How Emotional Pain Showed Up on My Skin — And What Finally Healed It

Two years ago, almost to the day, I split up with a man I thought I loved. After 6 years of being single, never having introduced a man to my daughter, I met him, fell for him, and welcomed him into our home. My daughter brought a picture home from school one day, and it had his name on it. It breaks my heart even now to think about how much he did not deserve that picture.  

I’d been waiting for the moment I could post a photo of us together. 6 long years of feeling like the odd one out, I’d been so grateful that this year I got to share in the happiness on Valentine's Day, and finally launch my relationship to the people who had been on the journey with me while I’d been trying to get my life together as a single mum. 

I posted a reel of all these little clips and pictures of us together, smiling and dressed up, it got more likes and comments than anything I’d posted for a long time. Lovely messages came flooding in saying how happy they were to see me so happy. I was already a life coach, I’d been helping women for years and was always posting about self-worth, boundaries, healing your wounds and listening to your intuition. It was amazing to be able to demonstrate to the world what doing the work had given me. 

Six weeks later it all fell apart, and I was crushed. He told me that before we met, he had got someone else pregnant, and that she was now due to have his baby, and he had to be with her. It was the perfect lie. He left the relationship as a man just wanting to do the right thing. And I was left standing there, calling out to him that he didn’t have to do this, that I would help him raise the baby, and that he could still be with me. 

I didn’t know how to be after this. I felt I couldn’t show up in my business in the way I always had if I didn’t address it. So I made a video, explaining what had happened. I poured it all out, all my pain, snot and tears, and told them everything. And again the messages of support came flooding in. But this time, there were one or two who dared to question the story. Who told me, in the kindest possible way, that they felt something wasn’t quite adding up. 

Another week went by, and I’m trying to come back down from it all. Comforting my daughter who doesn’t understand where he’s gone and is upset with me for not fixing it. One afternoon I get a phone call, and during that call my whole reality drops away and I can see everything as clearly as I know you can already see it. The whole thing was a lie. He wasn’t who he said he was. He had been lying since the first message he ever sent me. 

Not just about the big things. It was everything. From where he lived, to places he had lived before, the jobs he’d done, the people he knew, his hobbies, how his family had treated him, to the money he had, the car he ‘bought’, the person he was. It was all a complex web of pointless, compulsive lies. And I was going to find out sooner or later, which is why he ran. 

And my God the humiliation. 

It was like a slap in the face. I have never in my life felt the intense shame I experienced while going through this. Layer upon layer of disbelief, somewhat at him but mainly at myself for how I could have been so stupid. 

Three months later, the spots began to come. Huge, red welts spread across my cheeks, my nose and my forehead. They were red, painful to the touch, and they were everywhere. 

I waited a few months before going to the doctors. They told me it was a severe case of adult acne, and I would need to take tablets as well as use a cream. I did this for three months, and saw minimal improvement. As soon as the course was finished, they came back just as bad as before. 

I then tried Skin + Me, which is a website a friend recommended where they prescribe treatment based on what you want to achieve and the photos you upload. I used this for 6 months, and my skin purged and got so much worse before it started to improve. Even then, it was nowhere near back to normal, and I still suffered with breakouts and flare-ups. 

I’ve read books before like ‘The body keeps the score’ and I have awareness around the physical manifestation of mental and emotional pain, and so I had done my due diligence in releasing the hurt and anger I felt towards him for what he’d done (I still have a very sweary letter I wrote him saved in my documents). But after almost a year of living with severe acne, I felt like my body was still trying to tell me something. 

I am a verbal processor, I need to speak to understand my thoughts. So I started to talk, out loud, to the man who had hurt me, and I told him what an absolute $%*&$%£ he was, that he was disgusting for doing that to us, that he hurt my baby and made her cry, that he should never have done what he did, that I trusted him and he let me down and because of that I had let her down and I would never, EVER forgive myself for that. 

And in that moment I realised how furious I was with myself. 

This part of me was absolutely livid that I could have been so naive to allow someone into her life when I clearly didn’t know him. She was screaming in my head, wanting to lash out and attack me for not protecting the baby. My mama bear was fully reared up on her hind legs, and she wanted to claw my eyes out, because I could have prevented it and I didn’t. I should have prevented it, but I didn’t. I had hurt her, and that was unforgivable. 

I know how this may sound to anyone unfamiliar, but when you start a journey of self-enquiry and self-reflection, you will meet these sides of yourself, although they will be different for you. I have a fierce mama bear in me. She is wild, and she will tear open your insides and eat your heart if you hurt her baby. And she was punishing me internally for what I had done wrong in her eyes. 

I knew I had to listen to her and let her release all the pent up anger she had in her. So I kept talking and writing things down until she had nothing left to say. And then, I started to repair the damage. 

In my mind, with my eyes closed, I found the part of me who had been hiding, terrified in the corner while the bear let her have it. And I gave her a voice too. She said she was so sorry. That she had genuinely believed that maybe, after all the work she had put into her sense of worthiness, that she’d finally met someone who was as good as he had pretended to be. 

She said she never meant to hurt Paige. She just wanted it to work so much, to have that family unit, to give Paige the stability and structure she couldn’t help but feel she had missed out on. She really had cared about him. She thought the fairytale was possible, and she fell for it, but that doesn’t make her bad. Just hopeful. 

And she is still hopeful. 

And the bear is still there….but she’s calmer now. Thank the Lord.

The reason I’m writing this is because it is World Health Day. And this is what I know to be true. Our health is a result of our mental and emotional landscape. What we think and feel is mapped out in our bodies. Our emotional pain becomes physical pain. 

And I know this, because within days of this emotional release and compassion replacing the anger, after a gruelling 18 months, my skin finally began to heal. 

Nikki before

Nikki After