I used to assume that self-acceptance was an action. That there was an “accept myself” mental motion I could execute. And I had tried to “accept myself” many times, but it never seemed to do anything.
Nowadays, I think “self-acceptance” is a misnomer and mostly doesn’t exist.
Instead, I think it’s about the absence of self-rejection of each part of yourself.
For example, I am often unaware of how I’m feeling in my body, and I would rather be aware. The common advice to this problem is to become more aware of your feelings by “accepting” them. But by my logic above, the way to accept feelings is actually to cease rejecting them.
Of course, if you’re rejecting some feeling or part of yourself, you must have one or more incentives to do so.
As I investigated these incentives (mostly through Coherence Therapy), I discovered that I intuitively believed my feelings were dangerous:
I was afraid that being aware of my feelings would make me less productive, rather than keep me focused on what feels meaningful.
I was afraid that expressing my emotions would make other people mad at me, rather than help me find the people I feel comfortable being myself around.
I believed deep down that negative feelings were intrinsically bad to have, rather than merely indicating that the world or my interpretations of the world could be improved.
…
No wonder I was rejecting my feelings!
Since then I’ve made a lot of progress on “accepting” my feelings by untangling the incentives I had to reject them.
Thanks to Stag Lynn for helping edit this post. Thanks to Kaj Sotala for reviewing the draft.
I suppose there is always some “ideology” behind self-rejection, but perhaps it makes a difference whether that ideology is against your feelings on the object level, like “feelings are for losers” or “this specific feeling makes you a loser”, or on the meta level, like “thinking about your feelings is a waste of time”.
I mean, if it is the latter, it should be easier to overcome if you happen to be in a situation where you can’t do anything else, for example you are traveling by train and you forgot to bring a book, or you are hiking. Or it someone tries to start this topic with you. But if you have direct objections against feelings, you will actively oppose the opportunity to think about them.