Love Even This: The Road to Self-Acceptance

“I just wish I could stop feeling this way.”

Nicole often struggled with bouts of anxiety that were not only a cause for frustration but a source of deep shame. She hated that she had these experiences and considered it a weakness. For Nicole, the concept of self-acceptance was as foreign as they come.

Therapy and Self-Acceptance

I often think of self-acceptance as the great problem that people bring into therapy. 

In a sense, it is the underlying issue that is hidden behind all the overt symptoms that cause someone to seek out a psychotherapist.

People enter into therapy with many things they want to change. They look in the mirror and do not like what they see and hope, perhaps, that therapy can lead them to a better self and a better life.

This is only exacerbated in a culture that idolizes perfection and worships at the altar of productivity. These days we are besieged with advice on the 18 (or 20 or 52) Ways to Be More Awesome, Happier, Flawless, Relaxed, Creative and just generally Better.

Self-actualization is the great expectation with which we live, compared to which self-acceptance might seem like a call for simply settling.

But self-acceptance is not the opposite of self-actualization. Rather it is the foundation that makes self-actualization possible.

The Power of Self-Acceptance

From a Jungian perspective, psychological symptoms are not automatically approached as problems that need to be eliminated. Without denying the suffering that such symptoms can cause, Jungian therapy sees them first as the psyche’s failed attempts at healing. In other words, the symptoms themselves are meaningful and may point to a needed quality or experience in an individual’s life.

For Nicole, our attempts to eliminate her anxiety through various approaches — relaxation, mindfulness, changing her underlying thoughts — all seemed to lead nowhere. Finally, in exasperation she said, “Why won’t it just won’t leave me alone?” 

Sometimes it is the seemingly little moments in therapy that can have the most meaning. In this case, that little word ‘it’ suggested that her anxiety was no longer just a feeling that she was identified with. It was a presence in her life that “wouldn’t leave her alone.”

What was this ‘It’ that wouldn’t leave her alone, I asked Nicole? Was there an image that she could connect to? 

“It’s like a complaining child that refuses to be satisfied. There is nothing I can do to make it happy.”

This image was a turning point in Nicole’s therapy. An image like this helps to create a distance between the individual and their experience. Through the image they have something with which they can develop a relationship. 

Relating to this image of the complaining child was the beginning of Nicole’s road to self-acceptance. 

We began to understand that trying to drive out her anxiety was like trying to abandon a small child. This child was a part of her and losing connection to this aspect of herself would have been devastating in the long run.

Compassion for the Self

Most people come into therapy because they have learned at some point in their life that some part of them is unacceptable. For Nicole, this child represented an aspect of herself that had to be abandoned early on in order for her to get through a difficult childhood.

The image of the child revealed Nicole’s anxiety to be related to a vulnerable, undeveloped, and ultimately rejected part of herself. Accepting this child was an essential part of her self-acceptance. Without this understanding, she might have healed her symptoms, but lost a part of her soul.

Self-acceptance means having compassion for the suffering, weak, and broken parts of ourselves, to love even this difficult aspect of our lives. 

Without this compassion we continue to reject those aspects of ourselves that were rejected early on. These aspects, then, remain in a state of rejection. We may eliminate our symptoms, but the original wound goes unhealed and a vital part of the soul remains unredeemed. 

As C.G. Jung once wrote:

“We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.”

Inviting the Darkness In

It is my experience that self-acceptance has a powerful effect on the symptoms a person brings to psychotherapy. Rejection of those experiences — condemnation, to use Jung’s word in the quote above — has a way of entrenching those symptoms even deeper, while acceptance can begin to dissolve them.

Approached with compassion and love, Nicole’s “child” could begin to feel safe enough to let go of it’s complaint and begin to express it’s natural joy and curiosity toward life. And, eventually, she could, too.

The importance of self-acceptance and the transformative power of inviting into our lives even our darker emotions is powerfully described by the Sufi mystic and poet Rumi, in the following poem, titled The Guest House:

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

(Translated by Coleman Barks)

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