercising, sleeping well, etc.), I wasn’t seeing the slightest improvement in my skin. That made it extremely difficult to keep a positive mindset after years of dealing with constant breakouts. In this post I am going to share how I was able to find acceptance of myself and the way that I looked while experiencing severe acne. I’m also going to share different areas of your life that you can address to help you find acceptance for yourself and finally find some peace.

For Context…

I’m not going to lie. It took me a long time to find acceptance with the way I looked with a face full of cystic acne. Especially because my acne onset came at a time when I was just starting out in my adult life. Most of my friends and people I was surrounded by at college had outgrown their middle- or high- school acne and had perfect skin. Even if they were drinking their weight in alcohol, eating pizza and ramen for lunch everyday or sleeping in their makeup.

I find that I have a natural inclination towards negative thoughts and thinking. I’ve been that way pretty much my whole life. Fortunately I’ve been able to become self aware of my tendency towards negativity, but it’s something that I have to constantly work at to become more positive, and not get sucked back down the rabbit hole of an “Eeyore” or “poor me” mentality.

So, to make a long story short, the journey to accepting the way I looked with acne and to love myself no matter what was a long time coming. And honestly, it’s still a work in progress sometimes. If I were to do the things I am about to share earlier on in my journey with acne, I would like to think I would’ve come to accept myself a lot sooner. It seemed like once I finally found acceptance and peace with my acne, is when things started to turn around.

Relationships

My journey to self-acceptance started when I was in a border-line emotionally abusive relationship with a narcissist. I know that is a serious claim to make and the abuse of the relationship is diagnosed by me and not an expert, but looking back, that’s what I would describe the experience as.

I started dating this person about a year into when I first experienced severe cystic acne. I was struggling with my self-worth and self-esteem and never thought in a million years anyone would ever want to date me with my skin looking the way it did. Even from the start, our relationship was just a “situationship”. He didn’t want to be in a committed relationship. I did. But, instead of saying ‘okay, it must not be meant to be’, I proceeded to stay in this situationship for over two years. There was a lot that happened over those two years and ALL of it was unhealthy. I knew it instinctually and no matter how many times I heard “you deserve better” - whether from friends, family or a podcast talking about relationship advice, I could never bring myself to completely say goodbye to him until I had moved hundreds of miles away!

This is a long way of saying - if you have a relationship like this in your life, I can guarantee it is only exacerbating your acne. The stress of constantly being around a toxic person (even if you have extremely high highs with this person), is causing intense stress to your mental and physical health.

For me I believe the stress manifested in inflammation in my body which kept my skin inflamed with acne. Being alone and feeling lonely sometimes is healthier than being in an abusive or toxic relationship. This applies to more than just romantic relationships too - maybe it’s a friendship, work relationship or a family relationship. I know these are not easy things to address. It will likely take months or even years to improve the relationships in your life. Obviously the most helpful thing to do is see a therapist if you can afford one. If you cannot (which is where I’m at), my go-to option is listening to advice on podcasts or reading books.

I have two podcasts I think are great for navigating mental health and relationships. The first is a podcast I discovered after I was out of an unhealthy relationship and in a committed, healthy one. However, I wish I had discovered it during those hard years. It’s called Do You F***ing Mind hosted by Alexis Fernandez-Preiksa. I love this podcast because Alexis tells it like it is while also not making you feel bad about some not so good decisions we’ve all made. She’s got great content on all kinds of mental health topics including relationships, brain health, self-esteem, motivation, confidence and more.

The second podcast is called New Mindset, Who Dis hosted by Case Kenny. This podcast also talks a lot about relationships and some of the stories and scenarios talked about hit eerily close to home. It talks about not settling for unhealthy or toxic relationships - even if that means you remain single for longer than you might like to. It advocates deeply for loving up on yourself instead of always trying to look outside of yourself for love or validation. Case Kenny also has multiple journals all about self-love, confidence and inner peace. Although I haven’t tried one yet, I would absolutely love to give one a try one of these days.

Mindset

For me, mindset was (and is) the hardest area to address. Even more so than relationships because having the courage to walk away from a toxic or unhealthy relationship first takes a strong mind and a strong sense of self-respect. When my skin went from looking pretty healthy to being completely broken out in painful cystic acne-spots, I let that dictate my emotional state. There was a big part of my identity, self-esteem and core beliefs locked up in the way that I looked. I think that is unfortunately the case for a lot of young women and girls. Instead of trying to address my mindset, core beliefs and identity, I thought I could ignore the mental aspect of having acne and put my sole focus on the physical, and I would be able to heal my acne. I changed my diet, ramped up my exercise, made sure I got my eight hours of sleep every night. I started dry brushing, never slept in my makeup, cut out alcohol (yes college was not as fun for me), took a lot of supplements and seemingly did everything right from a physical perspective. But, never addressing the mental part of acne kept me stagnant for years.

As I dug deeper into the world of holistic health, I eventually knew that I needed to address my mental health if I wanted to truly walk the walk of living a healthy holistic lifestyle. I realized my mental state could be holding me back from healing. That’s when I started learning more about meditation and it’s benefit not only to our mental health but our physical health as well. I learned that meditation helped to calm the body’s flight or fight response and switch the body from running on sympathetic (fight or flight) mode (a.k.a. stress mode) to parasympathetic (rest and digest) mode (a.k.a. healing mode). I personally started using the Headspace App just because I was hearing about it everywhere. For me it was helpful to have someone guiding me, but I have known other people who like to just sit in silence and focus on their breath.

To this day meditation is still hard for me to keep consistent with. I’ve discovered that yoga is like a moving meditation for me. Even walking in nature silently while focusing on your feet hitting the ground or breathing deeply in clear air can be a meditation. It may look different for different people. So, if you’ve felt put off by what we think traditionally of as meditation, don’t give up just yet! Along with calming down the nervous system, meditation also taught me to notice my breath and racing thoughts. It’s become easier for me to notice when I go on a negative thought spiral. I can catch myself and let negative thoughts go or even better, notice that my negative thoughts aren’t true, and turn them around to a more positive way of thinking. After discovering meditation, I gradually found myself learning more about different spiritual teachings and teachers.

Spirituality

Spirituality may not seem related to acne in the slightest, but for me, it was the thing that moved the needle the most. While I was working simultaneously on mindset and spirituality, what I was learning from a spiritual lens helped put things into perspective, which I then incorporated into my mindset. There were two books that were very influential for me and ones I still think a lot about in my daily life. The first one is called A New Earth by Eckhart Tole. While this book was intense (which I think most spiritual-related books are), it was so eye opening. While I don’t want to say too much because I think everyone should have their own experience and interpretation, my biggest takeaway was learning about our egos and how they can play a big role in the suffering that we experience in our lives.

The second book is called The Power to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. This book shows a different theory of psychology called “Adlerian Theory” or “Adlerian Psychology”. It was truly mind boggling and it made my brain work really hard. My biggest takeaway from this book was learning how to shift your perspective on the world and people around you to find a little bit more peace in your daily life. It highlighted that everyone has individual responsibility and control over their own lives and happiness, and that felt empowering.

Final Thoughts

While addressing the physical body in terms of nutrition, movement and lifestyle is important if you are dealing with an imbalance in the body such as acne, addressing your relationships, mindset and spirituality are equally as important. They may even be more important. Addressing the non-physical does not come easily to me, so I have to work hard to incorporate mindfulness and positive thinking into the day-to-day. The more I’ve worked on these three areas of my life, the better I’ve felt both physically and mentally. I finally came to a point in my life where, even though I had acne, I was okay. I started believing myself when I said that my beauty and value didn’t come from how I looked, but from my inherent worth that every human being has. I practiced being grateful for my life and even being grateful for experiencing severe acne because of how much it taught me. Everyone deserves to feel good in their own skin.

I wanted to leave you with a quote from A New Earth that I have had hanging on my bulletin board since I first read it during my sophomore year of college with a face full of acne: “Acceptance initiates healing. The foundation for healing is to accept this moment as it is. In this moment, the so-called illness may manifest either as pain, discomfort, or some kind of disability. This is what you surrender to. If you are diagnosed with an illness, you don’t deny the illness, but you also don’t dwell on the concept of illness and build an identity around it. The ego will use anything for an enhanced sense of identity.”