ACCEPTANCE IS NOT LOVE OR WHY SHOULD I ACCEPT EVERYONE?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

When I speak or write about acceptance, that it is important, that it affects the quality of life, how we live this life, how we feel in this life. They often look at me askance, and as if they ask a very such question, which at one time, not so long ago, very much worried me "Why should I accept everyone?"

Are you familiar with this question? I do, and oh, how much

Now all and sundry are writing about how important it is to accept yourself, how important it is to accept others, and telling everyone about it, many, almost everyone, moreover, forget to tell how to accept it, and if they write, then with intricate phrases that look like to esoteric revelations and, of course, do not forget to season everything with love. And naturally, this raises a lot of questions, a lot of discussion and a lot of resistance.

So I, too, could not understand in any way with what joy it was necessary for me to accept everyone !?

Now I'm working on a program about acceptance, and I got into the literature up to my ears, plunged to the bottom to feel where it all comes from and where it goes later, where the cut is, how to patch up, and stuff like that. And something came to me, as always I share my discoveries.

When two years ago I could not understand how everything works with acceptance, I meant by acceptance that which was not acceptance …

Let's do a thought experiment: Let's say you accept others, how would you behave? How would you communicate with other people?

The word “love” comes to my mind, the accompanying feelings and care, and solicitude, and tenderness, and so on, respond. As if accepting others would mean loving them, caring, I should like them all.

This is the whole point. Acceptance is not love

When clients come to me, I say that everyone has a basic minimum acceptance, which is expressed in taking care of ourselves, so that we do not think there, and we take care of ourselves as best we can. And at the initial stage, we are working on noticing this concern, this is the basic support that helps us move further in our work.

Very often, psychologists confuse the concepts of acceptance and self-love, but this is not the case. Love can be part of acceptance, but it is not acceptance itself.

Still why is it better not to mix these two concepts together, because love is too subjective a concept, so much so that after we use it, a person has his own associative array, and that's it, it is almost impossible to change something in his ideas about love.

And since the concepts are still confused, one can often come across articles and trainings with the names "love yourself", "the rules of self-love." Naturally, in relation to myself, love is good and healthy, but the question remains, with what joy I need to love everyone, take care of everyone, there are 7 billion people in this world, and most of them are strangers to me, why should I? to clog them, I'm not Mother Teresa !?

And here spiritual practices are usually connected, which convince that loving everyone is good and right, maybe yes, but a strange feeling arises inside again.

You seem to have accepted yourself, accept yourself well, but you cannot accept everyone as yourself, in order to take care of everyone, you need to have some resource inside you, it’s for a minute, it’s draining something like, maybe Mother Teresa had an inexhaustible source inside, but I’m not. I learned to accept myself with difficulty …

And this leads to the fact that a person thinks that something is wrong with him again, he cannot accept everyone, which means he does not accept himself enough, we all read articles and know that in order to accept others, you need to accept yourself, after accepting acceptance of others as a complete set goes on, and if you cannot accept others, it means that you have not fully accepted yourself, and so everything is in a circle.

Stop

Acceptance is not self-love as we are all used to.

There is a very important element in acceptance - respect

We know very little about respect and this concept is also very transformed. Everyone remembers from childhood the phrase adults need to be respected, where respect is a form of managing a child, we respect elders, because they supposedly know more, smarter than us, more experienced, they generally know everything better, but we do not know anything.

By the way, here's another such mental exercise for you, think about your associations with the word respect, share them in the comments.

In the moral consciousness of society, respect implies justice, equality of rights, attention to the interest of another person, his convictions. Respect implies freedom, trust.

We were not told about such respect in childhood, not about this. And it turns out like this.

Respect comes from the right of every person to be, this is a basic feeling, this is the value of a person as such, confidence in his right to exist, no matter what

Based on this, when we respect ourselves, we, as it were, declare our right to be. In spite of everything, I have the right to be, I have my place in this world, and no one has the right to deprive me of this place.

This basic respect goes into the basic minimum acceptance that I wrote about in detail in another article. Basic acceptance - and yet it is!

What happens?

If we accept ourselves as basic, then we have self-respect for our existence, being, even if it is minimal. This means that accepting another person can be viewed in terms of respect for their existence.

Then accepting others will mean respecting their right to be, respecting their freedom, their choice, this equality and interest in another.

And this does not mean at all that you like all people, that you love them all, no.

To accept the other does not mean to love; to accept is to respect the other person's right to be

When we accept someone, this does not mean that we like him, absolutely not, we just understand that he is different, and he can be what he is.

We do not make a claim to the tree that it is such a tree, that this tree is an oak tree, we don’t tell him “hey oak, why are you an oak, I want apples now, let’s you be an apple tree”. We do not do this, we understand the whole absurdity of such a situation, so why do we do this to people?

And here's another example, if we see shit on the way, we don't poke at it with a stick, don't say “hey shit, why are you lying here, I don’t like that you are shit, I don’t want you to be like that”. We are not trying to make candy out of shit, we just bypass it so as not to get caught up in it.

That is why in the concept of “acceptance of the other” there is this respect in relation to the being of the other. We may not like a person, we may despise him, we may be hurt by who he is, or experience absolutely any other feelings, but we always leave the right to another person to be who he is.

Psychologist, Miroslava Miroshnik, miroslavamiroshnik.com