Your self-acceptance starter kit
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How to, you know, actually start this whole self-acceptance thing.
Happy Sunday, Soothers. Self-acceptance! Self-self, acceptance! We all KNOW self-acceptance and self-compassion are keys to improving our lives, our mental health, our self-love, all the good things in our life. But how do we actually, like... begin accepting ourselves?
That's what I'm going to tackle today, giving you a few tangible and actionable exercises and steps you can begin to put into practice. Self-acceptance and self-compassion are so wonderful when you're able to embody them but 1. they are so vague sometimes as to feel meaningless, like, what does it even mean to accept yourself, what does that actually LOOK like? and 2. society is super invested in us literally hating ourselves, while at the same time paying a lot of lip service to self-acceptance, and so the messaging gets super murky and confusing and shame-inducing. "I should accept myself... but also I should lose 20 pounds and be able to thrive under COVID and be having more sex and meditating daily and, and, and...?"
The end result ends up a message of "Accept yourself.... but only when you've improved yourself."
Fuck that.
You get to be okay with who you are right now, the flawed, imperfect, angsty, anxious little beautiful weirdo that you are. And here's the thing about true self-acceptance: It is ALSO the place from where you can begin to make meaningful change on the parts of your life you genuinely WOULD like to shift or improve.
That's right: it's also okay to want to improve and change!
But if you're anything like me you spent most of your life trying to change from a foundation of self-loathing and shame, which is a pretty unstable foundation to take action from. When you attempt change and improvement from a place of self-love and acceptance for what already is, that's stable, solid ground from which you can truly begin.
So let's go. Let's accept self. Here are some exercises.
Write down everything you dislike about yourself and want to change. Then, come up with at least two reasons that everything on your list is actually an asset or beneficial to your life. This may stretch your brains a bit, and that's the point. "I have a horrible temper and you want me to come up with reasons it's GREAT?!" or "I'm a horrible procrastinator and I'm supposed to think that's beneficial — it's ruining my life and job!" Just give it a try. This is a little bit of shadow work around self-acceptance. Pretty much everything in the universe is technically neutral, and also has a "light" side and a "shadow" side -- aka the sides that can go a bit too much in either direction, shaking it out of balance. So anger has a shadow side — cruelty, rage; but it also has a "light" side — righteousness, fuel for change, getting what you need. We want to begin to see the full spectrums of the things we are only currently considering horribly flaws. This helps shift our thinking towards self-acceptance.
Take a look at the list of all the things you don't like about yourself/want to change, and ask, What if they did never change, how could I move forward in my life in a way that supported that truth? I wrote a while back on considering the question, "What if nothing ever changed?" and I'm offering you an expansion of that thought here. Single, but don't want to be? What would it have to look like to love your life forever as a single person? Like, what would you have to do to support that? Dislike your home for whatever reason? How could you make it feel cozier and supportive to your needs? Or what have you. Let me give you a few examples from my own life. Something I don't like about myself right now is that I spend a lot of time on my phone and most nights I actually take my phone to bed (I know, the shame!). So, what if I always took my phone to bed, what would that look like to support that reality? I would wear blue-light blocking glasses and turn the phone to greyscale and dim to minimize the blue light. I would unfollow things on social media platforms that got me too riled up. I might even notice that zoning out on my phone before bed feels kind of soothing; reading books before bed actually too often activates me because I get so into stories that I can't put books down and then I stay up til midnight reading and actually get less sleep. Another example? I have probably gained about 20 pounds in the last few years. This fall, it's time: I'm donating/throwing out the clothes that no longer fit, that I've held onto for 4 years, and am considering hiring a stylist to figure out how to dress this body. Another example? I have a client who believes herself to be a procrastinator — finishing most projects last-minute or needing deadline extensions. Well, one, who said it was better to not finish stuff last minute (I mean, society says that but is it ACTUALLY BETTER? Not necessarily, right?)? But two, what would it be like to support yourself in a life when you were simply forever a last-minute procrastinator? I told her it might look like making a pot of coffee the night before a deadline because she can assume she will be pulling an all-nighter to finish it. It might look like not scheduling anything the day after a deadline because she might have stayed up late finishing it and will need to sleep. It might look like having a standard email crafted and ready to go with the right phrases to ask for a deadline extension.
You might be saying that this is all well and good for lifestyle stuff like procrastination or phone use, but what about deeper things... harder things... uglier things?Find a forgiveness practice that resonates with you. Many of us do need to forgive other people in our lives, not to absolve them or reconnect with them, but to remove the heavy emotional weight so we can move on in our own lives. But honestly, a lot of the time, the person we have to forgive is ourselves. And where we might really need forgiveness is for hating ourselves for so long. Because, for me, this actually meant I was hating a younger part of myself and she knew it and it weighed so heavy on her heart. So consider doing inner child work; consider the Hawaiian Ho'oponopono prayer and practice of forgiveness; find forgiveness meditations that resonate with you. Other beautiful practices include Focusing, Somatic Experiencing, and Internal Family Systems. Finally, an exercise my coach Nida had me do was to write a "love letter" to myself. She wrote, "This is based on the work of Dr. Barbara DeAngelis. It is typically used to sort through feelings wrt another person - and it’s extremely powerful when writing to yourself. The process guides us with simple prompts through the many layers of emotion we may not be in touch with." You can do this for yourself too, dear reader; find instructions here. (You can also use this in relation to another person you wish to forgive/release.)
Finally, know this — like, REALLY know it — self-acceptance takes time. And if you struggle now with self-acceptance, you may beat yourself up for not accepting yourself right away or as fast as you want. It all happens in good time; for me, it's been a years-long unfolding.
When I still find myself in those moments of self-recrimination and self-criticism and self-loathing, as I, also a human, inevitably do, I try to reach for one of my most comforting phrases:
"I am still learning."
And so may I be lucky enough to, forever.