Health & Wellness

The story behind birthmarks:

 Our Skin is the waterproof and permeable outer covering of our body made up of proteins, which gives us our skin tone, marks our inner and outer boundary and also acts as the first line of defence against any toxin, germs and pathogens. 

Let’s understand what SKIN means according to meta understanding. 

When we split the word skin, we observe the word ‘kin’ in the spelling of ‘skin’. 

SKIN= S+ KIN

The “S” stands for a surface boundary, whereas kin means one's family and relations. Our family creates our outer boundary by telling us what is allowed or not allowed

Today we are going to explore a story of the birthmarks

Birthmarks are congenital, benign irregularities occurring anywhere on the skin at birth or may appear shortly after the birth. Birthmarks vary in colour, size, appearance, and shape. Some are permanent and may get larger over time. 

In Iranian folklore, it is believed that birthmarks occur when a mother touches a specific part of her body during a solar eclipse. Contemporary American folklore associated with the New Age movement believes that birthmarks are signs of distressing experiences from a previous life 

According to the research in META-Health we know that internal conflicts faced by the fetus and his mother can show up on the skin of the infant as flat or raised, have regular or irregular borders, and have different shades of colouring from brown, tan, black, or pale blue to pink, red, or purple.

META-Health believes Every birthmark is unique and has its own story

 Our psyche, physical body and our soul are closely related. Marks on our psyche translate into marks on our body. When a pregnant lady endures any kind of physical or emotional trauma during her pregnancy and is unable to make effective choices to end the trauma then, she ends up in a freeze response which can impact the growing fetus. One such negative impact is birthmarks on the skin. Our skin captures our invisible emotions and makes our trauma’s and emotions visible to us.

 This is a story of a twenty-year-old Sheela. She had three birthmarks in three different places on her body.

 The first one was at the corner of her left eye, the second one was on her back very close to her hips and the third one was on her left arm. All three were different shapes and colour..

Three different modalities were used to understand these marks on the body.

1. Understanding drawings - Drawings help us to understand the subconscious mind before six years of age.

2. Lüscher Color Test - is a psychological test invented by Dr Max Lüscher who believed that colour selections are guided unconsciously, they reveal the person as they are, not as they perceive themselves or would like to be perceived. 

The colours used in the drawing revealed the subconscious programming of the mind.

3.  META-Health- is the body- mind-social connection, which says, “Our body never lies; it reacts to everything that it suffers internally. It helped to identify the connection between birthmarks and past trauma which caused these birthmarks.

What did Sheela’s drawing reveal?

Sheela’s, drawing and her choice of colours showed her extremely guarded behaviour. She constantly felt extremely responsible for the happiness and safety of her mother. 

 She expressed that, she did not like living with her parents. According to her, her parents despite being their unhappy, intolerant and abusive marriage were constantly pretending that their marriage was perfect. She wanted them to stop playing this difficult game of perfection and find their peace.

  She was angry with her mother for giving birth to her and wanted her parents to take responsibility for the damage they had inflicted on her and her brother. She felt unloved and uncared helplessness, hurt, anger, confused, emotionally disconnected and wanting complete freedom, to the extent of not wanting to exist as life felt meaningless and yet felt obligated to protect her mother. She was constantly having mood swings, ranging from extreme anger to extreme need to belong in a loving relationship.

 Sadhana, her mother, told us her story, she said she was pampered as a child before marriage, marriage had burdened her with responsibilities and felt ill-treated, helpless, angry, confused and just like her daughter Sheela was itching for complete- freedom. Sadhana told us that during her pregnancy with Sheela, she felt disconnected from everyone.

Marital sexual abuse is common in India and our laws do not protect the woman. The assumption is that couples with children are normal and happy. The ugliness of bedroom stories is often covered by the mantra of adjustment. 

Woman often despite domestic violence may stay in an abusive marriage and refrain from taking any legal action to avoid public scrutiny and humiliation which is clubbed with a stigma tarnished self-image after divorce.

 Sadhana was a victim of abuse. 

She was a good daughter-in-law, a fantastic mother and a dutiful wife, but she had endured a very difficult mother-in-law and a sadist husband who demanded unnatural sex from her. Her husband did not spare her even when she was pregnant. Sadhana’s heart ached empathy, love, understanding, harmony and connection with her husband, but instead, during the sexual activity, Sadhana’s body and psyche would be subjected to pain and humiliation and this cruelty had left permanent marks on her her her body and psyche. 

Each birthmark on Sheela’s body was the memory of various horror and discomfort endured by her mother. No wonder Sheela was on one hand very protective towards her mother as her mother was unable to protect herself and at the same time was very angry with her mother as she was unable to protect herself. Sheela displayed a love-hate relationship with herself and her mother

The birthmark around the corner of the left eye was connected with Sadhana’s need for love and affection from her husband Ashok.  She constantly looked through the corner of the left eye, secretly watching her husband and searching for softness and love on his face for her. She wanted him to support her, and more so during her pregnancy. The truth was he was never around and he never showed love or softness. Unrequited love left Sadhana feeling empty, unfulfilled and left a permanent dark mark on the face of her unborn daughter as if a reminder of her longing.

Sheela’s birthmark on her right arm appeared like finger marks of someone holding a person’s arm. Sadhana’s, story threw light on trauma imprinted on her daughter’s arm. Sadhana went back in time to her pregnancy. She had an intense need to eat Mumbai street food delicacy,” Pav Bhaji” and thus entered the kitchen to cook the dish. Her mother-in-law wanted Sadhana to eat, whatever was cooked, she blew her top. While watching Sadhana cook, in a fit of anger her mother-in-law, caught her arm tightly and brutally and threw Sadhana out of the kitchen. Sadhana’s anger got better of her and she retaliated by getting into a fistfight with her Mother-in-law. Her mother-in-law held Sadhana’s arm firmly and did not let go of her arm till she won the fight. Her husband refused to help. This left a permanent mark of fingerprints on the skin of the growing fetus. 

The trauma hidden by a birthmark on the hip was connected with the sexual misbehaviour of her Sadist husband Ashok. She would be subjected to intense beating and biting by her husband on her hips. Ashok could only connect with his manhood with his brutal behaviour to get a normal erection pregnancy. On one such occasion, during Sadhana’s pregnancy, Ashok had beaten her mercilessly on her hips, Her unborn baby girl carried the birthmark of insult, hurt, pain and abuse on her hip.

Twenty-one years later, the knowledge of META-Health made it easy to understand the trauma hidden innocently under the birthmarks on Sheela’s skin. Sheela was reacting on behalf of her mother’s unresolved traumas and was mirroring her mother’s feeling of disconnect by displaying antisocial and self-sabotaging behaviour.

Today, Sadhana has empowered herself 

by moving to a separate room and has put an end to her sexual abuse. The power of NO helped her to deal with her demons. She also understood that she is capable of protecting herself and thus daughter resigned from being her watchman. Reduced expectations helped them both to detox and heal their bleeding relationship.

 All of us need to understand that we need to heal our traumas and give our-self permission to free our-self from the shackles of self-doubt and move ahead.

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 By: Dr. Anu Mehta | Master Meta Heath