Hello there so its Thursday and I'm back on my talk2jo page to talk
about self-acceptance and why it can be really quite difficult to accept
ourselves. I'm writing a blog about this at the moment and you can find my
blog at thegoodenoughmum.com/blog and you'll see that
I'll be publishing something about this subject in the next couple of days. So
self-acceptance - why is it so difficult? I certainly struggled with
self-acceptance when I was younger and it's taken me a long time really to be
able to be okay with who I am as a person and I'd like to share sort of why
that's difficult and the things that have helped me to get more to a place
where I can be myself and be okay with being myself. So I read a really useful
blog yesterday all about something called introjection and it's a
psychological term that we use. An introjection is where we take on the
thoughts about ourselves that perhaps we think other people are thinking about us,
and this can start at a really young age and I'd like to tell the story that
the blog tells because it sort of illustrates the process of what can
happen. So it said imagine that Sam is a four year old boy who has been
learning how to dress himself and one morning his mum says to him now hurry up
go and get yourself dressed we're going out you can choose your best clothes put
them on and then we'll be going out so Sam run runs upstairs and he's really
quite excited because he's going to choose his clothes for the first time and he
can choose his best clothes so he puts on his brightest shirt and his best pair
of blue jeans and he runs downstairs to his mother who turns round and and has a
sort of look of disgust on her face and says that's no good you know go
upstairs and get changed. So he runs upstairs and he just feels
really dejected and thinks that he's useless and actually he can't dress very
well and he can't he can't choose his own clothes so he takes his clothes off
and he sits there and he waits for his mummy to come and dress him because
obviously he's no good at choosing clothes himself and the mummy comes
upstairs and she's even crosser because he's not even dressed now and he sees
her face and he feels like you know mummy thinks I'm I'm stupid and what we
don't know is that mummy is planning to go out for lunch with a couple of her
single friends who don't have children she's worried about how Sam's going to
look to them and she felt fairly embarrassed when he came down he was
dressed in his cowboy outfit and also the babysitter's cancelled and so
they're going to be in even more of a rush now than she thought and basically
she's just really stressed and of course Sam doesn't really understand any of
this all he knows is that mummy was cross with him and he takes it
personally. And part of why that would be is that as
children we are very very dependent on our parents to look after us and we fear
abandonment and we need to please our parents and what we see our parents
demonstrating even in - they don't have to say anything it can be with their faces -
and we can see pleasure or displeasure in them and we tend to take that into
our identity and we can very quickly if, it's sort of like those sorts of
incidents happen again and again, we begin to build up this identity that we
aren't very good. The other thing that can happen is you know there's so
much out there about a sort of encouraging us to be good you know such
as you know children are asked to go and kiss usually elderly people whom
they don't really know very well and they have to sort of overcome that sort
of dislike of actually kissing somebody they don't know because that's what
they've been told they've got to do and that's being a good boy or a good girl
you know being a good boy or a good girl in all sorts of
ways that's just one example but in sorts of ways we're told this is how we
have to be good. So you know we push over a child a playgroup and we're told that
that was naughty and we've got to go and say sorry even though we don't feel
sorry - we begin to override our emotions and begin to take on what is considered
to be good behavior and also it can begin to seem to us that we're naughty
and so we're building up this sort of internal picture of ourselves that we're
naughty and unless we're good we're not acceptable and we begin to sort of think
that being good is the only way to be acceptable and so inevitably when we do
make mistakes we can actually begin to think that that we're unworthy of
love, we're unworthy of acceptance and it's
really difficult for us to actually live with ourselves and this is where our
lack of self-acceptance comes in. Carl Rogers has got this
lovely quote I've used that at the top of my blog which to be honest I struggle
to remember but he said the curious paradox is is that when I accept myself
as I am then change happens really quickly and it is a paradox but if we're
able to let go of all those notions of what we have to be in order to be
acceptable to people, if we can let go of those ideas, if we can make a
distinction between socially correct behavior and what's good, if we can make
a distinction between those, we don't then have to be good in order to be
acceptable. We might do socially correct things but that's not necessarily
talking about being good because the fact is is that we are actually enough
in who we are. I think, there's some, the aspect of this that I found so so
helpful in my own growth and development I think is knowing that you know we are
human, we have what Paul Gilbert who writes about the compassionate
mind calls tricky brains whereby a lot of our threat systems react before our
conscious brains are engaged. That is just the way the brain works you
know for: an example would be is that if you touch something hot you will move
your hand before you even realize that that thing was hot - before it enters your
conscious brain - because at a very quick level, at a lower part of our brain our
bodies are reacting and that's before the message gets to our conscious brains.
When we were responding to threat we can behave in ways that actually our
conscious brains - if it had a chance to think - might stop us from doing and so
we can react in ways where that threat system takes over and then afterwards we
could think, my god you know why did I do that, and it's really important I think to
recognize that that is part of the human condition we do have tricky brains. Paul
Gilbert says you know it's not our fault but we do have a responsibility and I
think in recognizing that the way we are is not a fault it's a result of our tricky
brain, it's maybe a result of the perhaps stressful situations that our own
parents were under and perhaps their difficult circumstances that they were
brought up in perhaps they hadn't been able to resolve things from their
childhood and that's sort of transmitted into us so we were not in control of
those things. But what we are in control of is our, I suppose you know, how we choose
to deal with ourselves in this moment and part of that is about you know
allowing ourselves to recognize that we are human. And it's really important to
sort of try and think of things like how would your best friend approach you
in this situation when you've done something that you don't feel very happy
about? You know if you can imagine the kindest wisest person that you know and
how would they respond to you in this situation?
And if you can begin to imagine that compassionate mind that often helps us
to recognize that truly we were trying our best
we may have mucked it up we may have hurt people but it wasn't our intention
and we can begin also to to do something which Paul Gilbert caused mentalizing
which is imagining how it feels for the other person as well so in that little
example I gave at the beginning with Sam and his mum I mean obviously Sam at
four years old isn't able to mentalize what was happening to his mum in that
situation but perhaps when he's older if you remember that incident he'd be able
to look back and he'd be able to recognize that his mum is just a person,
just as vulnerable as he was, and you know that she was stressed out the thought
of meeting her friends and you know she wanted to impress them because she
wasn't feeling very confident herself - that's the sort of process of
mentalizing and I think it's really helpful if - whatever situation we're
in - even if we can, you know, if we're treated badly by people to sort of try and
imagine what was going on for them in that moment and what made them behave in
that sort of way, and and what the influences are on them. And we really
don't know often what has gone on in people's lives, we really don't
understand the pain and suffering that they've experienced, and that's usually
where difficult behavior comes from and it's where our difficult behavior comes
from as well and it's so helpful I think to hold that in mind because that really
helps us with self acceptance - is to think you know yeah I didn't choose the
circumstances, I didn't choose my parents - I have to say I do have lovely parents -
but you know we didn't choose the situations that we were born into, we didn't
choose the school we went to, all the children we interacted with, we didn't
choose the bullying, whatever, those things happen to us
but we don't need to stay in a place of being like a victim to those
circumstances, we can actually now exercise a choice as to how we want to
respond to those situations. And sometimes it's actually really helpful
to talk through, especially if we've been very hurt by circumstances in our lives,
you know they're not often not our doing - but then what tends to happen is
when we've been hurt by circumstances because we're hurt we go out and we do
hurtful things and it can be really helpful to talk that through and that's
why I I work as a counsellor: to give people the opportunity to talk about
this sort of stuff and to be able to go over these things and to understand what
was going on both for them and for the people around them
and so that they can learn to live with whatever happened to them and whatever
they did and where necessary to try and and make a difference to their lives. So
if that's spoken to you at all and you want to talk to me about it
I do offer face-to-face counselling in Southend,
I do have space available and if you'd like to see me and have a chance to talk
about these sorts of things you'd be more than welcome to get in touch with
me. It is all completely confidential and unless of course there's there's a risk
of something like harm to children so - you know and obviously we
can we can talk through that so you know the limits of confidentiality - if you
want to contact me via Facebook you're welcome to do so
obviously the conversations aren't shared with anybody else it's just me
that has access to my facebook page and we can talk a little bit if you'd like
to know more about it; but just in finishing as well I'd like to say I
talked a bit more about this on my blog thegoodenoughmum.com/blog
and that'll be coming out I think I'll finish it today and if you're on the
email list you'll be getting it tomorrow if all goes well - but please do
visit that that website and have a look at the
blogs because they expand a little bit on what I'm saying. So I can see
someone's just joined me I'm sorry I'm just about to finish but you can catch
me on the replay and thanks for joining me and I'll see you next week either on
Tuesday at 9:15 on the good enough mum business page or here at the talk2jo
business page at 9:15 on Thursdays and you're very welcome to join me then. Bye!
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