I used to think “self-acceptance” was a skill. Later I realized it’s actually an anti-skill. Self-acceptance is always there—but self-rejection can be learned on top. What we call “learning self-acceptance”, then, is actually the process of unlearning each and every self-rejection.
For example, I used to be fairly emotionally numb (ie: rejecting my own feelings). And, in theory, I wanted to “feel all of my feelings”. The common advice for this goal is to “Pay more attention to your feelings.” So I tried that for five months, but the only outcome was wasting five months.
When I realized this wasn’t working, I thought, “I’ve been avoiding my feelings for YEARS. What if this isn’t random and accidental… what if it’s strategic? What if my numbness has incentives?” If this was true, it would make sense that brute forcing attention didn’t work: It didn’t address whatever the incentives were.
But what were they? Why might I “want” to be numb? So I prompted a counselor to help me investigate. After much wrangling (both the counselor and also my mind), out of my subconscious came things like:
“Being aware of my feelings will make me less productive.”
“Expressing negative emotions will make others mad at me.”
“Negative emotions are just bad will cause suffering.”
And each felt true. For the first time, I could see why I had been avoiding my feelings. I even felt respect these motivations.
And, contrary to what some readers who have had their brains fried by low quality therapy might think, all of these incentives were actually correct. Awareness of feelings…
Distracted me while I was working, making me less productive in the short-term.
Caused me to express more negative emotions, making the people around me at the time more likely to get mad at me.
Created suffering because, separately, I was resisting negative emotions pretty hard.
It was all locally optimal. Fortunately, it wasn’t globally optimal: it was possible to have my cake and eat it too, feel my feelings and not have this bad stuff happen.
Resolution looked like finding and feeling mindsets like:
What if awareness of my feelings made me pointed me at what was most meaningful to me (as opposed to just being distractions)?
What if my avoidance of having people mad at me meant I wanted to become better at defending myself in conflict and/or live with different people?
What if negative emotions could be cool and interesting as sensations (as opposed to just suffering)?
It was a deep and complicated process, and involved other bottlenecks I won’t get into here. But once every inentive felt addressed, the millisecond-flinch of rejecting and numbing my feelings stopped (at least for those particular incentives). I feel a lot more now. Self-love returned to being obvious again.
