Radical Self-Acceptance: The Surprising Key to Transformation
Buddha set the roots of radical self-acceptance way back when. However, humanistic psychology opened a space for people to recognise the value of self-acceptance in psychology by embracing a view of human nature as essentially good.
What is Radical Self-Acceptance?
At the heart of radical self-acceptance is a love for yourself as you are right now. This contrasts to typical self help with it’s focus on improving yourself. Growth is still an aim of radical self-help. However, you achieve this through acceptance, rather than effort and change.
When you radically self-accept, you embrace who you are without judgement or the desire to change to fit the expectations of society or personal standards. You accept all aspects of yourself, strengths and weaknesses, emotions, past experiences, exactly as they are. The aim is to love and accept yourself as you are, because your imperfections are what makes you perfect.
Neuroscience and Radical Self-Acceptance
Radical self-acceptance involves changing the way you think about and relate to yourself. This is possibly because of neuroplasticity, your brain’s ability to change in response to how you use it. When you practise self-acceptance, you break negative thought patterns and grow new, healthier and kinder neural connections.
Self-compassion is a key feature of radical self-acceptance. Researchers believe that a lack of self-compassion can increase sensitivity to negative emotional experiences. Additionally, people who they consider low in mindfulness or high in over identification are more likely to feel overly attached to their negative feelings. Over-identification is the state of excessively attaching or identifying with your thoughts, emotions, or experiences. Instead of knowing your emotions as temporary or separate from the core of you, you over-identify with them. This can lead to an exaggerated emotional response and difficulty gaining perspective.
Research shows that practising self-compassion activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which reduces the stress hormones and activates the parts of the brain that deal with positive emotions. The deactivation of the amygdala reduces unnecessary anxiety.
How Hypnotherapy Supports Radical Self-Acceptance
Tara Brach is widely associated with radical self-acceptance. She says, “Radical acceptance is the willingness to experience ourselves and our lives as it is.” Radical acceptance is a combination of mindfulness and western theories. You can use Buddhist practices as your base to achieve self-acceptance.
Meditation – is the key to knowing your own mind and understanding yourself. Most people find their unconscious mind sprints without any difficulty, while their conscious mind tries it’s hardest to catch up with a lot of rapid breathing and a racing heart. This is the nature of your brain’s ability to produce thoughts outside of your control. Meditation is the tool you can use to notice these thoughts, clearly as they happen.
Mindfulness – Mindfulness is about acceptance without judgement in the present moment. However, this is sometimes misinterpreted. Mindfulness is a curiosity. When you live mindfully, you remember to notice and don’t get entangled in the experience. Mindfulness is about watching the process unfold. There is the question of whether we should switch the term accept, in mindfulness to notice.
The ability to be mindful is necessary before you can change. For example, in CBT, the idea is to replace negative thoughts with positive. However, you must first notice the negative thought. And before this, you must remember to notice the negative thought. Mindfulness will help you remember to notice, and meditation will help you notice. However, in radical self-acceptance, the intention is to grow through acceptance rather than change. When you use these Buddhist practices to improve your ability to notice, you can develop your curiosity and view the thoughts and emotions as parts of a play that appear on stage for their scene, and then disappear as quickly as they appeared. They aren’t real and hold little power. Mindfulness, like radical self-acceptance, isn’t about change. Your thoughts, judgements and reactions remain. However, you can watch them unfold without berating yourself for it. Without trying to fight it or run from it. Without suppression or redirection.
In my hypnotherapy work, I focus on mindfulness and take a humanistic view to help you open your mind and explore your thoughts and reactions. Hypnosis will help you enhance your self-awareness and mindfulness, so you can notice and remember to notice. Hypnotherapy will encourage you to embrace yourself fully, aligning with radical self-acceptance to help you grow without the need for change.
References
Michael H. Parrish, Tristen K. Inagaki, Keely A. Muscatell, Kate E. B. Haltom, Mark R. Leary & Naomi I. Eisenberger (2018) Self-compassion and responses to negative social feedback: The role of fronto-amygdala circuit connectivity, Self and Identity, 17:6, 723-738