Accepting Who We Are

Self-acceptance

To kick-off our exploration on how to become the most impactful person we can be, we will begin by expounding the importance of the first required mindset trait - the ability to love and accept who we are.

Many people are not aware of it but self-acceptance, as a process, actually starts very early on as a child. At a time when we are not yet autonomous in our actions nor are we mature enough to generate feelings of self-love, we learn to recognize ourselves as worthy and valuable by embracing the care and appreciation of other people.

Family interactions play quite an important role in that. If the environment in which we grow up in is one where our parents are very caring and supportive of what we do, we usually learn to accept ourselves and become more confident of our own abilities. But if such support is missing, particularly in cases where we face a lot of criticism and neglect, we will often have a very hard time generating inner feelings of love and affection and thus struggle to accept ourselves fully.

This, of course, brings with it certain repercussions. When we grow up unable to generate positive feelings towards ourselves, we will be a lot more inclined to resent the way we look as well as the things we say and do, and will inevitably develop into a much more negative and insecure person. This, combined with the fact that we also tend to blame ourselves for almost everything that happens in our life, often leads to an almost permanent unhappy and depressed mental state where the urge to find release from the pain and suffering completely overshadows any desire to become a better person.

If that wasn’t enough, we also become a lot more prone to build a fake identity. Given that, as humans, we have a natural evolutionary drive to feel accepted and acknowledged by the group and that, as children, our safety is still very much connected to the approval of our parents, whenever the environment we grow up in is one where simply being ourselves does not seem to be enough to deserve the love and acceptance of others, we instinctively start trying to find the behavior that does. Whether that is, for example, acting very confidently in a setting where everyone is trying to impress each other or self-pitying when our caregivers are overprotective and tend to our every need, we usually begin slowly (and for the most part unconsciously) adapting to what is being rewarded by our environment and gradually create and behave in line with a personality that, although fake, works to make us feel more accepted. And since this feeling of acceptance greatly contributes to our sense of safety and also produces strong feelings of reward, we usually don’t really care if we are behaving in ways that might not be totally truthful to us, we simply stick to our new identity and carry on doing what we know it works.

Ultimately, this is why accepting and loving ourselves is so important to become the most impactful person we can be. When we don’t, not only do we automatically become someone more negative and depressed that has very little energy and motivation to do the things we know would be good for us and for the world, we also begin structuring our life around doing what needs to be done to gather the acceptance of other people and slowly but surely let go of our ability to be true and honest to ourselves.

Now that we know this, we can focus on what is most important. If we feel like we are not totally comfortable with who we are and often behave in ways that reflect our fear of what other people might think about us, the best thing we can do is learn how to establish feelings of self-acceptance. We will expound later on what is the most effective way to achieve that but for now, what is even more important is making sure that our mindset is conducive to the generation of those feelings. When we grow up feeling that simply being ourselves is not enough to be accepted, we tend to ingenuously assume that it must be because something is inherently wrong with us and that belief makes it very hard (if not almost impossible) to appreciate the human being that we are. This is why, on this chapter, we will first focus on disproving that misconception and describe the two initial steps that we need to go through in order to see ourselves at a better, more accurate and self-compassionate light.

It's not your fault

Now before we explain the first step to get into a mindset that can allow us to start appreciating who we are, there is an observation that is important to make. For those who are reading that already have a positive relationship with themselves and may be now wondering if the information on the next pages is going to be relevant, it is important to keep in mind that just because there is knowledge that might not be applicable to us, it does not automatically mean that it is therefore redundant. If we consider the fact that a lot of people have never been able to fully accept themselves and that these often include those whom we care the most, it becomes clear that a lot of benefits can still come from understanding what exactly those in our family and friendship circles might be struggling with and how we can potentially help them.

That being said, for those who, on the other hand, can relate to what has been described in the previous topic and, on a fundamental level, feel like they have never truly managed to accept who they are, in the next lines we are going to reveal the most fundamental understanding we should internalize in order to kickstart this process.

Now we’ve seen in our previous topic that the process of self-acceptance has its onset in our childhood and the problem is that, as a child, since we are still quite naive and inexperienced and naturally place a lot of trust and authority on adults (particularly on our parents), we rarely (if ever) suspect that they might be in the wrong. Even when our environment growing up is one where we are being met with constant negative criticism, our usual tendency is not to assume that the blaming is inappropriate but to conclude that everything that is happening must be our own fault.

Over time this can, of course, lead to unfortunate consequences. The more we believe that the fault is on our side and that the judgment, blaming and neglect is happening because something is inherently wrong with us, the more we start resenting the person that we are, and since these negative feelings only tend to get worse over time, we eventually become trapped in a situation where we are completely unable to develop a position opinion of who we are.

But the thing is, this was all the result of a series of misinterpretations. If we go back to the past and, with a clear head, analyze some of the bad things that happened in our life, we will realize that in all those occasions in which we might have thought that the fault was ours, in reality, it wasn’t. We might have been, of course, led to believe that but that was only because, as a kid, we couldn’t yet tell that adults have a lot of issues of their own and that their blaming and negativity had a lot more to do with their inability to solve those issues than it had to do with something that we had done wrong.

So if you are reading this now and for all this time thought you were the one to blame, you should know you’re not. There is nothing wrong with who you are. If you had grown up in a setting where those same episodes that made you feel bad about yourself had been dealt with proper diligence and care, you would have today no issues accepting the person that you are which ultimately proves that the problem has never been that there is something wrong with you but that you were raised in an environment where other’s mistreatment made you believe that.

Another factor that might explain why we tend to blame ourselves at an early age is the fact that, as infants, we lack the ability to see things from other people’s perspective (psychologists call it a lack of theory of mind). As a result, since we essentially cannot yet grasp that other people have beliefs and emotions that are completely separate from our own, anytime they are upset or angry, we will innocently assume that we are the cause of the problem even if it has nothing to do with us.