To find the right strategy, look at the current one. This is how we usually “accept ourselves”:
- We look at ourselves without digging too deep.
- We ignore all the horror of what we saw or are touched by it, like a mother obsessed with her child.
- We decide to change something.
- We forget in a day.
If you are angry now and brush it off, saying it’s not me, breathe out and think again. Honestly.
You don't like yourself too much. Sometimes or always. You are dissatisfied with something about yourself, but it’s hard to change, and psychologists or compassionate friends pour treacle: “You are who you are. You’re okay, just accept yourself.”
Let’s just experiment for a second and decide that not everything is okay with you. That the number on the scale makes you sad not because you cannot accept yourself, but because you are fatter than you want to be. That if you earn half as much as your friends, the solution is not to not compare yourself to them, but to earn more.
Accepting yourself in the sense in which inspirational quotes on social networks describe it means the unthinkable - you have to come to terms with it. Decide once and for all that you are fat and will remain so. You can surround yourself with a comfortable reference group (“you even look fat,” “not like that skinny Jolie”) so as not to go crazy from the constant “condemnation of society.” Change your friends to others who are poorer. Then you can compare until you’re blue in the face, because you’re cooler than them.
Accept yourself? No problem. Just lower your expectations. In a choreographed world, where nothing reminds you of your shortcomings and past ambitions, it will be dry and comfortable. Potentially for a lifetime.
Don't panic
Let's be mature. True self-acceptance looks like this:
- You look carefully at yourself and inside yourself, and then around. You realize what you are like, including in comparison with your current environment.
- Realistically assess the horror of what you saw. You agree that now you are exactly like this and no other.
- You try to be kind to who you are, like a good but intelligent mother would do.
- You decide what is already good (and there will definitely be good), what you cannot change (never or now), and what you want to change and can.
- Start making changes.
- …
- PROFIT.
Now let’s figure out how to go through these complex steps (if they were simple, everyone would have done them long ago) efficiently and without losses.
Track moments of rejection
To learn to accept yourself, you must constantly be in a state of full awareness. This will allow you to track those moments when you feel disgusted with yourself. Try to ask yourself questions more often: “What am I doing now?”, “Will this benefit me?” and so on. At one point, you yourself will find the answer to the question posed, after which all that remains is to overcome the reason that led to the feeling of rejection.
Regular ≠ bad
If you are familiar with the “self-esteem swing” (that is, you jump between “I am a king” and “I am a nonentity” without a tangible buffer), this means that your self-esteem is inadequate. After all, what are we all like as a group? Regular. Not gods and not squalor. Normal people have pros and cons, and you won't change your life until you accept this fact.
Calmly, modestly, without fatalism and hysteria, tell yourself:
I'm an ordinary person. In some ways I am better than others, in some ways I am worse.
It's hard. “I’m ordinary” for many is tantamount to “I’m a loser,” because we have the illusion of our own importance, and we will have to go a long way to sinking to “ordinaryness.”
By the way, here the comparison that is so unloved by everyone can even help. Compare yourself with close friends. Those who share their innermost things with you, and not just the glossy version of their life in their feed.
They also have problems at work. I'm also overweight and have a beer belly. They were also abandoned. They also abandoned plans and abandoned dreams, which they never began to realize. They are not Einsteins, or Gateses, or supermodels. Like you, they probably don't have a ton of amazing traits, but they do have some very good traits that make you love them. And there are some bugs that are unpleasant, but not terrible. They are just like you.
Training exercises for self-acceptance: how to accept yourself and learn to love your body
True self-acceptance is accepting who you are without any demands, conditions or exceptions. According to therapist Russell Grieger, unconditional self-acceptance is the understanding that you are separate from your actions and your qualities. Those. you admit that you made a mistake, that you did something bad, that you have flaws, but you don't let them define you as a person.
Self-perception of yourself, your body, appearance and attitude towards yourself is what affects our health, self-esteem, relationships with friends and strangers. This is an innovative methodological technique that can often surprise participants with its effectiveness. You can involve children; it is much easier for them to draw their problems than to explain them.
Mapping as a method appeared in South Africa for the study of sick people, then it often underwent changes. But even before this, neuroscientists were interested in the brain's internal representation of the body, called the body map. The exercise is similar to a meditation practice. We move in accordance with our body map, which we think we structure, but we already have it. If there is a discrepancy between the map and reality, then the map will win. Therefore, cards are good at correcting incorrect movements in dancers and musicians. The map displays the processes occurring in you, your thoughts and sensations.
Body mapping is the process of consciously correcting and refining one's internal image of oneself to produce efficient, coordinated, effective movement through self-exploration. The exercise helps you understand your problem areas, feel changes in your condition and health, and measure your level of comfort/not comfort. The exercise is intended for use at home alone or in a small group. This is a slightly simplified diagram of creating a map of the body in the brain.
All such exercises make it easier to accept yourself.
Techniques for self-acceptance “Body Map” and “Color of Breath”
The purpose of the exercises: to explore techniques, understand and evaluate the attitude towards your body, understand and improve your emotional state. Help yourself accept the characteristics of your body, i.e. both good and bad (in your opinion), learn to love yourself. Help eliminate the causes of ailments and diseases.
Acceptance techniques are part of working on accepting yourself and your body. But even after doing these exercises several times, you will get good results and begin to feel better about your body. Further, perhaps the tips from the techniques outlined in the article about increasing self-esteem and self-confidence will help you.
Prepare a rug or something comfortable, find some nice, calm music. Get out some paper, a set of colored pencils, markers or paints. Before starting the exercises, it is better to write your name on a piece of paper and draw a blank - a silhouette of your body. Find an empty room or a quiet area where no one can disturb you. You can do the exercise in a group, or alone. If you do it in a group, there must be a leader who will lead the process.
Duration about 30-40 minutes.
Let's start accepting ourselves
Turn on calm, quiet music. Here are melodies that are very calming and relaxing.
Now you need to lie down on the floor and take a comfortable position. Take several deep breaths and exhalations. After this, close your eyes and breathe as usual, try to relax. If you cannot do this at once, then address each part of the body. I relax my left hand, I relax my right hand, I relax my neck, I relax my body, ... I relax my head, I relax my forehead. Actually, the practices that are used for relaxation in this exercise are used in meditation and relaxation. After this, try to focus on the sensations in your body. Assess your emotional state and try to briefly describe how you feel. ⠀ Imagine how the breathing process happens - how the air enters your lungs and spreads throughout your body. Try to present this in as much detail as possible. Continue to relax and answer the following questions: ⠀ What kind of air do you breathe? Color, density, sensations. How intense is the color of inhaled and exhaled air?
How do you exhale air? What does it feel like? Color, taste, density, any other characteristics that you feel. Have they changed since they were inhaled?
What do these colors mean to you?
Is the air flowing, passing, or getting stuck somewhere? Where do you get stuck? Do you feel discomfort? And why? Now imagine that your body is a continent . It has the same things as other continents. Mountains, forests, fields, plains and depressions, rivers and seas, deserts and glaciers. There are well-groomed areas, but there are also those where there is desolation and chaos. First, let's pay attention to the valley of forests and clean lakes. Everything here breathes peace, joy, love. You like these places in your body, you accept them, and your body responds to love and acceptance.
Next we move into a zone of constant natural disasters, cataclysms and constant droughts. This is the area of pain. Find the areas in your body that bring you discomfort and pain. Visualize them in your imagination. Earthquakes can occur here, volcanoes can erupt, and floods and droughts constantly occur. How many such places do you have? How often do they cause you discomfort? Try to feel each zone. Take your time.
Now find warm places with lush greenery and good weather where there is a cool breeze in the morning. These are areas of pleasure and joy. Find and feel these areas of your body. Outline them in your imagination. How many are there on your continent? Are these large areas or small corners? How often do they bring you joy? What is it connected with? What emotions do these places evoke now?
We travel further across our continent and find zones of change. These are the areas that respond when it comes to rapid change. How are changes happening on your continent? Do they happen on their own or are you involved in it? What can you compare them to? Constant care and watering, drainage of swamps, land regeneration, creation of parks. How does change make you feel? How many of them are there on your continent?
Now let's turn our attention to the glacier zones. What's the weather like there? Wind? Sun? Is there a snowstorm? These are areas of your body that you reject or do not accept about yourself. What territory do these areas occupy? Have they always been located here or were there others? Or maybe there was none? How has this area changed? Reasons for the change? Why has this area become rejected?
Feel if there are areas on your continent that you are not paying attention to? Find them and move there. What do you see? How do you feel? These can be deserts or sun-scorched steppes. They seem to be on their own. These are zones of oblivion. How much area do they occupy on your continent? What do they look like?
If some part of your body hurts, for example, your leg, head, heart, then try to feel how it sounds. This usually sounds like a not-so-pleasant squeaking or grinding noise. Try to mentally organize your work. Lubricate the joint, pity and stroke this part of the body, apply plantain, improve blood flow, etc. Imagine how the functioning of an organ or part of the body improves, and the pain and discomfort goes away. Unpleasant sounds should become quieter or disappear altogether.
Now imagine your body as a map. Remember where and how the zones you imagined were located. Take a few breaths and open your eyes. Take pencils/paints, prepared silhouettes and draw a map of your body.
After the exercise, be sure to sketch and write down everything you saw and understood.
▫️Color and size of breath, its change. The color of inhaled and exhaled air. Color associations. ▫️What feelings towards your own body are clearly expressed? ▫️In what parts of the body do these experiences live? ▫️What thoughts did you have about certain areas? ▫️How can you correct the discomfort?
It is better to repeat self-acceptance techniques several times, for example, 3-4 in a few days or once a week, this is necessary to improve the effect and track how your emotional state changes.
Don't forget to work with the glacier, frost and exclusion zones later. Try warming them up a little, defrosting them, watering them and planting them with herbs. Everything happens according to the same method, you relax and start working with the zones, but you pay special attention to the glacier zones and oblivion zones.
After a week or two you can repeat.
These are some of the quick methods to accept yourself, but if you find it difficult to do everything at once, break it into 2: breath work and body mapping.
See why nothing works out in life and what to do about it and what prevents you from thinking correctly and thinking clearly.
On this site you can take free courses on increasing self-esteem, changing your thinking, teaching creativity, analytical thinking, creating a business, public speaking, etc.
Achieve What's Important
Everyone wants to feel great, the more often the better, and the psyche helpfully feeds you a buzz for any achievements, even illusory ones. Passed the level? Cool. Did you get any likes? Goddess.
Video games and social networks are so addictive because they give you a boost in self-esteem for no reason, but (fortunately) life puts everything in its place. If you are tired of falling into the pit of “I’m nobody” and running with your heels sparkling for a new portion of likes, you need to understand one thing.
Self-esteem is increased 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 nicely, 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 so that one could turn out to be more or less nothing, will not give this, no matter how many likes you collect. The feeling you get from beating a newbie in a game is nothing compared to completing a difficult project at work.
Don't be angry with yourself or others because you are unhappy with yourself. Why be happy? What did you do today to feel great? If all the answers come down to what you ate (literally or figuratively) and not what you cooked, things are bad.
By the way, about those around you.
Cultivate counterbalances within yourself
So, you got to know your Inner Monster well, got used to it and stopped resisting. At this point, come up with another character that will represent a different part of your personality. Let it be the Good Fairy or the Wise Witcher.
When you start criticizing yourself again, call on a new character to help, tell yourself words of encouragement. Try to look at what you consider to be your weaknesses from a different angle - it may turn out that sometimes these qualities are actually useful.
Especially for readers of “Burning Hut” on the Alpina Publisher website there is a promotional code BURNHUT. He gives a 15% discount on paper versions of the books “Recipe for Happiness” and “The Perfect Storm”. Valid until December 31st.
Cover: Mathieu Stern / Unsplash
Stop blaming others
There are people who had terrible childhoods and monstrous parents. They (and not all of them) have psychological traumas and blocks, 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 mixed in. And everyone has the same society, with its propaganda of unrealistic standards of appearance and success.
It has nothing to do with what your life looks like now.
Even if your mother told you as a child that you were fat (stupid, a 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 presses?
I know that looking for childhood traumas is a favorite strategy of psychologists, but even they will say that this is at best a start. At worst, it’s a waste of time chewing on the past instead of working with the present. Waiting for a wizard to give advance praise for non-existent achievements or an apology for imagined or even real grievances is a dead end. No one will go to the gym for you anyway, no one will get a new job, no one will learn the language, no one will build relationships.
No one will live for you. And die too.
Why do we NOT accept ourselves?
The answer to this question often lies in childhood. Mom, dad, siblings, grandparents - everyone who surrounded the child in his early years influenced his self-perception. It’s enough to throw out “come on faster, why are you so slow,” so that after many years an adult hates himself for his slowness. Systematic reproaches can create a distorted image of yourself.
At the same time, parents do not necessarily have to bully their child forever. Constant phrases “you should...” also have a negative impact on self-perception. And it doesn’t matter whether the child can do it or not. The main thing is “you must.” With this, children move into adulthood, continuing to demand the impossible from themselves.
Society is not limited to loved ones. Caregivers, teachers, friends - they all influence how we see ourselves.
One more thing. These are comparisons. First, mothers and fathers compare us with obedient children, then teachers compare us with excellent students, then we compare ourselves with successful colleagues and successful classmates. Getting out of this is difficult, but it is very important if you want to live a joyful life filled with pleasant emotions.
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 you a buzz now, right away. The embodiment of the desire to eat something tasty and healthy gives a buzz (for those who know how to enjoy the taste of healthy food) and health in the future.
To change bad habits to good ones, you need to gradually learn to enjoy useful things, but not through willpower: it won’t last long, because acting through “I can’t” is stressful, and the brain will avoid it with all its might in the interests of self-preservation. This is one reason why dieting is usually followed by a feast of gluttony. It is much better not to break yourself, but to change circumstances to make it easier to achieve your plans.
Have you noticed how easy it is to go to dance classes if there is a young lady you like? How do you want to skip to the gym if you fall in love and looking good is so important for your loved one?
This is the flow. Pleasant emotions overcome the stress of doing something new and difficult.
Look for opportunities to create flow. Go to the gym with your favorite friend. Set yourself a goal publicly (on social media, for example) and publicly track your progress. Let your friends' comments support you. Finally, sign up for the training. The goal of any good training is to create flow. Just don’t get hooked on these trainings as if they were likes. They charge you with emotions, but if this charge goes only into dreams, you will waste your money and time. The flow must be caught and directed to useful activities, only then will your life change.
Life story
Svetlana - psychologist
I hated the reflection in the mirror. I struggled with excess weight. I worked hard at work, but earned little. I often felt guilty. Subconsciously she avoided changes in life. She lied to herself that “there are no worthy men,” but in fact she considered herself unworthy of love. I read books on psychology, went to lectures and trainings. She suffered from complexes, resentments, nervous breakdowns and remained alone.
One day I was really tired of fighting with myself. And took a time out. I spent my evenings in silence and dreaming about a person who would understand and support me. Well, where is he, my man? Well, when will he come and help me? And then I suddenly realized that I had such a person.
And this... - Me!
All my life I was sure that first I had to change myself - lose weight, improve my character, acquire new skills. And only then a man will love me. After which I will start a family, look perfect, do an interesting job, and earn good money. And then I will finally love myself and become happy. But this strategy did not work, because I was approaching the problem from the wrong side.
It turned out that you first need to love yourself, and only then will your relationships with men, work, and money improve. That’s why neither smart advice from books, nor self-development techniques, nor attempts to become indispensable at work, nor weight loss helped me.
I began to study and immediately apply self-love practices. This is how “Lovemarathon” appeared first, and then the “Negotiate to Happiness” course.
And so... HURRAY! In September, my book was published: “How to negotiate to happiness with yourself and others.”
Understand who you really are
To learn to accept yourself, you need to perform a certain algorithm of actions every day. Start asking yourself questions like: “Who am I?”, “What is my name,” “Am I my body?” However, this is best done in a meditative state, when the mind is completely cleared of extraneous thoughts. Otherwise, you risk starting to ask yourself such questions in moments of self-criticism, which will only worsen your own condition.
Over time, you will come to realize that you are not just a person with a specific character, but something more. You have a global goal in this world and you are obliged to fulfill it. You are the spirit of the universe, a piece of the creator, something more than just flesh and blood. Learn to remember this every time you have a moment of self-rejection. After this, the realization will come that the body is just a tool that will sooner or later become unusable, but the spirit always remains immortal.
Reconsider your own beliefs
Constantly ask yourself the question: “How to accept yourself as you are?” Psychology will help you figure this out. Try to criticize yourself less for the slightest offenses, because it is self-criticism that leads to your own rejection. To do this, you need to deal with those beliefs that are inside you and force you to constantly criticize yourself. Perhaps the reason for this was someone’s opinion that hurt you, and now you have decided to change radically. In this case, it’s worth asking the question: “What role does this person play in your life?” If it is minimal, then is it worth taking his opinion into account at all?
Rebirth of unconditional love
Working with the inner world helps you accept yourself, but this process can only lead to a worsening of your condition if you do not know how to control yourself and your own thoughts.
First you need to enter a meditative state. To do this, you need to take a comfortable position, close your eyes and imagine that you are in a place in which you are comfortable and cozy, in which time literally stands still for you. This could be the edge of a forest, the ocean shore, the top of a mountain, and so on. Try to make sure that you don't care about anything except your surroundings. Throw out of your head all the thoughts that burden your consciousness.
In the first few weeks, meditation will be very difficult, but over time you will learn to remember the sensations of entering the meditation “mode”. During this process, you need to think only about the good. Try to make the rays of love and warmth warm your body, even if in fact you are sitting all alone in a cold apartment. You can try to remember moments of self-judgment and analyze them. However, it would be best to set your consciousness the attitude that you intend to heal from the state of your own rejection and regain that feeling of unconditional love for the whole world, as in childhood.
Keep an acceptance journal
Journaling is not only one of the best ways to love and accept yourself, but also a good tool for self-control and self-development. Try to write down on paper all the situations when you did not accept yourself. Be sure to track changes and reward yourself for success. However, you should not hope that after several weeks of such self-control you will learn to accept yourself entirely, because such changes begin with little things. Write down all the changes within yourself and re-read evidence of your progress in moments of self-judgment and decline.
