Self-acceptance is not self-love

However, it clears the way for self-love.

When you hate yourself, it is impossible to imagine self-love. Self-love is like the sun you fly towards with wax wings. It is like trying to roll the rock up the mountain, only to have it roll away down the other side the instant you get to the top. Self-love seems totally impossible when you think you are completely worthless and deserve only pain and suffering.

Fighting your image of yourself is impossible. It doesn’t work. It is disrespecting yourself; refusing to acknowledge all of who you are; diving into a pool of shame and living there like you were born there.

The only way through self hatred is to accept that you are a person who hates yourself. You must accept this, because fighting it is fighting yourself, and you can never win that battle. You can only make yourself even more shamed for being unable to fight yourself.

If you can accept yourself, the need to fight disappears. All that energy you put into fighting yourself comes back. It’s no longer being wasted.

Simple self-acceptance lets you regain much of your power, and it stops you from continually hurting yourself, over and over and over. It’s simple, and yet, so very difficult. Letting go of your self-hatred can be a horribly difficult thing to learn. It takes lots and lots of practice.

I used to imagine that I was standing in a stream beneath a tree. Whenever I had a self-hating thought that I recognized as self-hating, I imagined plucking a leaf off the tree, and writing the thought on that leaf, and setting the leaf in the water to float away.

Most of the time, there was an eddy current around me, and the leaf would circle back to me. But if I kept on writing those thoughts on leaves and putting them in the water, eventually, the stream would take them away, and they would no longer circle back to haunt me. It was a good thing the tree would grow new leaves each year, because it looked like an attack of gypsy moths, the way I was writing those thoughts down on leaves.

Actually, in my mind, the tree was always beautiful and full of leaves. It was a weeping willow, and somehow it made life possible, once I figured out about setting my thoughts free.

In letting go of the self-hating thoughts, I found I could accept myself. I understood that my goal was to accept myself; that I was doing myself no good by hating myself; but it was a very difficult thing to give up those thoughts. I had made a living out of those thoughts for decades. I had no idea who I was if I didn’t hate myself.

Self-acceptance means accepting that I am a person who has hated himself. I am a person who has thought all kinds of evil things of himself. It’s ok that I did that. I know now I can let go of that kind of thinking. That means I can be who I am, instead of constantly trying to change myself by hating myself. That never worked.

Oddly, by accepting myself with all my faults and all the horrible hurts I have inflicted on those I love (or thought I was loving), I stop beating myself up. I no longer need to beat myself up. I no longer make my life about beating myself up.

Instead, I can do what I do, and be myself, with all my fears and pain. I can feel those things instead of trying to hide from them or soothe them away before I even know what they are about. It’s ok that I’m the way I am.

Ok.

That’s not self-love, but it clears the brush away so I can find a comfortable place where self-love might overtake me. I’m not trying to love myself. I’m merely trying to let go of my self-hatred through accepting my self-hatred. It’s such a paradoxical thing. In accepting my own self-hatred, I accept myself, and in accepting myself, I can also clear away all those thoughts where I tell myself I am no good and I don’t deserve love.

And if I don’t not deserve love, then what else is there?

I can love myself or feel love or love others if I stop thinking I don’t deserve it. I don’t even have to think I deserve love or I am worthy of love. Once I’ve let go of my self-hatred it’s just plain weird. It’s like the absence of hatred is love. There is the possibility of self-appreciation, simply by letting go of all I hated, and accepting myself.

So self-acceptance isn’t self-love, but it does clear away what needs to clear away so that self-love can be. It is a precursor. A necessary condition. It doesn’t necessarily mean self-love will arise, but it means it can arise. The longer I go on accepting myself, the more the absence of self-hatred seems like as positive a thing as I can feel — a lot like self-love — enough so that it seems like it actually is self-love. As if self-love is the default state, and the only way it can not be there is if you are actively pushing it away. Let go of the pushing away, and the love can exist.