You alone are possessor of your own little idiosyncrasies. So learn to laugh it up, because the mistakes and foot-in-mouth moments will just keep on coming, whether you like it or not.
Taking yourself overly seriously is not a successful path to obtaining good mental health (which we talk about in Chapter 24). Your individual human fallibility can be both amusing and illuminating. Think about comedy programmes and films. Much of what makes these shows funny is the way the characters behave, the mistakes they make, their social blunders, their physicality, their personal peculiarities, and so on. When you laugh at these characters, you aren't being malicious - you just recognise echoes of yourself and of the entire human experience in them. Furthermore, you're unlikely to put down these characters on the basis of their errors. Give yourself a similar benefit of the doubt. Accepting the existence of personal shortcomings can help you to understand your own limitations and identify areas that you may wish to target for change.
For example, we have a couple of our own quirks that we try to accept, and even celebrate, as unique. Rob possesses no sense of direction, which can leave him lost in an empty car park for hours; believe us when we say that no map or sat nav helps. Sometimes we wonder if he even knows where he lives. Rhena has her own special pronunciation for many words, (that's to say, she gets them wrong). These are only two of our personal foibles that we're prepared to commit to print!
You're unique because no one is a facsimile of you. At the same time, you're also not special or unique in any way because everyone is an individual and, hence, unreplicable. Your uniqueness means that you're different from all others and paradoxically that you're the same as all others.
Why self-acceptance beliefs work
At first glance, self-acceptance and self-acceptance beliefs may seem like a tall order or ‘not what people think'. However, incorporating self-accepting beliefs into your life can really make a difference in your life, and we recommend it for the following reasons:
Self-acceptance beliefs are helpful. You're inspired to correct your poor behaviour or address your shortcomings on the basis that you give yourself permission to be flawed. You allow yourself a margin for error. When problems occur or you behave poorly, you can experience appropriate and proportionate negative emotions and then move on. People are generally more effective problem-solvers when they're not severely emotionally distressed.
Self-acceptance beliefs are consistent with reality. Do you know anyone who's entirely flawless? If you have only conditional self-acceptance, you're subscribing to a belief that you cease to be acceptable, or worthwhile, when you fall short of those conditions or ideals. Basically, you're telling yourself that you must succeed at any given task. Because you can (and do) both fail and succeed, the evidence suggests that your demand to always succeed is erroneous.
Self-acceptance beliefs are logical. Just because you prefer to behave in a certain way, doesn't mean that you must behave in a certain way. Nor does your failing to act in that manner logically render you a failure in all respects. Rather, this ‘failure' supports the premise that you're a fallible human capable of behaving in differing ways at various times. To broaden the point, this ‘failure' highlights your humanness and your inherent capacity to do both ‘well' and ‘less well'.
Using self-acceptance to aid self-improvement
As we touch upon in the nearby sidebar, which covers accepting flaws in others and yourself, self-acceptance can lead to healthy and appropriate negative emotional responses to adverse experiences. This type of emotional response tends to lead to functional or adaptive behaviours. Self-denigration, on the other hand, leads to unhealthy, inappropriate emotional responses, which in turn tend to produce unhelpful or destructive behaviours. Look at the following situation:
Wendy's been a full-time mum for the past ten years. Before she had her children, she worked as a legal secretary. Now that her children are older, she wants to return to work. Wendy attends a job interview. During the interview, she becomes very nervous and is unable to answer some of the questions adequately. She notices that she's becoming flustered and hot. It also becomes clear to her that secretarial work has evolved in the past ten years and that she lacks the computer skills necessary for the post. Unfortunately, she doesn't get the job.
Now consider two very different responses to the interview:
Response A: Wendy leaves the interview, ruminating on her poor performance all the way home. ‘I looked such an idiot,' she tells herself. ‘They must have thought me a real amateur, blushing and stuttering like that. I'm such a failure. Who'd want to hire someone as lacking in skills as me? I don't know what made me think I'd be able to get into work again anyway. I'm clearly not up to standard at all.' Wendy feels depressed and hopeless. She mopes around the house and continues to think about what a failure she is. She feels so ashamed about failing the interview that she avoids talking about it to her friends, thus denying herself the opportunity to receive feedback, which may be useful or help her feel more balanced. Wendy stops looking in the employment pages.
Response B: Wendy leaves the interview and thinks: ‘I really didn't present very well in there. I wish I hadn't been so obviously nervous. Clearly, I need to get some computer skills before I'm likely to get a job offer.' Wendy feels very disappointed about not getting the job, but she doesn't conclude that failing one important task makes her a failure. She feels regretful, but not ashamed, about her performance and talks to a few friends about it. Her friends give her some encouragement. Wendy then enrols on an IT course at her local college. She continues to look through the job ads in the paper.
In response B, Wendy is understandably disappointed with how the interview turned out. She's able to recognise her skills' deficit. Because she accepts herself with this specific deficit, she takes concrete steps towards improving her skills base.
In response A, Wendy is not thinking about how to do better at the next interview. She's thinking about how she'd like to crawl under the carpet and spend the rest of her days there. A bit of an extreme reaction considering the circumstances, but Wendy isn't considering the circumstances. She's decided that messing up an interview equals total failure, and she's feeling far too depressed and ashamed to start problem-solving.
Generally, your failures and errors aren't as important or calamitous as you think they are. Most of the time, your failures mean a lot more to you than they do to other people.
Understanding that acceptance doesn't mean giving up
In the example of Wendy, we don't suggest that she must resign herself to a life of unemployment simply because she lacks computer skills. Why should she? Clearly, she can do things to ensure that she stands a good chance of getting back into the job market.
In Wendy's case, self-acceptance means that she can view herself as worthwhile, while getting on with self-improvement in specific areas of her life. By contrast, if Wendy refuses to accept herself and puts herself down, she's far more likely to resign - perhaps even condemn - herself to her current state of unemployment.
Resignation requires little or no effort, but self-acceptance can involve a lot of personal effort.
High frustration tolerance (HFT) is the ability to tolerate discomfort and hard work in the short term, en route to achieving an identified long-term goal. In response B in the job interview example, Wendy accepts herself and holds an HFT attitude. She's prepared to do the work necessary to reach her goal of getting a job.
Low frustration tolerance (LFT) is unwillingness to tolerate short-term pain for long-term gain. An LFT attitude is present in statements such as ‘It's too difficult to change - this is just the way I am' and ‘I may as well just give up'. Resignation and LFT go hand in hand. In Wendy's response A, she refuses to accept herself in view of her recent experience and resigns herself to unemployment.
Resignation may seem like an easier option than self-acceptance because it means that you have to do less. However, people tend to feel pretty miserable when they resign a
nd condemn themselves, refusing to put effort into improving their situation.
Being Inspired to Change
You may think that self-acceptance is all fine and well when talking about human error, social gaffes and minor character flaws, but the dice are more loaded in instances where you've transgressed your personal moral code.
If you've behaved in an antisocial, illegal or immoral manner, you may have more difficulty accepting yourself. But you can! Accepting yourself doesn't mean accepting the negative behaviour and continuing to do it. On the contrary, accepting yourself involves recognising that you - an acceptable human being - have engaged in a poor, or unacceptable, behaviour. Accepting yourself makes you more likely to learn from your mistakes and act more constructively - which is in both your interest and in those around you.
Consider the following two scenarios:
Malcolm has an anger problem. He puts unreasonable demands on his wife and children to never get on his nerves. He has a bad day at work and comes home to find no dinner on the table and his two young children playing noisily in the sitting room. Malcolm shouts at his wife and slaps her. He calls his children names and hits them. His family is afraid and upset. This happens on a regular basis.
Fiona works in a shoe shop. She's been stealing money from the till to buy alcohol and codeine-based painkillers. Usually, she takes the tablets throughout the day and drinks heavily in the evenings, until she passes out. Lately, she's called in sick to work more often because she has terrible hangovers and feels very depressed. Fiona often calls herself a ‘useless drunk' and ‘a low-life thief', and then drinks more to stop herself thinking. She works hard to hide her drinking and stealing, and feels ashamed of herself most of the time.
Are Malcolm and Fiona bad people, or are they just currently exhibiting bad behaviours? If you condemn Malcolm or Fiona - or, indeed, yourself - as a ‘bad person' on the basis of bad behaviour, you're missing the point that a person is more complex than a single act.
In order to overcome destructive or socially unacceptable behaviours, you need to do the following:
Take personal responsibility for your bad behaviour. Rather than deciding you're just a bad person who has no control or responsibility for your actions, accept that you're doing bad things.
In the example above, Malcolm's doing very bad things when he takes out his anger on his family. But, if he decides that he's a bad person overall, he relinquishes his responsibility to change. Basically, he's saying: ‘I beat my family because I'm a bad person through and through and therefore I can't change.' He's also more likely to attribute his violence to external factors rather than to his own unreasonable demands: ‘They know what I'm like and they should damn-well stay out of my way when I come in from work.'
Identify clearly what you're doing that's wrong or unacceptable. You must be specific when pinpointing bad behaviours.
For example, Fiona has two definite serious problems or ‘bad' behaviours. First, she has an addiction; second, she's stealing to support that addiction. Fiona's shame and self-condemnation are very likely going to get in the way of her overcoming her problems. She cannot put in the hard work needed to recover from her addiction (which includes seeking professional help) if she can't accept herself as worth the effort.
To move on in life in a way that contributes to the kind of world you'd like to live in, assume personal responsibility and keep working on your self-acceptance.
Actioning Self-Acceptance
Just like virtually all skills worth acquiring, you're going to have to work hard and practise in order to achieve successful self-acceptance skills. This section focuses on ways to start integrating self-acceptance into your daily life.
Self-talking your way to self-acceptance
What's in a name? Rather a lot, actually. As we discuss in Chapters 3 and 9, most people largely feel the way they think. In other words, the meanings you assign to events have a great deal to do with how you ultimately feel about those events.
Similarly, meaning is attached to the names you call yourself. If you use abusive, harshly critical or profane terminology to give utterance to your behaviours or traits, then you're heading towards emotional disturbance.
The notion that you may start to believe something if you tell yourself it enough times, is partly true. Fortunately, you can choose what messages you give yourself and, therefore, choose how you think and feel about yourself.
How you talk to yourself impacts immediately, or obliquely, on your self-concept. Try the following self-talk strategies to make the best impact on yourself:
Desist with global labels. Humans often call themselves losers, idiots, failures, stupid or unlovable because of certain events or actions they've been involved in or done. You may use even worse language on yourself in the privacy of your own head. Why? Because you're caving in to the temptation to rate your entire selfhood on the evidence of one, or more, isolated incidents.
Be specific with your self-assessments. Before you classify yourself as a failure, ask yourself the following questions: ‘In what specific way have I failed?' ‘In what specific way have I acted stupidly?' It's far less easy to fall into global self-rating when you force yourself to be specific.
Say what you mean and mean what you say. You may be saying to yourself right now: ‘Oh, but I don't mean it when I call myself those bad names.' No? Then don't say them! Get into the practice of using language that describes accurately your behaviour and is in keeping with self-acceptance beliefs. Instead of muttering ‘I'm such an idiot for missing that deadline,' try saying: ‘Missing that deadline was a really bad move. I'm really disappointed about it.'
Resisting self-abusive language cuts two ways. This chapter focuses on self-acceptance, but much of the advice applies to acceptance of others, too. Generally, people are nicer and more forgiving to their mates than they are to themselves. But, people are still capable of damning others and calling them ugly names. Start exercising a different type of consistency: stop name-calling, full stop. When you do put a halt on name-calling, it can lead you to feel less intense anger and hurt when others behave poorly, which helps to reinforce your self-acceptance beliefs. If you're practising not globally rating others, then you're also minimising the tendency to globally rate yourself.
Following the best-friend argument
Out of habit, most humans employ double standards: you judge your friends by an entirely different, often more accepting, standard than you use on yourself.
Try to take the same attitude of acceptance towards yourself that you take towards your friends and family. Consider the following:
Act like your best friend by judging your behaviour but not judging yourself. Eustace has been having difficulties in his marriage. He has been staying out late, drinking with his mates, before going home and being verbally abusive to his wife. His best mate, Lucian, has highlighted Eustace's poor behaviour in their conversations but he's maintained an understanding attitude towards his friend's unhappiness. Lucian isn't about to define Eustace as a complete pig on the strength of his recent, excessive drinking and arguments with his wife.
Accept your failings as you would those of a dear friend. Laura just failed her driving test for the fourth time. She feels very down about it. Her best friend, Maggie, tells her to try again and to be less hard on herself. Maggie wants Laura to do the driving test again. She doesn't view Laura as a total failure based simply on her difficulty in passing a test. Even if Laura never drives, Maggie will likely remain her friend because of other things she likes and appreciates about Laura.
View your behaviour within the context of your circumstances, and above all, be compassionate. Rivka had an abortion following a short affair. She feels very guilty and can't imagine putting the event behind her. Rivka's close friend, Carla, reminds her of the unfortunate circumstances she found herself in at the time, and tells her that she's still someone that she likes and respects very much. Carla can see that Rivka has made a difficult decision. She
compassionately considers that Rivka has acted out of a degree of desperation. Rivka may have been unlucky, or a bit careless, with respect to birth control, but Carla does not judge her on the basis of the abortion.
Ask yourself whether the punishment fits the crime. Are you being fair on yourself? What punishment would you dole out to your best friend for the same behaviour? Be aware that you may be making yourself feel extremely guilty, or ashamed, inappropriately. If you wouldn't like to see anyone else feeling such extreme emotions in response to the same transgression you've committed, then you're applying a double standard that's loaded against you.
Are you created so differently that you must subscribe to an exceptional code of conduct? (Consider this an inverted inferiority complex.) Having some exceptional code of conduct implies that you, and you alone, are somehow designed exclusively to transcend the ubiquitous human essence of fallibility. However, you are human. You don't fail any more extravagantly than any of your peers - nor do you succeed more dramatically than they do. If you're going to exercise compassion towards your friends' failures and wobbles, you need to consistently apply the same rules of compassion and understanding to yourself.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy For Dummies Page 25