Inner Work

We live in a world of differences, colour, beliefs, politics, aptitudes, resources. Most of us handle these differences by judging them; this is good, this is bad, this is neutral, I like it, I don’t like it, I don’t care about it. When we turn these judgements against ourselves we suffer.

Negative comparisons are the bread and butter of a lack of self acceptance. Thoughts of “I’m not as good as …“, “They are better than me …” and perhaps surprisingly “I’m better than …“. It’s true that we all have different capabilities, in a world of differences that’s inevitable. That’s not the problem. When the comparison causes us to feel dissatisfaction with ourselves or judge ourselves then we may suffer.

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A lot of our difficulties with feeling self-acceptance comes from the idea that we don’t quite come up to standard. We’re too fat or too thin, we don’t have enough confidence or patience. If you are going to judge yourself you need to have a standard against which to fail.

Over the years we’ve accumulated a number of standards of behaviour, appearance, thought, speech. All the ways we are supposed to measure up to be a good person, worthy of respect and appreciation. Because we’ve been awash in these standards since an early age we can’t easily spot them. They are just part of our universe. Fortunately there are clues in our experience as to where these standards lie.

You can find them in these kinds of sentences

I’m too … - fat / greedy / lazy / (add your own)

or

I’m not … enough - clever / tall / rich / (add your own)

Let’s take “I’m too fat” as an example. The key word in this sentence is too. If I say “I’m am fat” it can just be a statement of fact, I’m above my ideal weight and that could cause medical problems and difficulty getting into my current set of clothes.

If I say “I am too fat”, the word too adds a standard (too fat compared to what?) and gives you an opportunity to judge yourself - self judgement is a long way away from self-acceptance. Being too … something is an opportunity to beat yourself up for not meeting a standard which is often out of conciousness and probably aquired during your upbringing.

If you say the sentence with the too in it I suspect you will get an extra ‘charge’ on it. Try this experiment complete this sentence

I am too X [pick something that applies to you. ]

Now say out loud

• I am X
• I am too X

What’s the difference in feeling when you say those sentences?

The flip side of being too … is being not enough. For example: I’m not disciplined is different to I’m not disciplined enough. Disciplined enough compared to what?

What we are after in this part of the process is to neutralise the sense of too … or not enough. We want to neutralise the charge of self-judgement that goes with those statements.

You might be thinking if I don’t feel an attachment or charge on these thoughts, won’t I just run-amok. I am too greedy if I accept how greedy I am won’t I just make a dive for the kitchen and eat myself silly?

My answer to that is: Do you have to feel bad to be good?

Standards are useful as guidelines they are not so useful when they are used as sticks to beat yourself up with. The extra emotional charge on the I’m too … is just that, extra, another opportunity for self judgement for believing that you don’t come up to scratch.

Suggestion

Make a list of I’m too ... statements that apply to you. Get yourself a sheet of paper and just say out loud “I’m too ….’ and write down what comes to mind. When I tried this exercise for the first time I listed more than 20 items.

When you’ve completed the list, work your way through each item. Saying it outloud and scaling the negative charge on that statement from 0-10.

Starting with the sentence with the strongest first start tapping (or use whatever change process you would like to use) to reduce the charge. Using the example I’m too fat.

“Even though I am too fat I accept who I am and how I feel.”

If while you are tapping on that statement memories come to mind, make a note of them so you can deal with them later. Each of these memories probably paid some part in coming to these conclusions. Neutralising them will pay dividends.

If you find yourself getting stuck you can use the the following setup phrases to take a different angles on the issue

• Even though I don’t want to accept that I am too … I accept who I am and how I feel
  
• Even though I can’t accept that I am too … I accept who I am and how I feel
• Even though I am ashamed that I am too … I accept who I am and how I feel

When you have neutralised the charge on each item, test the result by saying

I accept that I am … [fat]

Take care of any tail-enders that arise.

Use the same process for the ‘I’m not … enoughs.’

Make a list filling in the blanks I’m not …. enough and start repeat the tapping process.

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The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.

Carl Rogers

How does lack of self acceptance show itself? Tara Brach author, therapist and promoter of Radical Acceptance lists the following strategies that we use to compensate for a lack of self acceptance

• We embark on one self-improvement project after another. Striving to meet standards of health, career, psychological and relationship wellbeing. All worth while pursuits unless driven by a underlying feeling of ‘not good enough’.
• Holding back and playing safe. Avoiding risky situations, new careers, relationships and experiences.
• Withdrawing from our experience of the present moment. Pulling away from experience by telling ourselves stories of what happened and why it happened rather than being with experience as it is.
• We keep busy. Filling our time with activity at work and at home so we don’t have to be with the discomfort of self-aversion.
• Becoming our own worst critics. Running a constant condemnatory commentary in our minds. Reminding ourselves of our flaws and how everyone else is doing so much better than we are.
• Focussing on other peoples faults. Dwelling on other peoples faults and failures stops us from dwelling on our own. It also allows us to project our deficiencies out onto other people.

I recognise that I’ve used several of these strategies in the past. Imagine for a moment living life without having to use those strategies, being deeply comfortable in your own skin. Sound good?

How do we make a start? If you recognise these qualities in yourself there’s a strong possiblity that they have been ground in over many years.

I used to think that if I could just get the one limiting belief/memory sorted out then I would be completely fixed in a ‘Road to Damascus’ experience. Now I suspect its going to take a lot of patient disentangling. Be prepared for a lot of disentangling approaches in this series of articles.

I decided to start with a global approach to address some of the beliefs that I may have had about self acceptance and whether it is right for me.

One way of looking at this is that I was pursuing the psychological reversals that would stop me adopting self acceptance. What limiting beliefs stood between me and self acceptance?

I broke the reversals into the following categories

• Do I want to accept myself?
• Is is possible for me to accept myself?
• Am I capable of accepting myself.?
• Do I deserve to accept myself?
• Should I accept myself?

I used the following format for assessing and exploring these beliefs

First I just said out loud the belief statement and scaled it from 0 (false) to 10 (true).

I don’t want to accept myself (score)

Then I phrased it as a sentence completion, for example:

I don’t want to accept myself because …

I’ll get too big for my boots (score)

Completing the sentence with whatever came to mind. Each statement becomes a tappable issue. If it’s another belief you can tap directly on it. If it’s a memory then you can use the movie technique to neutralise it.

Here’s the full list. Try these out yourself, adopt an attitude of curiosity. Remember there really is nothing wrong with you.

• I don’t want to accept myself __
  because …
  …
• It’s not possible for me to accept myself __
  because …
  …
• I can’t accept myself __
  because …
  …
• I don’t deserve to accept myself __
  because …
  …
• I shouldn’t accept myself __
  because …
  …

Persistent tapping on these issues should start to soften the idea that non-acceptance is our natural state.

If you live in the Newcastle area you might be interested to know that the next two meetings of the EFT Café will be exploring these approaches to boosting self acceptance.

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To be in harmony with the oneness of things is to be without anxiety about imperfection.

Zen Master Dogen (1200-1253)

I deeply and completely accept myself is a part of the standard EFT set up statement a little incantation with tapping that prepares the way for working on the presenting problem whatever it may be.

Many of my clients have a problem with that phrase, apart from the suspicion amongst some British people that it is excessively Californian, they feel a little uncomfortable saying it, almost as if saying I’m deeply and completely acceptable is a rather indecent.

I suspect that most of us have trouble with fully accepting ourselves just as we are. In fact, vast swathes of the economy are setup on the premise that if we buy this furniture, use this cosmetic, go on this diet, etc, that we will become OK. Preying on self-dissatisfaction seems to be a good way to make money.

Self dissatisfaction or self hate (if taken to the extreme) is quite pervasive in our culture. A few years ago the Dalai Lama met with psychologists and neuroscientists to discuss the overlap between science and Buddhist thought about our inner life.

“What do you think about self-hatred?” I asked when it was my turn to bring up an issue for discussion. I was eager to get directly to the suffering I had seen so often in my students, a suffering I was familiar with myself. The room went quiet as all of us awaited the answer of the Dalai Lama, revered leader of Tibetan Buddhism. Looking startled, he turned to his translator and asked pointedly in Tibetan again and again for an explanation. Finally, turning back to me, the Dalai Lama tilted his head, his eyes narrowed in confusion. “Self-hatred?” he repeated in English. “What is that?”

Sharon Salzberg

The thought that something is wrong with me is a pervasive kind of contemporary suffering and a driving force behind many problem behaviours.The EFT setup statement is designed to work away at our self-aversion with respect to the problem whatever it might be, by bringing a level of self acceptance to the issue.

An email newsletter from Steve Wells of EFT Down Under reminded me of this issue and sent me back to his original series of articles regarding self acceptance and his 30 day self-acceptance project. This inspired me to start working on this issue in my own life. These articles will cover some of the things I’ve tried out along the way.

By way of a starting exercise you might like to try saying out loud each of these statements and getting a sense of how true they feel on a scale of 0 to 10 (0 is totally false, 10 is totally true).

• I deeply and completely accept myself.
• I can’t accept myself
• I shouldn’t accept myself.
• There’s something wrong with me.
• I am ashamed of myself

If the first one scores 10 out of 10 and the rest are score 0 then you probably don’t need to read this series of articles. When I tried the ‘I deeply and completely accept myself’ test I scored 1!

This came as more than a bit of a shock to me, after all I’ve been using this phrase consistently for the last 4 years. If it’s something similar for you I hope these articles will help change that for you.

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This is the first of a short series of article about how not to get what you want.

Here’s my first failure tip, follow this reliably and you are bound to go wrong

Spend your time thinking about what you don’t want

Think in great detail about what you don’t want, what’s wrong with your life, work, relationships, etc. Make a detailed list of what’s wrong.

If you’re a bit stuck here are some suggestions:

• I don’t want to be fat.
• I’m fed up of this rubbish job.
• I can’t stand my partner.
• I don’t want to live in this pokey little flat.
• I hate the way my family treat me

You might be asking: “But, what if this is true?” “What if I really don’t want some of these things”. “Isn’t it good to be honest and tell it how it is?”

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Dr Dave Van Nuys of the excellent Shrink Rap Radio is doing a series of podcasts on dreaming.

One of his guests, Robert Hoss, presented a method of dream interpretation that allowed you to find out the meaning of your dreams without having to look at one of those so called ‘dream dictionaries’. Normally I’m not very interested in dream work because people seem to rush to find out what someone else thinks a dream means.

HELLO! The dream is yours, not theirs!

In contrast, his approach is based on Gestalt methods, using six questions to allow access to the meaning of components of the dream. This process seems to give a simple and elegant way to find out from the dream itself what it is trying to tell you rather than interpret it’s ’standard’ meaning.

Listen to the podcast :
or download it

After looking at his website http://www.dreamsience.org I found that he is also interested in Energy Psychology techniques including EFT.

He has combined his approach to working with dreams and using EFT into a process, modestly entitled The Dream-to-Freedom(tm) Technique. This is an interesting approach I’m looking forward to trying out.

His website has a wealth of articles and information related to dreams and dreaming, well worth investigating if you are a ‘bit of a dreamer’.

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Do you ever notice what you say to yourself. Many people, including me, have a stream of internal dialogue, a running commentary on what we are doing and how well we are doing it. It’s often most noticeable when we feel we’ve made some blunder. “Oh, what an idiot!”, “How could you be so stupid!”, “I wish I hadn’t said that, what was I thinking?”, and so on.

For many of us this commentary is not delivered in a friendly understanding tone, quite the contrary, we often berate ourselves in a way that would get us beaten up if we were to use it on other people. We’d also want beat up anyone who used that tone on us, but we ‘happily’ castigate ourselves without mercy.

If you recognise this in yourself, I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one, you might like to ask yourself: “Is this kind of commentary doing me any good?” or “Would I expect this from a compassionate friend?”

If the answer to those questions is no, what can you do about it? Here’s one way to work with critical thoughts, borrowed from an American Zen monk Cheri Huber (just in case you were wondering about the name, in the Zen tradition ‘monk’ is a unisex term).

When you notice yourself having a critical thought, say to yourself in a friendly, interested tone of voice: “Hmm, that’s interesting, how do you know that?”. Wait for the answer. When it comes it may well be another critical thought (they run in packs), if so ask again in a friendly tone “Hmm, that’s interesting, how do you know that?”. Just continue in this vein, you may find yourself learning quite a bit about the way your mind works.

In this way you can begin to question the unquestioned authority of these thoughts, many of which were absorbed in childhood and have been knitted into your internal experience. It may take a lot of persistence to challenge all the negative thoughts and comments that are floating around in there, but a little awareness followed by a quizzical enquiry may go along way to making them much less convincing.

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