Full self-acceptance can take a bit of effort, as much of what we struggle to accept about ourselves, we can be – sometimes totally- unaware of. (Our shadow)
To be able to say, ‘I am OK – warts and all’ and truly believe, feel and accept it -needs us to fully embrace all aspects of ourselves – not just the ‘good’ bits we are conscious of and happy about, but also the ‘bad’ bits we might deny we have and be quite unconscious of. Complete self-acceptance usually takes self-awareness, self-forgiveness and a willingness to challenge what we might believe about ourselves.
The journey towards self-acceptance is not easy. It has a component of being prepared to feel the vulnerability shame can trigger in us when we make ourselves aware of some aspects about ourselves we are not comfortable with, we don’t approve of and that we might deny are part of us. It also needs us to accept we can’t always get everything ‘right’ or give optimum responses. Some of us leave childhood with a strong sense that getting everything ‘right’ is the only thing that will make us acceptable and prevent rejection. It’s like we’ve forgotten we are only human when we believe that.
If we fail to work out how to accept these parts of us that we have banished to our unconscious, we will always feel the deep agitation of not being able to be fully and authentically ourselves. We’ll survive but we won’t be optimising our manoeuvres within our lives.
So why do most of us have parts of ourselves we are unaware of that contribute to the prevention of full self-acceptance and what can we do about this? Here goes…
(Drawing from Carl Roger’s personality theory), we all travelled through our childhoods receiving approval for some things and disapproval for other things from the significant adults in our lives – whether they be teachers, parents, carers, grandparents, even neighbours. If aspects of ourselves we received disapproval for, triggered enough shame when we engaged in them, we would try to suppress them. This is because it’s hard for disapproval not to feel like rejection to a child (and rejection can feel very fundamentally dangerous to a child). This suppression did not mean these aspects of ourselves, disappeared, it just meant we tried to hide them, to pretend to ourselves that they were not part of us and in many cases get to the point where we could be disappointed in others for doing the very thing we received disapproval for (called projection).
That’s the tricky thing about self-acceptance. We’re often unaware of the things we do that we have relegated to our hidden depths/unconscious because we can’t bear the see them in ourselves for the shame they trigger. The process of self-acceptance needs us firstly to see these ‘judged negative’ aspects of ourselves (which can be very uncomfortable as we usually have to face the discomfort of the original shame we felt that drove us to suppress them in the first place). We then need to see/realise/sense/feel these aspects are definitely not worthy of the – often disproportionate, exaggerated and unnecessary – disapproval they received so they can be fully accepted by us. This process is called integration.
Integration liberates us from all the ‘should’ and ‘should nots’ we can unknowingly carry around with us. It also stops us judging others so harshly. As we becomes more self-aware, less blind to, and more kindly accepting of ourselves, life seem so much lighter and less jarring. Integration ultimately lets us be our full selves with decreasing self-criticism, fewer rigid rules you didn’t know you were applying to yourself and less fear of rejection.
The kind of things we can receive disapproval for vary considerably. If what we received disapproval for, could be considered less than ideal (e.g. being really chaotic and messy), but still very much part of us, we are likely to accept the negative judgement as fair and struggle to ever positively accept it’s just how we are! Often what we received disapproval for though was dictated by irrational ‘shoulds’ like which emotions it was OK to express (e.g. ‘Boys don’t cry’) and which behaviours were acceptable (e.g. ‘girls need to be quiet, contained and graciously put up with things.)
It seems quite common from talking to people – especially around my age – that many families had a strong culture of disapproval and non-acceptance. Certainly in my childhood family, there was a staunch culture never being good enough. We were always ‘too this’, not enough ‘that’ and who we were, as we were, would never suffice. We also received a message that ‘others were always better’. (I appreciate this was really just a reflection of my parents dissatisfaction with themselves.) This makes self-acceptance difficult. It can also make acceptance of others ‘as they are’ tricky too as such a culture teaches us not to.
So how can we become more self-accepting?
- Therapy! A counsellor’s job is to reverse a person’s tightly-held self-belief constructed as a result of the approval and disapproval they received as a child. It’s never a quick fix and the process needs to allow a person to delicately unfurl at a pace that does not trigger overwhelming shame or self-loathing.
- Curiosity! I have written about being curious about the back-story of our strong reactions. In those reactions there are clues to who you are and any automatic judgements you make about yourself – often without realising.
3. Awareness in the moment or ‘presence’ can help us be more effectively curious and prevent us from getting caught up in the automatic reactions we’ve always had. Again, I have written about this many times before but becoming aware of our emotions in the moment they are triggered is the ‘make or break moment’ that can can challenge, and free us considerably, from automatic reactions, accelerate self-awareness and then ultimately enable self-acceptance.
4. Listen to feedback from others. Brace yourself and try to listen to, receive and objectively evaluate feedback from others. Possibly invite it! Our biggest blind spots are nearly always to ourselves. Others are more likely to see traits in us that we can’t see in ourselves because of the denial we can do. Once we can learn to digest negative feedback as a possibility, we’re far more likely to truly ‘see’ and then accept a fuller version of ourselves.
5. Looking for those times we seek approval and/or fear disapproval and challenging their validity. Fear of disapproval can mean we miss opportunities and drive very harsh self-judgment. Chasing approval and external validation rarely satisfies for long. We can never have enough – however much we chase. I think learning to be less influenced by compliments and criticisms (and therefore being more able to objectively decide if there are any useful messages in them) is a healthy aim.
6. It’s obvious but I have to include it: cutting yourself some slack. Being human is messy, we all make mistakes, all mistakes can be forgiven. That negative, nagging and cruel voice that sometimes arrives in our head needs to be challenged. If that voice is just making us feel terrible about ourselves, it is serving no beneficial purpose. If it’s driving us to work out what the problem is, learn or work out the best way forward, it’s no longer a negative voice in our head. Transform it.
7. Less directly obvious as part of self-acceptance is gratitude towards others. When we start to see ourselves as more interconnected with, and reliant on, others, it develops a healthy humility, lessens a need to compare ourselves ‘against’ others and helps diminish any idea of the separateness that’s necessary to feel ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than other people.
For example, when we go to the shop and buy food, consider all the people in the growing, packaging, transporting and selling process we could give a nod of gratitude to. When we look around our home, there’s endless invisible contributions that went into creating the space we live in. This level of awareness of the ‘whole’ and gratitude for it can humble us. This in turn helps us arrive at a place with less of the ego that continuously craves praise or is wounded by criticism. This can encourage a deep self-acceptance – just for being as we are.
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P.S. When adults first consider the downsides of giving children approval and disapproval, there’s always an initial confusion. ‘How can we help children understand something is ‘wrong’ if it’s not ideal to tell them off/shame them for the ‘bad’ things they do and praise them for the ‘good’ things they do? How can they learn? I totally get this confusion because for most of us, it’s such a shift away from the ‘norm’ we experienced in our childhood.
The answer lies in how we approach unhelpful behaviours children engage in (and children do engage in things it would be ideal for them to unlearn). The aim is to prevent a child from feeling rejected or shamed but still addressing the problem behaviour. I have written about this before in many posts, but in a nutshell, it’s about isolating the ‘problem’ and proactively working with the child to find a solution – especially if the behaviour is a persistent one.