Category: Acceptance

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Accept Yourself is PsyBlog’s fourth online course, after The Anxiety Plan, Spark and Activate, all of which are included in the Premium Membership.

The course is designed to help you overcome barriers to self-acceptance and learn daily practices that promote emotional healing.

With a Premium Membership you can now access the whole of the Accept Yourself course immediately online.

A Premium Membership also gives you access to all members-only articles, premium content and other courses, as they become available.

About the course

Imagine seeing a small child falling over in the street and cutting herself.

We naturally feel compassion, a sense of warmth and understanding.

Although empathising with the child is easy, it can be hard to feel compassion towards ourselves.

Instead of accepting the self, we:

• beat ourselves up over mistakes,
• chastise ourselves for not sleeping well,
• fight with unwanted thoughts flitting through our minds,
• wrestle with traumatic memories,
• and get irritated by bodily aches and pains.

Self-acceptance makes you happy

A few years ago, a UK charity surveyed 5,000 people about ten habits that science has shown to make people happier.

The survey revealed that self-acceptance made people most happy — even compared to being positive, learning new things and being part of something bigger.

Despite its benefits, self-acceptance was the habit people were least likely to perform.

Overcome barriers to self-acceptance

We face many barriers to accepting ourselves, including:

• Surrendering control – and no one likes to feel out of control.
• Self-acceptance may feel like giving up – but it turns out that self-acceptance is not the opposite of change. It is possible to accept ourselves and to change.
• Dealing with the inner critic more gently.

Learn how to practice self-acceptance

Accept Yourself explains how to overcome barriers to self-acceptance through daily practices that promote emotional healing.

Part 1 covers accepting various parts of our lives, including:

• Accepting the body and personality.
• Accepting failure.
• Labelling self-critical thoughts.
• Accepting insomnia.
• Dealing with unwanted thoughts.
• Accepting pain and disease.
• Coming to terms with childhood trauma.
• Accepting the emotions.

Part 2 explains two ways to cultivate self-acceptance. How to use mindfulness to:

• Identify harmful patterns of thinking.
• Accept recurring thoughts.

How to use compassion training to:

• Develop the feeling of compassion.
• Direct compassion towards the self.

It also includes instructions on compassionate letter-writing and journaling.

Reclaim your peace

Acceptance is about what happens when we get to the end of the solutions road.

It means saying to ourselves, “Yes, this is the way it is.”

This revelation is the first step on a new journey.

Enroll in the Accept Yourself course and transform your thinking today.

The technique is not about giving up, but about engaging with emotions, both positive and negative.

The secret to getting happier with age is learning acceptance, research suggests.

Part of acceptance is learning to engage with negative emotions, which might seem an odd way of reducing them.

However, older people experienced less anger and negative emotions, the study found.

At the same time, they also showed increase levels of acceptance.

Acceptance, is not about giving up, but about engaging with emotions, both positive and negative.

As the study’s authors explain the…

“…goal of acceptance is not to reduce negative affect but rather to change one’s relationship with negative affect by engaging with all emotional experiences (including negative ones) in a nonjudgmental way.”

The conclusions come from a study of 340 people aged 21-73 years-old.

All were asked how they felt day-by-day and the extent to which they accepted their emotions.

The study’s authors write:

“Although aging is associated with some deterioration and hardship, ironically, people tend to feel better as they age.

[…]

Results demonstrated that feelings of anger and anxiety decreased with increasing age but sadness did not.

Further, increasing age was associated with increased acceptance of negative emotional experiences.”

How does acceptance work?

The study’s author explain how engaging with negative emotions can be beneficial:

“Acceptance is thought to decrease negative affect by two related processes: (a) presenting opportunities to acknowledge and understand negative emotions,
which promotes self-compassion as well as psychological and behavioral flexibility, and (b) reducing rumination, negative cognitions, and metaemotions.

Although engaging with negative emotions may initially increase one’s self-reported experience of these emotions approaching negative emotions in a
nonevaluative way diffuses these emotions relatively quickly.”

The study was published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Shallcross et al., 2013).

The strategy helps people cope without being defensive.

Treating oneself kindly when things go wrong is one of the best ways to promote emotional healing, research finds.

People who are more self-compassionate experience less negative emotion.

Self-compassion allows people to accept responsibility for bad experiences, while feeling better about them.

Self-compassion is also linked to more:

• optimism,
• feeling alive,
• and energy.

Being self-compassionate involves three components:

1. Directing kindness and understanding towards the self.
2. Knowing that suffering is part of the human condition.
3. Accepting mindfully what is happening.

People who are self-compassionate place less importance on the outcome of events; instead, trying to accept them mindfully whether they go well or badly.

One way of increasing self-compassion is through expressive writing, research finds.

Professor Mark R. Leary, the study’s first author, said:

“Life’s tough enough with little things that happen.

Self-compassion helps to eliminate a lot of the anger, depression and pain we experience when things go badly for us.”

The conclusions come from a series of studies in which people remembered negative experiences, imagined things going wrong and were even given unflattering feedback themselves.

In each case, people who were higher in self-compassion coped better.

Professor Leary explained why self-compassion is beneficial:

“Rather than focusing on changing people’s self-evaluations, as many cognitive-behavioral approaches do, self-compassion changes people’s relationship to their self-evaluations.

Self-compassion helps people not to add a layer of self-recrimination on top of whatever bad things happen to them.

If people learn only to feel better about themselves but continue to beat themselves up when they fail or make mistakes, they will be unable to cope nondefensively with their difficulties.”

Despite the importance of self-compassion, it is self-esteem that is often people’s focus, said Professor Leary:

“American society has spent a great deal of time and effort trying to promote people’s self-esteem, when a far more important ingredient of well-being may be self-compassion.”

However, much of the benefits of self-esteem may, in fact, be down to self compassion, said Professor Leary:

“As you disentangle them, self-compassion seems to be more important than self-esteem, and is in fact responsible for some of the positive effects of self-esteem.”

The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Leary et al., 2007).

Up to 50 percent of caregivers suffer mental health problems themselves in the struggle to help another.

Depression and anxiety do not just place a burden on the sufferer, but also those around them.

Carers for those suffering from mental health problems also feel great responsibility and suffer because of it.

Up to 50 percent of caregivers suffer mental health problems themselves in the struggle to help another.

Compassion is a skill

Research shows, though, that training in compassion can help carers deal with this responsibility, relieving their own depression and anxiety.

Compassion is a skill that involves turning towards other people’s pain.

Similarly, self-compassion involves thinking about the self with kindness, sympathy and compassion, without evaluating or judging the self.

The Danish study put 161 caregivers on an 8-week compassion training course.

Those they were caring for had a variety of mental health problems, including ADHD, depression and schizophrenia.

Ms Nanja Holland Hansen, the study’s first author, explained the results:

“After completing the course, the relatives had increased their well-being on several parameters.

They could deal with the illness in a new and more skillful way, and we saw that the training reduced their symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress.”

Facing suffering

Central to the training is learning to deal with pain and suffering without confrontation or avoidance.

Instead of trying to avoid the unpleasantness, it is important to look it in the face.

Ms Hansen said:

“The relatives learned that the more they turn towards what is difficult, the more skilful they may act.

For example, relatives often try to ‘fix’ the problem or the challenge – so as to relieve their loved ones of what is difficult.

That’s a huge pressure to constantly deal with, and very few people can bear it.”

Caregivers to those with mental illnesses face considerable burdens, Ms Hansen said:

“Fear and grief are emotions that take up a lot space for relatives of people with mental illness.

For example chronic fear, which is a real fear that parents of a child with schizophrenia have about whether their child is going to commit suicide, or whether a child with autism will ever enjoy a ‘normal life’.

Our suffering is maintained inside of us when we don’t work with it.

To avoid feeling pain, we may resort to behaviour such as working too much or buying things that we don’t need.

It’s therefore in all these everyday actions that our compassion training becomes important and can be used to help alleviate what is difficult.”

Loving kindness

The researchers helped people cultivate their loving kindness, training compassion for their own suffering, for others and for all sentient beings.

Caregivers also received training in ‘Tonglen’, which is Tibetan for ‘giving and taking’.

It is a type of meditation where you imagine taking other people’s suffering away and giving them all that is good in yourself.

The aim is to reduce selfishness and expand the sense of loving-kindness.

Ms Hansen said:

“Not a single person can completely avoid experiencing painful things in their life.

In this way we’re all the same.

But what isn’t the same for everyone is our ability to deal with the pain and suffering we experience.

Training programmes in compassion have been developed because the research shows that we can train and strengthen our mental health.

With systematic training of compassion, we generate more attention – and understanding of – our own thoughts, feelings and behaviour.

And this helps us to develop the tools and skills to engage in healthier relations with ourselves and others.”

→ Read on: how to support a depressed partner.

The study was published in the JAMA (Hansen et al., 2021).