How can you accept yourself?

0:00Kimberley Wilson:Hello and welcome. I'm Kimberley Wilson, I'm a psychologist, and this is Complex. Complex is the podcast that helps sift through all the content that's out there about our psychology and state of mind. We are constantly being told what's wrong with us, but there's so much that's right with us. And on that note, in this episode, I'm exploring self-acceptance. Is it just me? Or is it getting harder and harder to look at yourself in the mirror and say, yep, that's me. And you know what? I'm okay. Why is that? We do seem to like beating ourselves up. Whatever I am, it's not enough. And that leads to self-doubt and to anguish.

0:50Kimberley Wilson:it actually makes me feel really sad because I'll tell you now you absolutely are enough so why is it so difficult for so many people to believe this

1:08but now take a moment as you're listening I want you to imagine you're looking in that same mirror but this time you smile kindly at yourself.

1:20Kimberley Wilson:Maybe you're even pleased with what you see. You're suffused with self-love and a quiet confidence. How does that feel? Does it feel difficult? I imagine it does but I hope my special guest today can help walk us towards that image. I've invited Zan Van Tullican, doctor and one half of the presenting duo of our sister podcast What's Up Docs to join me. He's agreed to come on because self-acceptance, believe it or not, is something that he grapples with every day.

1:57Kimberley Wilson:So I hope we can be your joint guides through the mosh pit of misinformation to the smooth disco dance floor of understanding. Hello Zand. I don't mind a mosh pit. I'm sorry I'd go so far as to say I love them and I think they're quite psychologically healthy anyway it's lovely to be here it's very nice to see you thank you for joining me and we do know each other a little bit you know you introduced me to the audience as the host of this podcast I did I really enjoyed giving you a bit of a grilling I think it is really useful with the podcast to learn a bit more about your host that episode is in the feed on BBC Sound so I would say that everyone should go and check it out Thank you very much and we also presented a podcast together called Made of Stronger Stuff It's amazing you know people grab me in the street and say I loved Made of Stronger Stuff and then they say I loved Kimberley on it and then they tell me to send their love to Kimberley which I do right I mean I am reliable about giving you this feedback

3:05Kimberley Wilson:And we're here to talk about self-acceptance in this episode Normally we have a story from a listener at this point, but this is a special episode tomorrow and New Year's Eve, and it is kind of like a live show, and you are bringing yourself to the conversation. So why don't we start with you telling me what self-acceptance means to you? Self-acceptance to me, I feel at the moment it does slightly elude me, and I think that's because I really struggle with the idea of always wanting to be better. You know, most of my life has been spent kind of looking over the horizon going, oh, there's something there that I need to sort of be good enough to get to and I need to improve and learn more and get better at what I'm doing.

3:53And I think I've never managed to figure out the balance between wanting to be, meet challenges and do a good job and then just berating myself when I when I don't and I think the other ingredient which I wanted to ask you about is almost a superstition that self-acceptance to me feels at the moment like complacency and I think it's like resting on my laurels it's self-congratulatory it's looking in the mirror and going aren't I great I'm amazing and I feel like the day I do that my whole life will come tumbling down okay your face really lit up when I said that like this is stuff is that you as a psychologist wanted me to say well I think you

4:40Kimberley Wilson:touch on so many important points so one is this idea of the story that we're told which is we're always having to get better but actually no one's ever telling us what the clues are that we've reached our destination. We don't have any information about what it feels like to actually have achieved that. But the other thing you said was that you think that that necessarily requires some self-criticism, which I would disagree with, and we can get into that. And then the third part, which is that self-acceptance is synonymous with complacency, which I would also disagree with. There's a really common belief that if I've achieved anything, it's because I've been horrible to myself and hard on myself and I've pushed myself and if I take the risk of being kinder to myself I'll lose my edge the anxiety does feel like it sort of fuels me in some way I mean I do I would say if I was more accepting of myself I maybe this is tough I genuinely think I might just sit in bed all day and watch telly I know it sounds a bit irrational but I but I think it's a really common belief yeah and people they'll come to see me or someone like me and they'll be plagued with this kind of harsh critical inner voice but there's also a kind of resistance about well what am i without it you know and i think there's a confrontation or a contradiction in that about actually i'm living my life constantly kind of dealing with this critical bullying but also i'm afraid to let it go but i do have that resistance i think oh but maybe that is whatever I'm managing to get done in a day is a result of the sort of very literal kind of voices in my head haranguing me.

6:23Kimberley Wilson:I think a lot of the listeners who will, I think, objectively be looking at you and thinking, here's a successful guy, you know, he's got this great career. But it's really helpful, I think, for you to verbalize that there's this kind of inner turmoil. There's this really difficult internal conversation. I think you're sitting where a lot of the audience will also be sitting. So thank you for sharing that. I think that's really helpful and generous of you, actually. And so I think it's about time that we really got into the topic. We can really unpick it. So let's get into that complexity.

7:01Kimberley Wilson:All right. So, you know, what we know is that this lack of self-acceptance, what your describing is incredibly common. And according to an NHS website, 75 % of young people acknowledge the experience of not feeling confident in themselves. But what's really interesting about that is the inherent contradiction, right? Because here we are, me as an individual, thinking everyone outside is really successful. They're doing things. They're posting things on socials. They are achieving. They are grinding. They are all of that. and I'm the only one feeling like I'm failing, like I'm not really up to scratch.

7:42Kimberley Wilson:But actually, the vast majority of people feel like that. So we are sharing the same experience by ourselves. There's a famous idea of just sort of a harsh tutor of someone outside who sort of is demanding of you and that's how you achieve things. And I feel like if that person isn't in my life, that my brain will fill that gap. And I wonder whether we're conflating two things, which is a sense of satisfaction and happiness and peace or whatever, and success. Because you are describing this kind of idea that I need to get better. And it's kind of like, at what? Because then I will feel better.

8:30Kimberley Wilson:But then you don't actually believe that because if you feel better, then you won't strive to be more successful. There's an inherent contradiction in here. Okay, well, all right. Well, hang on a minute. You're sort of pointing your finger and nodding. What is it about yourself that you're not accepting? What is it that is stopping you from thinking, I'm enough, I've done well here? Well, it's a difficult question. I mean, first of all, let me say, my life is, I don't want to be richer or more famous or any of those things. And so it's not that I have any sense of sort of woe is me and oh, things are difficult.

9:07So it is a good question then. So what is the thing that I'm not accepting? I mean, these, the endless, relentless failures to do the things I promised I would do. I don't call my son who lives in Canada enough. I don't phone him enough. I think about him all the time. I talk about him all the time. I'm not good at picking up the phone. I don't see my parents enough. I have a number of excuses for all these things. I think that I could be much more patient with my family. So there are these things where I sort of go, I wish I was more, I'm not very punctual. You know, today to get here, I was so excited to see you.

9:45I have huge respect for how busy you are. I was 10 minutes late after the time that you had already allowed. I was 40 minutes late, in fact. Like if I have to leave to be somewhere in a day, it takes my entire brain capacity to be like, I mustn't miss this train, I mustn't be late. And yet I'm frequently sprinting down the platform in a sweaty mess. Those things just seem to be a sort of relentless set of just, why am I not a better husband, father, brother, son, etc. And also timing, dates, organisation, all those things I struggle with. So those are sort of the things that are meant to make you an adult, I'm pretty bad at.

10:25I think so many of the things that you describe are things that we all want to improve at we all

10:32Kimberley Wilson:want to be better partners we all want to be better at getting back to people I now say to people if they I think they're going to text me if I don't respond please hassle me it's not because I don't care about you it's just because I'm terrible at doing this but this is the point I think these are really really common concerns but I think you're experiencing them as completely unique to you. And so you're looking at this thing that I want to get better at and criticising yourself for it. So you've got the original pain and then you've also got the additional pain of I'm angry at myself for not being good at that thing.

11:07Kimberley Wilson:And also it hurts to not be good at that thing. We call these metacognitions, your thoughts about your thoughts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when I get frustrated, I then have an additional layer of frustration on top of that, which actually can go on and on. You know, then I'm frustrated about my frustration about my frustration. I mean, it's it's really daft what's going on in my brain. And so I think what might be helpful is just knowing that, you know, we are constantly thinking about where we fit and where we sit in people's minds and wanting to make sure that we sit in a good place in people's minds.

11:36Kimberley Wilson:And that is just ground zero of being a human. It isn't unique to you. It isn't something that you have conjured up all by yourself. My first thought when you said that was like, well, how's that going to help? Like, just because you've got problems, you know, you've got problems, I've got problems. But actually, I suppose that the next thought was, I will worry about not texting my son or calling my son enough. And then when I speak to him, he's not worried about that at all. And I've brought it up with him many times. I'm not saying he never wishes that I'd phone more, but it's not a dominant issue in our interactions and in our relationship.

12:12And I think it almost the sort of guilt and worry then actually stopped me. At some point, I'm like, oh, I can't send him a text now because I haven't texted for ages. One of the difficulties of thinking it's just you is imagining hostility on the other end. That person is thinking, why hasn't they got back to me?

12:29Kimberley Wilson:They don't care about me or this. So whatever the critical version is. And so you delay getting in touch because you don't want to be greeted with that hostility. Oh, that's really good. Yes, that is exactly true. And so you don't want to remind them of your existence because it will remind them of the distance and the time and then you'll imagine that you're in their bad books whereas if you just assume that we're all slightly distracted and we're all doing different things and actually a message from you was a pleasure for that person then there's less of a barrier to then sending that that message so how do i do it like where does that yeah how do i do it that's an excellent question and i think to answer it properly we need to really understand what the features the component parts of self-acceptance really are okay right and so the dictionary definition is a lot what it says on the tin the ability to accept yourself as you are including your faults ah yeah but even the word faults fault does not imply but fault is quite negative but um accept yourself as you are so in your description that's not what you're doing right you're already trying to improve achieve transform be somewhere else and then also including your faults so i suppose we would caveat that with what you perceive to be your faults because i guess from my perspective i would be thinking idiosyncrasies differences i actually got into a row with a friend of mine who's a psychologist.

14:07Kimberley Wilson:Not me. Not Kimberly. Very good friend and I was late for brunch. And this was brunch back in, you know, when none of us had children. And I was five minutes late. And she said, it's really disrespectful. And I said, but I was late to my medical school interviews. You know, I've been late for job interviews. I've been late for things that are terribly important. I just find punctuality really difficult. And she said, why can't you just change? And I said, well, why? why like we should all be better yeah but being late is not good and it's annoying for people and people get irritated by it like surely it would be better you can't be saying it's just okay to be late son i don't believe that's what you're saying is it what i'm saying i think might be a little bit more nuanced than that so the first thing i would be saying is what you haven't done is to accept that despite that this being something that you've done for at least 25 years that punctuality is an area that you struggle with.

15:04Kimberley Wilson:You haven't accepted that. It shows up consistently enough in your life for it to be true, but you resist it as a fact. Well, that's true. So what would it be like, take a deep breath, feet on the floor, what would it be like for you to say, I am not a punctual person?

15:31Kimberley Wilson:well people hate that i'm not asking about other people what would it feel like for you to say with 20 plus years of evidence what i know about myself is that i struggle with punctuality i'm not a punctual person i can't work out if it feels like a relief to say that or whether it feel it does feel a little bit like i'm saying i'm not a good person or i'm not someone who respects other people's time i suppose it does feel like admitting to a minor but not insignificant moral failing i suppose that's how it feels so you're not taking it as a kind of fact about your who you are as a person or your personality the way you're built there's a judgment on it it's something you are failing to do something you're unable to do incapable of doing and it's really interesting isn't it that this is something as you said talking to your friend I was late for my own medical school interviews I was let you know there's something that is really difficult for you about being there on time but it is so difficult for you to look at that evidence and kind of accept it let it sink in let it be an aspect of of how you present in the world it's really hard I can see how hard it is oh god it's such a good example the thing about the punctuality which I'm struggling with is that it's like I don't understand why I can't be on time but I suppose it feels very hard to just go all right I'm stuck with I don't know it's just admitting a failing yeah we're calling it a failing but I'm going to suggest two things so on part one the fact that you refuse to accept that you struggle with punctuality means that you keep promising people that you'll be on time you keep saying next time I'll be punctual and then you don't manage that and then you feel like you failed and then you've let them down and they're disappointed and so it compounds the issue and two it means that these things that we find difficult we imagine we have to do by ourselves and it prevents you from being able to lean on or ask for help from other people whereas if you'd been able to say listen everyone I really struggle with punctuality.

17:48And so what I'm doing is if you just tell me a time that's 30 minutes different from the actual time,

17:57Kimberley Wilson:then people can accommodate. But also you stop setting yourself up to fail. Oh, it's so interesting. Yeah. And it doesn't mean you don't keep trying to work on it. There are lots and lots of practical strategies that we can utilize, but you can't use them until you accept that there's a problem that needs to be addressed okay so let me see if i've got it so you're i feel i'm not trying to win an argument with you but i really felt almost sorry for you that i was bringing you this defective aspect of my personality and you were going to have to kind of spin it into some you know potentially good thing when i think everyone could agree that punctuality is just like important and respectful and polite and fairly easy and um it's just a sort of crappiness on my part that i can't do it and what you're saying is all that interpretation of punctuality is completely irrelevant it's something i struggle with i've struggled with it for my entire life and so as long as i expect to change every time i go sorry sorry sorry i'm late the implication is i promise i won't be late again okay and once we know what is we can deal with what is but whilst you're resisting what is we don't have any tools we don't have any we can't get a grip of it but i have to acknowledge the reality of my limitations because it's only from accepting reality that i can change things okay so saying i'm not a punctual person whatever i think about that being a kind of admission of failure and guilt and ridiculousness allows everyone else to manage their expectations and their timings and all the logistics and practical stuff and it allows me to stop having this relentless cycle of going oh sorry sorry sorry and i'll do better next time and the endless chastisement of myself going oh come on you can be on time you can be on time i'm glad that kind of landed because really what we're talking about whatever the issue is whatever aspect of ourselves we're struggling to accept is the power of integration.

20:02Kimberley Wilson:So not trying to split off this undesirable part of ourselves and hide it and cover it over and pretend it doesn't exist and cause a distraction over here and only show our shiny, bright, perfect parts of ourselves. And it's only by bringing these things together that I can look at it and think, okay, now what am I going to do with it? What am I going to do with this part of myself, which isn't perfect, It isn't how I would love to be for the rest of my life, but it is. This is honestly who I am. And I think the secondary benefit of that is that when we bring our whole selves to the world, people know who we are fully and accept us rather than only accepting the perfect persona that we present.

20:46Kimberley Wilson:There's a real power in that. That's really nice. I got very lucky with my wife that she had got to know me, figured out who I was, seen me at a bit of a low ebb before we kind of got together romantically. And so although I think actually I would have concealed loads of stuff, not like in a sinister way, but I just would have tried to portray some version of myself that I thought was more attractive. By the time we got together, she'd seen, she knew it all. She'd seen it all. I wish I was a better dancer. her she is sometimes if we dance together i do have a bit of like oh god she's gonna get the from this but overall what you're saying just chimes with me so strongly because i do have that relationship with my wife where she she gets everything and so i i can be just my authentic self my truth like i just not trying to conceal anything and that makes it much easier this is it isn't it that actually what you have seen in practice but you didn't realize in theory is that self-acceptance is the core of safe relationships and feeling good about yourself and being able to go into the world with that little bit of confidence.

22:00Kimberley Wilson:So what are some practical steps that we can use to get to this point of integration? And I say this knowing that it's much easier said than done. I'm going to suggest two things that I think will be helpful for you and for everybody listening. The first thing that we want to think about is trying to recognise yourself, your perceived faults, your idiosyncrasies, however you want to call them. But try to recognise them without judgment. The image I always use for this is that you're lying on a riverbank, it's a sunny day and there's a slow winding river next to you and all of your thoughts, your criticisms, your judgments, why was I late for that, I haven't messaged somebody back, I just leave on the surface of the river and they're just flowing away.

22:50Kimberley Wilson:So you can see them, you can read them, but you don't pick them up, you're not gathering them up from the river, you're just letting them flow. And this is a task that helps to break down what we call cognitive fusion, which is the idea that we fuse with our thoughts and we believe that our thoughts are real and true and facts and us. And it helps just create a little bit of distance between that thought, whatever that thought might be, I'm a terrible person and someone's really angry with me. It's just a thought that I can look at and I can observe. And that can just start to kind of take off the edge of some of that inner critic, that inner harshness, which doesn't actually do anything good for us.

23:31Kimberley Wilson:It takes a lot of energy. It makes us feel bad about ourselves. It makes us smaller. It makes us procrastinate. And so that would be my first step, recognizing yourself without judgment. And then if you can do that, and if you can get into the practice of doing that, I would suggest doing that for a couple of minutes a day in the beginning, just to get a sense of it. The next thing that I often say to my clients, especially if I'm working with people who have issues with body is about allowing other people to be separate from you. So for example, what I mean is reminding themselves that other people's bodies are none of my business, right?

24:07Kimberley Wilson:We often compare our bodies, compare ourselves, we look at somebody else and then think about ourselves. And actually, it's a really good practice to be able to say that person's hair, weight, shape of their legs is none of my business. And when you can allow other people to have their own bodies. It creates more space for you to be more accepting of yourself. I'm trying to imagine doing that. Yes, none of your business. If I bumped into someone I hadn't seen for a long time and their body had changed, they'd put on weight, and I might catch myself thinking, oh, you've put on weight, my thought to myself would be, their body's none of my business.

24:43Kimberley Wilson:Their body's none of my business. There's nothing there for me. That's good. Sometimes I do that with the news. I think I don't need to have an opinion about this. I'm quite good at that actually. And so you can apply that to whatever issue that you're struggling with. So if you've got a friend who's always on time and you look at them and you think they're always punctual, how they manage their time is fantastic, but it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with me. And I might want their punctuality. Maybe I wouldn't want their, I don't know, smoking habit or liver problems or whatever else right i might want their long beautiful legs but i wouldn't want their kidneys is that there's a little bit of that of going you don't have the whole picture you can actually put the whole idea down that issue doesn't need to play out it won't help it's not interesting it's quite boring i mean i'm quite bored by my own thoughts about this stuff a lot of the time no one's more bored than my therapist It's exhausted.

25:45Oh my God.

25:48Kimberley Wilson:No, it's the rumination part. You constantly talking about how terrible you are isn't making you a better person. It's keeping you thinking about how terrible you are. Yes. When you can accept whatever that thing is, then you can say, okay, now that my feet are on the solid ground of reality, what is my next step? That's a good trick to just go, none of my business. Would you say that's a mantra? I think it's a, yes, it's a really good practice. And I mean practice because none of this stuff comes easy. You know, we're invited to critique and criticize and judge and compare. And so it's real work to try to separate yourself from that.

26:25But if you're thinking about, actually, the less I'm thinking about somebody else, the more I have space to think about what I want for myself and

26:32Kimberley Wilson:the people around me. It's just about freeing up mental space. So let the faults float on by, on the river don't pick them up don't go fishing in the river just sit on the river oh that's an interesting thought okay well there's another one and none of your business applying to other people and all their perfections yeah and then the final piece because this isn't easy stuff is you can really this is one of the times where i think you really can benefit from therapy you can really benefit from having an objective person sit down and help you interrogate these things about yourself. Because these psychological habits are so, well, they're so habitual, they're so innate, it's really hard to extricate yourself from them by yourself.

27:17Kimberley Wilson:And it's just not the way we're made. We are social beings, we are born into networks, and we depend on other people to have a sense of who we are. And for additional support, we borrow other people's belief in us, and their encouragement, and their point of view, and their energy and their patience. And we do that in exchange self-improvement is actually a joint venture if someone is listening thinking i can't afford a therapist and i don't have time for a therapist is it a sort of substitute to go at least you could talk to someone who loves you and cares about you and say here are some things i'm struggling to accept and talk it through is that part of it or is it not quite the same when it comes to self-acceptance specifically actually you can take the risk with someone you love and you care about and who cares about you of saying i feel really bad about this thing about myself and i wish it was different but i don't know how to make it different and they will say i know you struggle with punctuality but you're one of the kindest people i know right when you get there it's great or something like that yeah or i know i can always call you you're really generous this is one thing this isn't all of you and they can help to kind of reflect the broader fuller story of you because we lose that when we're so focused on the parts of ourselves that we don't like and so okay that's really it is a funny magic trick you do that is interesting because i i thought it would just be some incredible bit of mental gymnastics you'd have to do to explain this to me i just didn't think you'd do it okay i feel like my work here is done what i really like about this conversation is that we didn't come with an agenda we had a topic but not an agenda and that actually there are a few relatively simple not easy but simple psychological skills that can really help transform the way you think about something and then you can immediately feel better.

29:26Kimberley Wilson:And when you're feeling better, this is my argument against the idea that actually it's feeling bad that drives you. I actually think it's when you're feeling better that you have the energy, the motivation, the optimism and the willingness to make those changes. I'm so impressed by that. I hope anyone listening will have just thought of something that they think is rubbish about themselves. That is a genuinely rubbish thing, like being unpunctual or whatever that terrible thing that they're doing is and gone if I can accept that that will make it easier to fix easier for other people to live with and reframe it in the context of the rest of their lives that is good thank you I'm really glad you found that helpful

30:14Kimberley Wilson:thank you Dr Zahn van Telenken for coming on to the show thank you for being here Thank you so much for having me on and thank you for listening. And this has been genuinely fascinating and useful. And thank you to everyone who's listening. I hope you found this episode helpful and encouraging because that's what I want. I want Complex to be your trusted space, a place where you can learn how to take care of yourself better and with more kindness. and please let me know what you want me to explore on the show and why email your questions to complex at bbc.co.uk we might use what you tell us but we'll make sure to do it anonymously please note also that i can't answer your questions personally so if you have a concern about a medical or mental health issue i strongly urge you to seek expert help and if you want details of further support with some of the issues raised in the podcast you can find them at bbc.co.uk forward slash action line.

31:11Kimberley Wilson:And the link is also in the show notes on BBC Sounds. And don't forget to subscribe to Complex on BBC Sounds and make sure your push notifications are turned on so you don't miss out on a single episode. And that's it. My thanks again to Zahn for coming. And of course, thank you to the lovely team at Loftus Media. Producer Kirsten Lass, assistant producer Katie Chandler-Clark, researcher Grace Revel, technical producer Ruben Huxtable, Digital Editor Richard Berry, Science Editor Rami Zabar, Studio Engineer Felipe Rojas, Sound Engineer Ruth Rainey, and at BBC Sounds, Assistant Commissioner Izzy Lee Poulton and Commissioning Editor Rian Roberts.