Be kind to yourself… It’s the type of advice any therapist will at one point give her client. But what does this mean?
The Standard
We are constantly presented with an explicit and oftentimes implicit standard of “healthy” human behaviour. Based on a set of western if not Christian values of discipline, ethics, hard work and charity, it might indeed serve as a useful direction for our development journey, if properly put in context.
The Shadow
As C.G. Jung masterfully asserted, there are more than one psychic forces comprising what we might call our personality. The aspects that are not aligned with the above mentioned standards are collected under the concept of Shadow.
As we cannot speak about light without mentioning darkness, togetherness without separation, good without bad, we cannot speak about our standard for character without acknowledging those aspects that deviate from said standard.
Projection
Whether we talk about being lazy, selfish, dishonest or fearful, even the most spiritually advanced among us are “guilty” of these “sins”. They are an integral part of our humanity. While reading these lines, you can probably identify some of these tendencies in your own inner experience, but most of us are quick to brush them off by finding explanations, excuses or plainly ignoring them completely.
Most of us do not have the tools and context to bring these experiences into awareness without becoming judgmental or being overwhelmed by feelings of guilt so we prefer to brush them off using different psychic strategies. And it might work for a while – depending of your definition of both “work” and “while”.
There are many strategies we use to avoid accepting our own shadow, but a comprehensive inventory of these strategies is beyond the scope of this article.
One of the most common strategies however is projection. We do this with people- projecting traits that we refuse to accept in ourselves onto others, but most importantly we do these by projecting onto reality itself. Jung famously said that perception is projection recovered. This is why sometimes, reality seems to obnoxiously feed us back precisely the type of situations and interactions that we insist on avoiding.
Consequently we seem to create the type of reality we wish to avoid precisely because of the mechanism we use to avoid them.
Accepting
One alternative is Acceptance. It is as challenging a strategy as it is straight forward. It is theorised in many schools of therapy with ACT being the most representative of them.
Essentially it is a non-mental process that paradoxically involves mindfully acknowledging shadow traits, integrating them using techniques that can vary from breath work to behavioural training, creating a support system in order to maintain this new type of behaviour, and eventually relapsing and starting all over again.
This last part which is integral to almost any change process, as best described by Prochaska is a probably the most difficult part to accept when considering a development process. Relapsing, instead of being considered a failure should be accepted as an opportunity to refine one’s strategy.
Caveat
One of the potential pitfalls of this process of continuous acceptance is pure fatalism. It is easy to start accepting everything as it is, from your own inner experiences to life-situations, but it’s very challenging to do so without relinquishing responsibility of action.
That is why I mentioned this being a non-mental process. Because the mind alone cannot manage balancing the extremes of fatalism and perfectionism.
We need a more holistic process for managing our life. It involves working with our bodies, our emotions, using our own life-situations as training ground and it especially involves doing it with others instead of on your own.
It is not a fixed process with a clear finish line. It is a lifelong process and it can be as painful and frustrating as it can be blissful and liberating.
If you want to check out a community of people dedicated to accepting themselves as they are and using that state of consciousness in order to create a better life for themselves and others, RoundPeak might be a good option. Let me know in the comments bellow if you know about any other such communities.
Isn’t accepting oneself as you are mean you are happy with the place you are in and not particularly inclined to “build a better life”? Being better, wanting better comes from not accepting the current status of things and fighting for “better”. Now, loving oneself just with all the quirks and imperfections and with the entire baggage have the courage to contientiously and diligently work for a better life for you and your tribe, that is indeed interesting. I am not sure how you meant your last paragraph.
Thanks for commenting on this. It is indeed easy to see acceptance and “building a better life” as conflicting concepts. As mentioned, one of the perils of practing acceptance is the prospect of fatalism. It is precisely why I suggest balancing acceptance as a form of relinquishing control with action as a way of keeping responsibility for one’s own fate. Hope this clarifies the intention.
I resonated with this, especially since I’ve become better acquainted with my shadow side in the past year. Accepting my own states of sadness, confusion and lack of energy has been and still is a journey…like you describe it above, with ups and downs. For those who want more insight into this, two books I found useful are Pema Chodron’s “When things fall apart” and Matt Licata’s “A Healing Space: Befriending ourselves in difficult times.”
I guess it’s just the way things are.. There are bright and dark sides to everything. It’s what makes reality real.
The challenging part is fully accepting this. I don’t know if it’s just me and my clients, or if anyone else feels the same, but it’s like I’m living in two different realities: one in which everything seems to be connected to everything else, I feel as part of a whole, I flow through interactions and tasks as if they where always suppose to be this way, and another one where I feel disconnected, like nothing makes sense, like I’m afraid to touch anything because I might break it, like all that I perceived to be coherent in the first state was just an illusion.
It’s like I’m living in two different dimensions. And naturally, I tend to search for the one where I feel connected and avoid the other one. Which makes me feel less connection and more confusion.
Whenever I just accept things as they are, my shadow as it is, my idiosyncrasies, clumsiness, inability to focus and so on, something happens: I start to enjoy life, to relax and to take each moment as it is.
Then comes the next part of the process: because of the reinforcing feedback loop that acceptance provides, and probably because of my low degree of spiritual discipline acceptance starts becoming a hinderance to my intrinsic motivation.
And it is through this dalliance between acceptance and pushing towards better circumstances that life is manifested.
Being a libra I am fully committed to both extremes but I find my strength in balancing them.
I am curious how other people integrate apparently opposite parts of themselves…