Why can't we accept ourselves in any way

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Acceptance of yourself. Psychological Viagra of our time. Why do I compare myself to others? How to love yourself? How to accept yourself as I am? Let's tell you now.

To find the right strategy, we look at the current one. This is how we usually "accept ourselves":

1. Consider ourselves without digging too deep.
2. We ignore all the horror of what we have seen or are touched by it, like a mother obsessed with her child.
3. We decide to change something.
4. We forget every other day.

If you are now angry and dismiss it, they say, it's not me, exhale and think again. Honestly.

You don't like yourself too much. At times or always. You are dissatisfied with something in yourself, but it is hard to change, and psychologists or compassionate friends pour molasses: “You are what you are. It's okay with you, just accept yourself."

For an experiment, let's decide for a second that not everything is okay with you. That the number on the scales saddens you not because you cannot accept yourself, but because you are fatter than you want to be. That if you earn half the money you know, the solution is not to compare yourself with them, but to earn more.

Self-acceptance in the sense in which inspiring quotes on social networks describe it means the unthinkable - you have to accept. Decide once and for all that you are fat and will stay that way. You can surround yourself with a comfortable reference group ("you even feel fullness", "not like this skinny Jolie"), so as not to go crazy from the constant "condemnation of society." Change friends to others, poorer. Then you can compare to blue in the face, because you are cooler than them.

Accept yourself? Not a problem. Just lower the bar. In a staged world, where nothing reminds of your shortcomings and past ambitions, it will be dry and comfortable. Potentially all my life.

Don't panic

Let's take it in an adult way. Real acceptance of yourself looks like this:

1. You carefully look at yourself and inside yourself, and then around. Realize who you are, including in comparison with the current environment.
2. Realistically assess the horror of what you saw. You agree that now you are just that and no other.
3. Try to treat who you are with kindness, as a good but clever mother would do.
4. You decide what is already good (and it will definitely be good), what you cannot change (never or now), but what you want and can change.
5. Start making changes.
6. …
7. PROFIT.

Now let's figure out how to go through these difficult steps (if they were simple, everyone would have done them long ago) efficiently and without losses.

Regular ≠ bad

If you are familiar with the "self-esteem swing" (that is, you are jumping between "I am the king" and "I am nothing" without a tangible buffer), this means that your self-esteem is inadequate. After all, in the mass we are all what? Regular. Not gods and not squalor. Normal people with pluses and minuses, and you will not change your life until you accept this fact.

Calmly, modestly, without fatalism and hysteria tell yourself:

I am an ordinary person. In some ways I'm better than some, in other ways - worse.

It's hard. “I am ordinary” for many is tantamount to “I am a sucker”, because the illusions of our importance are HERE, and we will have to go down to “ordinary” far.

By the way, this comparison, so unloved by everyone, can even help. Compare yourself to close friends. Those who share with you intimate, and not just a glossy version of their life in the tape.

They also have problems at work. There is also excess weight and a beer belly. They were also thrown. They, too, abandoned their plans and abandoned dreams, which they did not begin to realize. They are not Einsteins, not Gates, or supermodels. They, like you, most likely don't have a bunch of awesome traits, but they do have very good traits that you love them for. And there are shoals, unpleasant, but not terrible either. They are just like you.

Achieve What Matters

Everyone wants to feel great, the more often, the better, and the psyche helpfully feeds the buzz for any achievements, even illusory ones. Have you passed the level? Cool. Got some likes? Goddess.

Video games and social media are so addictive because they give a jump in self-esteem for nothing, but (thankfully) life puts everything in its place. If you are tired of falling into the pit "I am nobody" and running with sparkling heels for a new portion of likes, you need to understand one thing.

Self-esteem is enhanced by real achievements in areas of life that are important to you. The only way. No other way.

If it is important for you to look good and you lose weight, or learn to dress beautifully, or finally get your teeth done, you will feel better. The main thing is that these achievements will stay with you. A hundred pictures that you took to get more or less nothing on one, will not give this, no matter how many likes you collect. The feeling that you get in the game, "bending" a newbie, does not compare to completing a difficult project at work.

Don't be angry with yourself or others for being unhappy with yourself. Why be satisfied? What have you done today to feel your best? If all the answers boil down to what you ate (literally or figuratively) and not what you cooked, that's bad.

By the way, about those around you.

Stop blaming others

There are people who had a terrible childhood and monstrous parents. They (and even then not all) have psychological trauma and blockages, which, other things being equal, reduce the chances of a happy life. But most had normal parents and a normal childhood, with good and bad interspersed. And society is one for all, with its propaganda of unrealistic standards of appearance and success.

It has nothing to do with how your life looks right now.

Even if your mother told you as a child that you are fat (stupid, loser), how old are you now? Twenty five? Thirty? Even if the roots of your complexes lie somewhere outside, you are an adult. Your life is in your hands, and if not, who is responsible for it? Mom who didn't praise? A society that crushes?

I know that the search for childhood trauma is a favorite strategy of psychologists, but even they will say that this is, at best, the beginning of the journey. At worst, it is a waste of time chewing on the past instead of working with the present. Waiting for a wizard to issue an advance of praise for non-existent accomplishments or apologies for imagined or even real offenses is a dead end. Nobody will go to the gym for you anyway, they won't get a new job, they won't learn the language, they won't build relationships.

Nobody will live for you. And die too.

Pleasure + benefit + flow

A good mood has a fairly simple formula: [desire] + [embodiment] = [pleasure]. Happiness is a little more complicated.

[Useful desire] + [embodiment] = [pleasure] + [benefit].

For example, the embodiment of the desire to eat a burger gives a thrill now, right away. The embodiment of the desire to eat something tasty and healthy gives a thrill (for those who know how to enjoy the taste of healthy food) and health in the future.

To change bad habits for good, you need to gradually learn to enjoy useful things, but not through willpower: it will not last long, because the action through “I can’t” is stress, and the brain will by all means avoid it in the interests of self-preservation. This is one of the reasons why the diet is usually followed by the feast of binge eating. It is much better not to break yourself, but to change circumstances in order to achieve what you have planned it became easier.

Have you noticed how easy it is to go to dance classes if there is a nice young lady there? How do you want to jump to the gym if you fell in love and looking good for your loved one is so important?

This is the flow. Pleasant emotions interrupt the stress of doing something new and difficult.

Look for an opportunity to create a stream. Go to the gym with your beloved friend. Set a goal publicly (on social media, for example) and publicly track your progress. Let your friends' comments support you. Sign up for training, after all. The goal of any good training is to create flow. Just do not get hooked on these trainings, as on likes. They charge with emotions, but if this charge only goes into dreams, you will be wasting money and time. The stream must be caught and directed to useful activities, only then your life will change.

Love yourself

It might seem like a paradox. How to love a mediocre person who has so many flaws? To answer, it is enough to remember how you last fell in love. It is unlikely that this person was from the generally accepted point of view outstanding, but in the process of communication he became one for you.

You need to love yourself not because you are the coolest, but because you are you.

Your life experience, character, body, connections that you have built with the world are unique, and that's all you have. Be your friend, the best, understanding and inspiring for more.

Yes, you have disadvantages, but many of them are surmountable, and you know perfectly well how to overcome them. And those that are insurmountable, as a rule, are not fatal. This is exactly what was meant by the phrase "treat with kindness who you are, as a good, but not stupid mother would have done."

Remember, almost everyone, rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, lives by inertia. People who have made great strides in adulthood often cannot describe how they got there. They just did what they wanted. They can rationalize and remember how a certain phrase or event pushed them, like: "My father died early, and I was fired up with the idea of finding a cure for his disease." But many fathers died early, and not all of them became outstanding scientists. It just happened for these people.

The same goes for chronic losers. It happened so. Even if their conscious decisions (few people decide to lie down and do nothing, but let's say) led to an unhappy life, what's the point to blame yourself for this?

The main question for positive life changes is not "who is to blame," but "what to do."

With regular practice of the first two points (realistic perception + real achievement), self-love will gradually develop, because a) you will accept your current image and life that you have created, and b) you will actively work to improve and develop them.

And that's all a person can do.