SELF-ACCEPTANCE = HAPPINESS, FULFILLMENT AND SUCCESS
By Phil Golding
SELF-ACCEPTANCE – THE KEY THAT FREES US FROM SUFFERING
An adult with a genuine, healthy self-esteem can shield his or herself from emotional suffering, or at least quickly recover, regardless of the negativity of the situation. Those with a healthy self-esteem carry a strong belief in their own self-worth. They are not dependent on others to give them permission to feel worthy. They do not need pats on the back before they can feel good about themselves. They already know they are worthy, even when they make human mistakes, which human beings inevitably do. To them, their fundamental worthiness is not in question. They exist, therefore that are worthy. That is it. Nothing can change that and nor should it.
I am not talking here about a big ego indulging itself. I am talking about responsible people who know how to truly care for themselves and in so doing, know how to care for others. Because of this strong belief in their essential worthiness, those with a healthy self-esteem do not indulge in self-rejection and as a result, are unlikely to be condemning of others. Those with a healthy self-esteem are psychologically protected by their own self-acceptance.
What about the rest of us, who struggle when it comes believing in ourselves? As a result of our self-rejection, emotional difficulties such as anxiety, depression, timidness, anger, along with many others interfere with our lives.
Many of us don't even realize that we are rejecting ourselves. We don't realize that this is the underlying cause of our suffering. We assume that the cause is our circumstances in life, but our circumstances are only triggering our own self-defeating thought patterns that are running habitually within our mind below our awareness.
We are not wrong because this is happening. We are not stupid either. Our minds are programmed without us knowing it before we are even teenagers. Our potential for happiness, fulfillment and success is still in place. The challenge for us is to access that potential and use it to first heal our minds and then use what we have learnt to create that life that we really want.
In this article I want to give you some insights as the how to do this, knowing that it is not as simple as just reading an article in a magazine. But hopefully this might be a good stepping stone for someone to embark on the road to happiness, fulfillment and success. At the very least, it can give you some insights into the nature of the human mind, why we suffer and how to overcome suffering.
To begin with, let's have a look at how our minds get caught up in suffering.
WHERE OUR CONFUSION BEGINS
The opposite of self-acceptance is negative self-judgment or self-rejection. This form of self-judgment, more than anything else, blocks us in our efforts to work through and overcome emotional problems.
In my personal and professional experience, I have found that all destructive judgement stems from one fundamental belief, or rather misbelief , that is forged in children's' minds by the confusion of others. This misbelief is:
By the term “ human” , I am meaning not perfect. For children in particular, the standard of perfect behavior is measured by others. Furthermore, there are invariably many different versions of what this perfect standard is, depending on who is metering out the discipline. This standard can even change from moment to moment with one individual disciplinarian, depending on his or her changing moods. When we were children, we were often unable to live up to these standards.
As children, we are very vulnerable. We are dependent on our adult cares for our physical, mental and emotional wellbeing. In regards to our mental and emotional wellbeing, we depend on our carers for our sense or identity and our sense of worthiness. It is essential for our successful development into adulthood that we feel we belong and that we are loved unconditionally. When we don't receive this vital love and attention, we are liable to be adversely effected in a very deep way.
During our childhood, when we failed to live up to the standards set for us by our carers, some of us suffered abuse, ridicule and rejection. We were deemed unworthy of love. As a result, we frequently felt sad, afraid, ashamed, abandoned, angry and so on.
Often the problem is a lack of active mentoring by our carers. Our carers were often pre-occupied or absent and not in tune with our essential needs. We felt unworthy of love in this situation as well—not important to our carers.
Another problem is too much involvement from our carers. As children, we need room to be ourselves—to develop our own unique identities according to our own special potential.
As children, due to our vulnerable, undeveloped minds and resultant deep dependency, we end up taking such negative experiences very personally. We conclude that we must be wrong in some way to be treated in such a manner. In many ways we conclude that we don't deserve love. We also take on the beliefs of our main carers, not knowing anything else. As children we are on a rapid learning and developmental path, but we can't yet discern the quality of what we are learning. We are just unconsciously soaking it all up. This is the root of childhood conditioning, positive and negative.
When we take this misbelieve that we are unworthy because we are human into adulthood, no matter how we try to hide this deep confusion from the world around us, it nevertheless pervades and distorts every area of our lives. This condemnation, this withdrawal of love, I believe, is the main root of all continuing rejection of ourselves and others.
As a child, we may have also had a character that was sensitive or difficult to manage in many different ways, which can compound the situation. In other words, children often display strong personality traits and emotional dispositions seemingly from birth. We are not necessarily a blank slate before we start. Nevertheless, the weight of responsibility is on parents to skill themselves up for the task of parenthood. It is the parent's challenge to constructively work with and reduce, or hopefully help their child overcome negative traits. It is also an opportunity for the parent to help the child reach his or her highest potential. Children are children. They cannot be expected to successfully parent themselves.
Naturally all children need guidance and discipline. This is how we learn to take control of our own emotions and needs. All discipline, however robust it may need to be at times, must be wise, loving and compassionate, otherwise it contains elements of destructiveness.
Of course, the withdrawal of love is where the confusion starts for everyone, and we all then pass it down the line from generation to generation. Because we are all human, no one is a perfect parent. We can't always protect our children from the negative circumstances of life, not matter hard we try. Coming to terms with our humanness as parents is one of the challenges of self-acceptance and personal development in general.
THE ONGOING PROBLEM OF NEGATIVE CONDITIONING
When we were children, we may not have had any other example of care to relate to, so we grew to regard the confusion created by negative conditioning as a normal way to think. Because of this “normalizing”, this confusion becomes imbedded deep within our minds where it continues to control us beyond our awareness. These subconscious thought-patterns gain a hold in the early stages of childhood development and grow into distorted beliefs that then control how we feel and act. These misbeliefs then keep our emotional problems on a repetitive loop, creating ongoing difficulties such as conflict, when conflict wouldn't be present otherwise. Our perceptions of reality have become distorted. We then continue to create a distorted reality for ourselves throughout our lives until we become aware of these self-defeating beliefs and change them. Until then, we may think that life is against us, but in actual fact it is our own negatively programmed minds that are causing our suffering.
In the same vein, because of this confusion, we think being mistreated by others is the cause our suffering, as it was when we were children. However, as adults, it is our own self-rejection, emerging out of our own misbeliefs, that makes us emotionally vulnerable to the perceived or actual mistreatment from others.
This fundamental insight can be very difficult to comprehend at first. We have been so conditioned to blame others for our emotional suffering. On the surface it appears so convincing that someone else or something else is the cause. We think that if only they would behave in the way we think they should, everything would be alright. Sometimes the other person's behavior is destructive. More often than not though, we have misread the situation. More often than not we are over-reacting to someone's minor human imperfections. More often than not, people don't intent to hurt us, they are just a bit unskillful at times, just like you and I. Most often, the problem is not the other person so much as our inappropriate reactions to their humanness, and underneath that, to our own humanness. When this is the case, when it is time to deal with an issue that does need to be acted upon, we are not able to do this effectively. We either overreact or not act at all.
Caring for ourselves and being empowered is about learning to constructively act, to consciously and confidently responding to life's challenges rather than blindly and fearfully reacting in ways that just makes things worse.
Thinking that we are a victim and lashing out at others or ourselves or avoiding life's challenges altogether is the sort of thinking that represents the confusion that keeps us in a mind state of believing we are powerless to control our own happiness and wellbeing.
HEALING OUR MIND AND TAKING BACK CONTROL
In our confusion we are still relating to life from the position of a powerless child. If it wasn't for self-rejection, acute emotional vulnerability in adulthood would not be there in the first place. Without this prior self-rejection, the condemnation from another would have little impact. We would simply know that the person doing the condemning is perhaps having a bad day and is obviously confused. We would know that no matter what mistakes we may happen to make, we do not deserve to be mistreated, to be condemned as unworthy.
We can't always have control over the behaviour of another. We can, however, take charge of what we accept into our own mind and heart. We can shield ourselves with our own self-acceptance. Self-acceptance contains the power of love, which is far more powerful than most people realize. There is nothing more powerful, in fact. The challenge lies in the degree we truly understand love and our ability to put it into action.
An adult has the power of reasoning and the capacity of consciousness to know what feels right, and to trust that feeling. The only thing that feels right is love. As a result of our level of accumulated confusion, unfortunately for many of us, our ability to access this important adult capacity of conscious-awareness becomes impaired. We become so confused that we think we have to reject ourselves instead of love ourselves. This self-rejection locks us into a position of acute vulnerability. We become isolated from our own higher knowing. In our state of vulnerability, our limited survival instincts may then be inclined to condemn and attack as a form of “defense”, in a blind reaction to the negative conditioning in our own minds.
Self-acceptance lifts us out this unnecessary fight-or-flight reaction. Self-acceptance, practiced in a consistent, dedicated way, inevitably exposes, dismantles and overcomes self-rejection and all its negative consequences. This is self-responsibility. This is becoming a mature adult with a healthy self-esteem, who feels fulfilled, regardless of who we are, what we do or what we have. We know how to care for our own mind. We don't waste our time blaming others for the way our own mind reacts. We are part of the solution for the world and not part of the problem. Furthermore, as a result of our healing journey, we learn how to consciously stay centered within our own self-worth, even in the face of life's challenges.
A profound degree of self-acceptance is the key that frees us from suffering, but there are many obstacles along the way to finally turning that key, and almost all of them are inside our own mind. This is why it can be so hard at first to see the true nature of these obstacles, and why it can be even harder to change them.
Don't be discouraged though. The fact that the obstacles are inside your own mind also makes the situation immeasurably easier, providing your healing journey is approached in the right way. It is made easier because you don't have to waste your time trying to control or change other people. To find peace, happiness and fulfillment, you only have to look within yourself. Almost all the changes you need to make are within your grasp. Furthermore, the unlimited power with which you need to make those changes is also within you. You must, therefore, never give up on yourself!
The more we truly accept ourselves, the more we love ourselves unconditionally. The more we love ourselves unconditionally, the more we heal ourselves. The more we heal ourselves, the more self-aware and empowered we become and the more we are able to act in a way that is for our highest good, and the highest good for everyone else for that matter.
Below is a set of guide-lines in the form of a check-list for caring for yourself and particularly your mind, which is the foundation of your entire life.
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