The Power of Acceptance
Criticism. Judgment. Dismissal. Denial.
If people aren’t doing it to us directly, we’re doing it to ourselves internally to protect ourselves from hearing it from others.
Do you ever have a thought or emotion pop up and you go, “That’s dumb,” or, “That’s not normal,” or “I’m a terrible person for thinking/feeling this”? And then those beliefs cause you to not speak to someone else about it? Like “If I thought it was dumb, then they’re DEFINITELY gonna think it’s dumb.”
Why do we do this to ourselves?
Well, society and our families (guided by society) have criticized us from the very beginning. Before we were even born, our parents were being berated from all angles about how to be “good” parents. Theories on child development gave broad-stroke milestones for “normal” development.
If public social rules aren’t followed by us then someone from somewhere will criticize us. We are dismissed and diminished over and over to where we lose trust. Sometimes it’s trust in ourselves. Sometimes it’s trust in others.
Parents doubt their skills to be parents, even if the way they parent is helping their kids be more connected and regulated. If it’s not how their other parent friends are doing it, then they’re the weird ones.
So how do we move past this?
We have to accept our humanness.
Society pressures us to be perfect. Perfect levels of productivity. Perfect levels of social. Perfect levels of appropriate. If we let the expectations of society define who we are, then we often lose a lot of our personal identity. Yes, it can be uncomfortable to grow, but why do we only seem to accept the discomfort of conformity and not accept the discomfort of being our own unique selves?
We have to accept we’re a complex combination of nature and nurture.
The nurture we received from society and our parents shaped us and caused many of us to build protection and coping mechanisms that are getting in the way of daily life. There may be coping mechanisms that are safer we may not even realize we needed or could incorporate into our day-to-day lives (i.e. stims) due to society’s bullying to keep it all in.
Therapy can help us discover those coping skills that work for us. Therapy can also help us untangle the nurture from the nature.
Discovering our nature can be incredibly powerful. I highly recommend identifying your natural number from https://bodyof9.com/ because it helped me a LOT in understanding what I need in terms of connection and feeling heard.
We have to accept our logic side and our emotional side.
Many of us intellectualize a LOT (I’m guilty of this myself). Logic makes sense. Logic gives us a framework. …but this means that many emotions don’t make sense to our logic. Society uses logic when defining normalcy. Logic lets us not really feel our emotions, it lets us analyze them from afar. Logic creates a list of “shoulds” and a cramped life of conformity.
Now before we start getting in a criticism loop and judging our logic side (see how easy judgment creeps in?), logic is not good or bad! However, it can also be behind a lot of the internal criticism towards our emotional side.
We can have one emotion about a situation. We can have 10 emotions about that situation. Those emotions may be about that situation or about the primary emotions about the situation. Super meta. Super complex. And it’s all okay! We can accept it.
These three are the main ones. They branch off into smaller categories for sure, but working on accepting ourselves from these three different angles can allow us to feel more at peace. I don’t expect anyone to flip a switch and be accepting of themselves immediately either. This is the challenge of it, right? In order to be accepting, we also have to accept that we won’t be perfect at accepting our humanness, nature/nurture, and logical/emotional sides. The fact that it builds on itself is both amazing and infuriating, and I believe in us and this shift in mindset.
