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Psychologist Carl Jung had written, “The acceptance of
oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole
outlook on life.”
While I think that this is true, this doesn’t make
self-acceptance easy. Self-help guru and ex-pastor, Jim Palmer, is one of many
who have tried to provide a roadmap to self-acceptance:
·
Until you can look upon the entirety of yourself
without judgment, you will never find complete freedom in life.
Just stop judging yourself? This might sound easy, but the universality
of the problem suggests that self-judgments have been written into our DNA.
This why we cannot take criticism and relentlessly try to prove our worth.
Palmer also correctly notes that our self-judgments are also
associated with a sense of condemnation:
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We often judge ourselves through a binary lens -
good or bad…And depending upon how you judge any particular part of yourself or
your life, you are likely to take it as an overall judgement of condemnation
against yourself. This thought, action, choice, characteristic, habit, pattern,
mindset, feeling is bad…
Perhaps there might be a good purpose for our feelings of
condemnation, but Palmer advises his readers to replace this with “A more
empowering lens through which to view yourself differently”:
·
I am a human being of worth and value at every
moment…deserving of my own acceptance, patience, kindness and compassion.
However, this is no longer self-acceptance but a
narcissistic form of self-promotion. It constitutes a refusal to accept
ourselves as we truly are - moral beings wired to make moral judgments.
Instead, Palmer’s strategy relies upon a steady diet of self-affirmations to
overcome our self-judgments. However, these are numbing drugs that require
increasingly higher fixes to keep us afloat. Why? Perhaps they fail to address
the underlying problem.
According to Palmer, our negative beliefs are often false
beliefs, while the positive affirmations are the true beliefs:
·
The root of self-judgement and shame is often
false beliefs and stories we believe about ourselves, which govern our
self-image.
Are these false beliefs? In contrast, the positive beliefs
Palmer promotes represent secular religious beliefs. Telling ourselves that we
have value, worth, and are deserving of good things reflects the beliefs of
secular feel-good psychology and not the painful self-acceptance of who we
really are and those truths we have long suppressed.
Nevertheless, I think that Palmer is correct that:
·
Self-acceptance involves the realization that
one's imperfections are not unique to them but universally true of every human
being.
However, this brings us back to the question of acquiring self-acceptance.
Palmer believes that “Shame-based religious messages” are its antithesis.
Instead:
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Offering hospitality to every thought and
feeling that arises is being an impartial, accepting and compassionate witness
to your thoughts and feelings about yourself as they come and go. Offering
hospitality is the absence of all judgment, resistance, and condemnation. This
inner disposition of hospitality allows these thoughts and feelings to arise
and dissolve, you neither grab ahold or resist them when they come. This space
of hospitality is also one of curiosity. Rather than grab ahold of disapproving
thoughts and feelings and fueling them into strongholds of self-condemnation
and shame, just be curious about them.
However, Palmer does regard certain feelings and thoughts as
negative and untrue. Perhaps instead, we need to take full responsibility for
our malicious, jealous, and lustful thought life and judge our thought life as
our conscience requires. However, for Palmer, shame is not acceptable:
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Shame is internalizing a false and condemning
belief about who you are. Shame says: “I AM bad”, “I AM worthless”, “I AM
inadequate”, “I AM inferior”, “I AM pathetic”, “I AM a loser”, “I AM a
failure”.
Perhaps instead, self-acceptance requires us to accept
shame, guilt, and other bad feelings about ourselves as conveying truths.
Perhaps the way up requires us to first follow and accept what we find on the
path down.
Perhaps Palmer is unwilling to accept the path downward
because he has rejected the only possible antidote for the shame and guilt we
encounter - the God who is willing to absolve us from our shame, guilt and
feelings of condemnation when we confess our sins to Him. Instead, Palmer is
convinced we can argue away these feelings.
My five highly recommended psychologists and the multitude
of self-help books believe like Palmer. However, I walked away from them
convinced that, on top of all my other conflicts, that I was a failure for not
being able to take advantage of these “proven” and popular remedies for arguing
away feelings of guilt, shame, and condemnation. Instead, I found that I could
more easily argue away the pain of a broken arm.
Instead, it was only through the love and forgiveness of
Jesus the Christ that I was able to experience freedom and self-acceptance. If
He accepted me, how then could I refuse to accept myself!
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