Exploring blame – its power and our attachment to it

CHALLENGING THE BLAME FRAME

As a therapist learning about transformative or healing justice, and thinking about barriers to it,  I can’t help but connect what I hear to self-acceptance and the things that get in the way of that. I know that when it comes to self-acceptance, the reliance on punitive or coercive strategies – on "blame and shame" – to control the self can be really baked in. The idea of letting go of those strategies can feel terrifying, and the urge to hold on to them really strong.

I remember when I first learned about Gilbert’s Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT) approach, I felt challenged by his claim that “much of what goes on in our minds is not our fault” (Gilbert). He maintains that:

It is not our fault because our capacities for powerful desires (like love, sex, status and belonging) and our emotions (such as anger, revenge, anxiety and depression) were built by evolution over millions of years. We didn't choose to build them like this! (Gilbert)

He argues that, “We did not choose to have a brain like this”. Our complex brains emerged out of millions of years of evolution. Gilbert also argues that experiences we did not choose, within our family and cultural context, lead to us learn certain ways of responding to situations we experience as threatening:

We call these protective or safety behaviours and strategies. They are very understandable and often rapidly activated. They are the way the body has learnt to try to protect itself. That is absolutely not our fault because usually they just developed in us without much thought on our part. However, they have a huge disadvantage – they can have unforeseen and undesired consequences. For example, they may stop us learning new ways of dealing with difficult situations. This is because safety learning tends to use the same strategies in a variety of situations. As a result, because of our tendencies to be submissive, self-blaming or aggressive, we cut ourselves off from possible sources of good things. (Gilbert)

We are complex brains in complex bodies, evolved over millions of years, and shaped by the in-itself complex, familial and cultural context within which we find ourselves. That all makes sense, and yet somehow the conclusion – that the way our mind works is not our fault, and we should not blame ourselves is hard to sit with.

Part of me feels like without blame, we can’t take responsibility and can’t have control. But CFT sees things differently. Gilbert argues that we can let go of blame and still take control:

We can learn to step back from our first reactions and learn to think about them in different ways. We can develop the habit of learning to stop before acting on first reactions. Learning to stop and really notice and attend to what is going through our minds is a first step to having more control. Learning how to be compassionate to our feelings, rather than fighting with them or trying to avoid them, is the next step. (Gilbert)

He is not trying to throw responsibility out the window, but instead raise the possibility of responsibility without blame:

[A] key issue is how we can learn to stop blaming ourselves for what we feel or how we’re reacting, become aware that this is the working of a brain that’s been designed for us, but that we can take more responsibility for our minds so that we don’t just end up in that canoe being rushed along on rivers of desires, disappointments, passions or emotions. (Gilbert)

I found this idea challenging because some part of me couldn’t help but feel that responsibility without self-blame is responsibility-lite. Blame feels serious. Responsibility without blame feels wishy-washy – a cop out somehow.

I had to ask myself: “Why am I resistant to the idea of responsibility without blame?”. Talking to a friend involved in the transformative justice movement, we thought about how an attachment to blaming ourselves and others can manifest in so many different ways – even as we try to find less punitive, and more healing, trauma-informed, dialogue-based and resourcing-focused strategies to build safe and just communities to live in. My friend remarked:  “Some of us are not ready to give up blame because it’s all we have”. Blame can be a way we’ve learned to meet our very real emotional, motivational, moral, political, and social needs.

I invite you, if you are someone who feels a need to blame yourself or others, to extend some acceptance, compassion, and gentle curiosity to the part of you that feels that need.

UNDERSTANDING THE ROLE BLAME PLAYS IN OUR OWN LIFE 

If you took a minute to fill in these blanks with as little self-censorship as possible what would you write?

I need to blame myself because …

I need to blame others because …

I need blame because …

These are some sentences that emerged out of discussions with people around me. Do any of them resonate with you?

I need to blame myself…

• I need to blame myself to motivate myself to be better.

• I need to blame myself because in order to take responsibility.

• I need to blame myself because people who don’t end up doing terrible things.

• I need to blame myself because otherwise I’ll feel as if I have no control, and that's a scary feeling.

• I need to blame myself because if I blame others it will damage my relationship to them.

• I need to blame myself to show others that I take responsibility and that I care.

• I need to blame myself to pre-empt blame from others.

 I need to blame others…

• I need to blame others to give myself permission to feel the anger and pain I’m experiencing.

• I need to blame others because otherwise they will do it again.

• I need to blame others to honour the pain of the people they have hurt.

• I need to blame others because I want them to face consequences.

• I need to blame others to reclaim my power and control.

• I need to blame others because I want to see others suffer for what they’ve done to me.

• I need to blame others because I want them to understand what they’ve done and blame themselves.

• I need to blame others to stand up for people who have been hurt.

• I need to blame others in order to not feel complicit.

 I need blame…

• I need blame as a way to make room for and talk about my anger and hurt.

• I need blame because moral authority helps you have an impact and influence others.

• I need blame as a way to control others who might hurt me or let me down.

• I need blame to communicate my values and what I stand for. 

• I need blame to connect to others who feel similarly. 

• I need blame to feel validated - because being right feels like the only legitimate way to get my response validated, and in order to be right, the person I’m in conflict with needs to be wrong.

• I need blame to seek sympathy - because being wronged is the only way to seek collective sympathy in a society where sympathy feels so rationed.

• I need blame to navigate conflict - because talking about blame feels safer, less exposed, less personal and more authoritative than talking about feelings, needs, boundaries or values. It’s not me and you in conflict, my needs versus yours, or even my values versus yours -  it’s good versus bad.

• I need blame when I don’t have access to other strategies for seeking justice or structural change. It can feel like the only thing I have at my disposal to seek redress, keep people and myself safe, or realize my values.

• I need blame because blame is powerful.

THE POWER OF BLAME

This isn’t an anti-blame piece. I'm not asking you to delete blame. Reflecting on these discussions I’m struck by how powerful blame is - how much impact and influence it can have; and why we are drawn to it. I’m struck by how many different values and needs we try to pursue through blame:

Responsibility. Commitment. Consistency.

Motivation. Control. Achievement.

Change. Safety. Validation. 

Justice. Accountability. Redress.

Belonging. Security. Cohesion.

I’m left wondering what it would look like to try to pursue those values and needs, and try to bring about the changes in ourselves and our world that we want, without blame. What would be necessary for that to be possible? What would need to shift? What might we gain? 

REIMAGINING RESPONSIBILITY WITHOUT BLAME 

Our society ties blame and responsibility so tightly together that it can be hard to disentangle them. But responsibility seems to be about recognition and action; and blame doesn't seem like it has to be an inherent part of that. I wonder whether blame is an attitude or energy we have just got used to bundling responsibility up with - the fuel we have learnt to use to drive and power it - rather than an inherent part of it.

Even so, untangling them in our mind and being aware of how they can operate separately in our lives  feels like an ongoing practice, rather than the work of the moment. I try to imagine what committing to that practice would look like, and this is what emerges for me:

I want to try to understand and acknowledge, as well as I realistically and sustainably can, both how I am effected by others and our world, and how I affect others and our world.

I want to try to recognise the impact of my actions, and the implications of my choices.

I want to look for different ways of doing things, within the limits that I have and the situation I am in, that prevent harm and reflect my values.

I want to  learn and grow from my mistakes.

I want to acknowledge, and when possible, prevent harm.

I want to try to work if I can to repair what is possible to repair.

I want to make room for grief and remorse, and honour pains that feel irrepararable.

I want to  set boundaries, make commitments, seek validation and support, prioritise safeguarding, critique oppressive systems, and advocate for change in ways that are effective and sustainable - with as little reliance on “blame and shame” as possible.

I want to find words for anger that do not centre blame.

That list feels quite weighty to carry. Writing it I sit with feelings of self-blame connected to memories of all the times I haven't done that, and those memories fuel doubts and fears about my capacity to engage in the practice the list envisions. But the list also reminds me that there are ways to take  responsibility for those actions that are not built on blame. Bringing that practice into this moment I recognise that I can take a step in this practice right now by taking responsibility for how I wield blame without blaming and shaming blame itself, or the part of me that has held onto and does hold onto blame. I want that blaming part of me to feel safe to be seen, so that it is not tempted to disguise or obscure itself. I  want to welcome it to awareness, and explore what it can tell me, so we can find a way forward together.

I’ve linked some free resources on Compassion-Focused Therapy below, if you are curious to find out more about CFT. Most of the quotes above are from the top link. 

https://www.getselfhelp.co.uk/docs/GILBERT-COMPASSION-HANDOUT.pdf

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.692.1746&rep=rep1&type=pdf

https://self-compassion.org/wp-content/uploads/publications/GilbertCFT.pdf

Figuring out what you need to Flourish in the New Year

PART 1:  FILLING UP AS WELL AS POURING OUT

The New Year is a time when many people start thinking about resolutions for the year ahead, and plan to make changes in themselves and their lives. I definitely think it can be really helpful to reflect on goals. (Personally I would recommend an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy approach to identifying goals, that centres personal values ). But I’ve noticed that sometimes focusing on resolutions can feed into a tendency to think about ourselves in terms of outputs. We think about what we want to get out of ourselves in terms of behaviour, performance and outcomes. 

Even when we do think about self-care resolutions, it can get sucked into the "output" framework. We can start to think of it as another thing to do - a task, obligation or outcome, to succeed or fail at as an individual. Self-care becomes something we can fall short at, leave undone, be bad at, or beat ourselves up about. I think something is lost when we start thinking of self-care as primarily another output or resolution, rather than as a process and practice with inputs and outputs.

SUSTAINABILITY

This year I’ve been thinking about self-care a lot in the context of sustainability. One question I’ve had on my mind is how we can live in a way that is sustainable emotionally and physically.  Growing up I always wanted to do my best and give 100%. But increasingly I’ve realized that as a therapist it is important to do my sustainable best rather than my absolute best so that my practice can be sustained, consistent, grounded, and fulfilling. 

That phrase “sustainable best” can be a little hard to envision. One image that helps me keep in contact with what it looks like is the idea of perpetual soup. I read about a possibly not entirely real medieval practice of having a pot of soup constantly topped up and simmering for a whole year, with things being added as they came into season. The pot is never allowed to dry out or burn down to the bottom, it just keeps going. I can’t help but think, in this age of burnout, that it might be helpful to take a perpetual soup strategy with our minds and bodies. That might be a path to sustainability.

WHAT YOU PUT INTO YOUR POT

So as a complementary New Year's activity to balance the seasonal emphasis on goal setting, I invite you to consider what you are putting into your pot, and what you would like to put in your pot this coming year.

Is your pot running out of soup or overflowing?

Are you pouring out more than your pouring in, or pouring in more than you are pouring out at this moment?

What have you and others already put in it?

Have you got what you need in your soup? 

Is the balance of ingredients working for you or is it a little off?

Is there anything your soup needs more of?

What do we need a little dash of and what do we need a whole  lot of at this moment in time? 

What ingredients can you not get hold of (especially in lockdown), and what substitutes would work instead to keep you fed?

I don't think the answers to those questions are always immediately obvious. Most of us aren't taught how to figure out what the ingredients for a flourishing self are. 

I imagine that the ingredients for a flourishing self are different for everybody, and depend on the kind of soup you want to make, and what’s already in your pot. I imagine some things we add will change over time, while some things stay the same. 

I invite you to think about the ingredient you might need at the moment and in the coming year as you make your soup – the inputs you need to achieve the outputs you want in the year ahead. I believe that as you identify and add as many of those ingredients you can, with the help of those around you if possible, you set ourselves up to succeed more sustainably than you otherwise would. Providing yourself with the ingredients you need to thrive can be a way to pursue your goals without damaging your mental and physical wellbeing in the long term. 

FIGURING OUT THE INGREDIENTS THAT WORK FOR YOU

Depending on your self-parenting style, it can be hard to think about the inputs you need and want, rather than the outputs you expect or demand. If you aren’t used to considering what you need and what helps you, it might take a while to figure it out. 

These are some questions to consider as you compile your list of ingredients:

What nourishes your body?

What gives you energy?

What inspires you?

What do you find comforting?

What helps you clear some space in your head? 

How do you find new ideas and new ways of doing things? 

How do you play?

What feels like an adventure? 

What sustains you?

What allows you to pause?

What helps you release tension?

What helps you feel safe to explore and be curious?

What helps you feel comfortable to express yourself? 

What gives you confidence to create? 

What helps you to switch off? 

What helps you feel more connected to others? 

What kind of support can you receive and use?

What makes you feel rested?

What helps you get unstuck?

If it is hard to answer those questions, or you are just curious about another perspective, it might be helpful to read the next section. The section explores what Gilbert, an expert on compassion and its relevance to mental health, describes as the “Three Circles Model”:  three interacting embodied systems of emotional regulation that operate within us.

PART 2: A SYSTEM-BY-SYSTEM APPROACH TO FIGURING OUT WHAT TO ADD

Understanding a little bit more about how our mind operates can give us new ways to reflect on the kind of ingredients it needs to flourish. I have found it helpful to use Gilbert’s Three Circles model to think about what I need. Gilbert in trying to integrate psychotherapeutic ideas and the insights of neuroscience, identifies the following three systems of emotional regulation:

Threat and Self-protection System: 

This is the system that is involved in our fight-or-flight response and it can help keep us alive and safe.

The function of this is to pick up on threats quickly and then give us bursts of feelings such as anxiety, anger or disgust. These feelings will ripple through our bodies alerting us and urging us to take action against the threat, to self-protect. (Gilbert)

Trauma can have a profound impact on how this system operates. Stress, difficult life circumstances, and anxiety can lead to it being often activated. 

Incentive and Resource-seeking System (The drive-excitement system):

The function of this system is to give us positive feelings that guide, motivate and encourage us to seek out things and resources that we (and those we love and care about) will need in order to survive and prosper. (Gilbert)

This system is primarily an activating and ‘go get’ system. A substance in our brain called dopamine is important for our drives. (Gilbert)

This system can fuel our ambition and help us keep those all important New Year’s resolutions. It can make us feel energised, excited, and focused. 

When balanced with the other two systems it guides us towards important life goals. Imagine what life might be like without it: you’d have little motivation, energy or desire. (Gilbert)

But it can also lead to frustration, discontentment, racing thoughts, and difficulty switching off or letting go. In some forms of mania, for example, this system can be overactivated. This system can also be vulnerable to hijacking. Activities that give us a dopamine-kick, like winning or drugs or praise, can be very addictive; and that hook can distract us from other equally important, or more important, goals that we might have.

Soothing and Contentment System:

This system, when activated, helps us to rest, recharge, refuel and feel restored.

This system enables us to bring a certain soothing, quiescence and peacefulness to the self, which helps to restore our balance. When animals aren’t defending themselves against threats and problems, and don’t need to achieve or do anything (they have sufficient or enough), they can be content. Contentment is a form of being happy with the way things are and feeling safe, not striving or wanting; an inner peacefulness. (Gilbert)

This is quite a different positive feeling from the hyped-up, excitement or ‘striving and succeeding’ feeling of the drive-excitement system. It is also different from just low levels of threat, which can be associated with boredom or a kind of emptiness. (Gilbert)

Engaging this system makes it easier to sleep, eat and bond. This system is interesting because while it is in some sense internal, it also has a particularly relational quality. As infants, the way our parents relate to us can help to soothe and calm us. Some of our first experiences of being soothed may be the result of being comforted, picked up and held, or nursed. Kindness and our contentment system are closely linked. Gilbert describes the role of a “hormone called oxytocin which links to our feelings of social safeness and affiliation. This hormone (along with the endorphins) gives us feelings of well-being that flow from feeling loved, wanted and safe with others.”

ACCESSING AND HARNESSING THESE SYSTEMS

Each of these systems has useful functions and positive emotions associated with it, but they all also have certain pitfalls and limitations. They can each get out of balance – some can be highly stimulated and activated, while others are crowded out or under-engaged. 

If you were to draw three circles on a page to represent each of your systems, how large would they be relative to each other?

We flourish more easily as each system becomes more accessible, manageable, and harnessed in a direction that feels right to us. Things can go wrong when one system is silenced, shunned or ignored, or another system gets to run the show all on its own without the feedback of the other systems.

Complete harmony between the systems might be elusive, but observing the systems at work with a curious and compassionate attention can help. It can help to recognise that they all have a function, and to acknowledge that how easy or hard they are to activate is not necessarily something you chose or within your control in a given moment.

All you can do is help them work together as well as possible. That brings us back to inputs, or ingredients for perpetual soup. 

If you are feeling stuck imagining inputs you might need, it could help to consider each system in turn.

Is it larger or smaller than the others? Is it loud or quiet? Overactive/overstimulated or underactive/understimulated? 

Are its workings confusing or clear to you? Does it feel misdirected or aligned?

Does it feel accessible? Can you tap into it when you need to?

What conditions would make it easier or harder to access? 

What triggers, engages or activates it? What feeds it? What gives it permission to speak? What helps manage it? 

In light of that, what would help you to be able to access, activate and direct it in the way you want? 

WHAT DOES EACH SYSTEM NEED

Reflecting on each system in this way, can help you, over time and probably with some experimentation, to identify the particular inputs you need to harness your three circles in a way that supports your flourishing.

Just like outputs (goals), the inputs we need can vary depending on where we are in our personal journey and the nature of that stage of our lives. There may be times when socialising, or alone time, learning more, or letting go may become more or less important, given where we are and where we want to go. It might be that certain ingredients prove elusive. Just as I imagine medieval peasants cooking perpetual soup had to do, we may need to be creative and seasonal in our use of ingredients when certain things we need are scarce.  And like them, as we make the best of what we are able to find, we may end up with an entirely unique kind of soup - never quite the same as any other soup, or even to itself a day ago. 

RESOURCES

If you would like to learn more about the Three Circles Model check out this free resource:

Conmpassion Handout: www.getselfhelp.co.uk/docs/GILBERT-COMPASSION-HANDOUT.pdf

Or you can purchase The Compassionate Mind by Paul Gilbert.

If you would like to find free ACT resources to help you clarify and follow through with New Year's Resolution, there are many available on Russ Harris' website.

Trauma 101: learning to feel safety in a body inhabited by trauma

Audre Lorde said: “Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.” You could say something similar about trauma. We have learnt a lot in recent years about the impact of trauma on mental and physical health: “We have learned that trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body (Bessel van der Kolk).

HOW WE EXPERIENCE IT

This imprint can be profoundly painful. We can experience it as an unbearable feeling of unsafety and discomfort  – an uproar in the body as alarm bells in the nervous system ring; or as a shutting down – a silencing of that uproar that silences everything else as well. Bessel van der Kolk in The Body Keeps the Score describes the experience of many traumatized people:

Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside. They learn to hide from their selves.

The body sensations that occur when our body’s alarm bells are going off  – the twisting in our stomach, the tightness in our chest  –  can feel pretty terrible but for much of our history they helped keep us alive. Threats, like a sabre tooth tiger on the horizon, activated a stress response in the body that helped us to respond – to quickly run away or gear up for a fight  – our hearts beating faster, our muscles tensed. We can see in other animals the fight, flight and freeze (think rabbit in headlights) response at work. The difference with humans is that we have a powerful capacity for remembering, drawing conclusions, making generalisations, and  imagining possibilities. Threats are no longer just the thing happening right in front of us but things that have happened in the past, that could happen in the future, that might be happening. So as humans lots and lots of things can activate our threat system, and things that happened to us before can impact how easily and in what ways that threat system is activated.  Trauma can create a state of almost constant activation. The alarm bells seem to never stop ringing.

HOW WE COPE WITH IT

That feeling of activation and unsafety is painful and hard to live with,  so people try to find ways to cope with it, or deal with it, or evade it. Bessel van der Kolk argues that “many mental health problems, from drug addiction to self-injurious behaviour, start as attempts to cope with the unbearable physical pain of our emotions”. The defences we have  – the self-medicating, the avoidance, the survival tactics, and escape strategies – however frustrated we may feel towards them at times, come from a place of trying to cope. They are our system trying to find a way to get by, with the tools it has, in the situation it is in. Recognising, honouring, and appreciating that can go hand in hand with discovering new ways to cope.

HOW WE SHUTDOWN

There is a state on the other side of fight-and-flight, which doesn’t feel like activation. Sometimes when our body feels under threat and powerless to do anything about it, it shuts down. Our heart slows, numbness sets in, inertia takes over, and our mind feels foggy. I think of it as our body playing dead – becoming limp and lifeless as a last ditch effort to survive what it cannot escape. It can feel deeply unhelpful, but it can be understood as a desperate measure for desperate times – a way to bear the unbearable. Being able to move into that state can help us survive, but getting stuck in that state doesn’t always feel like fully living.

HOW WE CAN RELATE DIFFERENTLY WITH IT

As people learn about uproar and shutdown states, one of the first things they want to figure out is how to move from that state of uproar or shutdown into a calmer, more comfortable feeling of safety. I’m not sure that we can ever permanently reside in a feeling of safety. In a world that contains risks and threats, perhaps a permanent feeling of safety might not even be advisable. A warning system exists for a reason. But we can find ways to come back home to a feeling of safety more easily and more often. We can learn how to connect to and nurture feelings of safety, comfort, aliveness, peace, and pleasure. That capacity exists within us and, though trauma can try to break it, it is a resilient thing. It resides within our body; accessible in physical spaces and moments in time that are, even very briefly, free of immediate danger.

Many trauma-informed practitioners believe  that if trauma is held and experienced in the body, then the body has to be included and centred in our process of healing. Bessel van der Kolk argues that:

In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.

He suggests that: “Once you start approaching your body with curiosity rather than with fear, everything shifts.” But it can be hard to grasp what relating to our body differently would look like – what it would mean to neither push away, deny, dismiss, or fight body sensations, nor be lost in or taken over by them. For me it is about leaning into these four processes:

 Noticing the body’s experience

• Extending curiosity towards the body and its experience of the world.

• Asking ourselves questions like, “What’s the weather in my body like right now?” or “Where do I feel that emotion in my body?”.

Respecting the body’s experience

• Acknowledging that our embodied threat response can be very powerful and visceral – and not always easy to sit with.

• Remembering that our threat system is trying to keep us safe.

• Recognising that it’s not always right and can overreact, but it also isn’t the enemy or without value.

• Giving ourselves permission to feel what we feel, even when we would rather not feel it. 

Grounding the body

• Bringing the body back to the present and to an awareness of its aliveness, by tuning into and stimulating the five senses.

• Shifting the body’s attention from threats in past and future, to the hopefully safe here and now.

• Asking ourselves, “What can I see, hear, smell, touch or taste around me?”.

• Offering ourselves safe sensory experiences (from a hot shower, to heavy metal, to a walk in the cold) that are loud enough to be heard, however faintly, through the fog or noise of our body state.

Soothing the body

• Helping the body settle and experience the amount of comfort it can, in that moment, receive.

• Offering it gentleness, nourishment, and pleasant experiences.

• Reminding the body, not through words but through little tangible acts of care, that there are enjoyable and restoring sensations to experience in the world  as well as scary ones.

• Giving ourselves permission to take a break however temporary from an exhausting state of activation, stress, and hypervigilance.

These processes don’t always feel possible. When sensations within our body feel overwhelming, or feel locked away behind glass, it can be incredibly difficult to access these ways of relating to the body; but it does get easier with practice.  It can help to start small – perhaps by acknowledging how hard those sensations are to be with and offering the body a hot drink, a cold splash of water on your face, a sour sweet, a deep breath, a gentle head scratch, an open window, or a thick blanket. Whatever feels possible. That isn’t a solution, but it is an opening and an anchor. It is an offering of care, and an invitation to connect to the capacity for healing and pleasure that exists within us, however remote or small that capacity might seem in difficult times.

If you aren’t able to commit to or afford ongoing therapy at this time but would like some support in developing an individual trauma-informed embodied self-care plan please get in touch. I can offer an extended one-off session or a set of three sessions at my normally hourly rate to help you identify and explore practical self-care strategies to help you feel safer in your body.

Making sense of self-acceptance

Or what I learned about self-acceptance from trying to walk a cat

Self-acceptance is not a concept that comes easy to me. I remember being quite a few days into an Acceptance and Commitment therapy training once (the clue is in the name) and having to be reminded, “It’s accept and commit, Nina, not dismiss and commit!”. I see that struggle with the idea of self-acceptance in a lot of my clients, when I explore the possibility of accepting some part of themselves that they don't like or don’t feel good about. “I see what you mean,” they say, or “I get that it’s healthier to do that,” but something inside pushes back or pulls away from the idea.

A lot of people come to therapy because on some level they want something to change. It is pretty common for people coming to therapy to want something about their life or themselves to be different. They want to feel better, do better, live better — be better, perhaps. And it’s not surprising, given the messages many of us have received about what change looks like, that the call to self-acceptance sits uncomfortably, in seeming conflict, with that. Whatever we’ve read in self-help books or heard in therapy, it can still feel deep down like self-acceptance  would get in the way of change. Accepting can sound like settling, like setting up camp in a place you just don't want to be rather than pushing through to get somewhere else. 

The growth kind of change

I find it easier to see how change and self-acceptance can be allies and not antagonists, when I focus on the growth kind of change rather than the fixing kind of change. When I spend time with plants and animals I’m reminded that growth is not the negation or the eradication of everything that is. It is not primarily an act of destruction. It is an unfolding, a process of absorbing and expanding — a reconfiguring of what is already there. You grow from where and what you are.

There are two things I have faith in — that I feel like I know about you as you read this, even if I have never met you:

You are not a broken object, to be either fixed or thrown away.

Whatever your past, whatever your flaws or shortcomings, you are a living being with the potential to learn and grow.  You are endowed with the capacity to move in some way, at some pace, towards healing and your own version of flourishing.

Like all living beings we grow easiest and bloom fullest in the right conditions, with whatever the right metaphorical sun and rain and soil is for us. Like all living beings the wrong conditions can limit and distort our growth as we try to adapt to them.

But that potential to sense and orient, to absorb and convert and make use of what’s  around us, that strange alchemy of living — that’s in us.

If we think of change in terms of growth, the work of change becomes  the work of being good self-gardeners and caregivers, nurturing guardians and guiding educators of our own potential. That might sound a little too big and too elusive to grasp if we have no ready models to hand. But the practice (unlike the theory) is not abstract, esoteric, or epic.

The practice feels, if anything, like the act of walking a cat.

Walking a cat: some thoughts

I don’t know if you have tried to put a cat on a leash and walk it.  It’s an odd experience, and perhaps if you are acquainted with cats this analogy doesn’t make self-acceptance sound any easier. But then self-acceptance isn’t easy for a lot of us.

The thing with cats is that we want to take care of them, do what’s best for them, and keep them safe. But also they don’t really listen to us, or they do sometimes and then pointedly ignore us. They can get along with us, and even love us, but they do so on their own terms. And, well, sometimes working with myself feels a lot like that.

I have taken to walking my new cat Zelda sometimes since she seems to be not at all bothered being in a harness, and the first thing I realised is that you don’t really walk a cat as such — you sort of go on a cat’s walk with it. I’d like to walk her around the block but I’m not sure we will ever actually make it out the drive.

It has been fascinating to watch her figure out what she wants to do. It’s a long retractable leash and I leave the front door open for her so she knows she can run inside if she needs to. I think of the open door as a secure base because I’ve read too many therapy books. Sometimes after dashing out she will retreat back to the doorway because the sound of a car or the weird and unfamiliar shape of a bicycle scared her, or the neighbourhood fox approached.

And then a leaf will catch her eye, or a twig, or a ledge —  and she is back out the door to investigate.

At a recent online conference, Dr. Stephen Porges, an expert in working with traumatic stress, talked about the importance of honouring our physiological states. He described what it is like when the body is in a state of threat  —  when our instinctive fight-flight-freeze response is engaged; and described how when the body feels safe we are able to engage, connect with others, explore, and play. I think Zelda out on a walk in the front drive would have made a perfect Zoom backdrop to that talk.

I’m struck by the fluid interplay between the physiological states I see in her — the shifts, the instinctive back and forth. She shows me that honouring our physiological states doesn’t mean staying stuck in them. I notice how she moves to self-regulate —  hiding under the car or coming close to me to be comforted, or deciding to go inside when she feels a bit scared. And I am amazed how quickly she starts to feel better, and how rapidly curiosity and excitement take over when she runs to explore something new and interesting.

She reminds me that both body states, that of fear and that of safety, are valid and serve a purpose. I want her to avoid moving cars and possibly suspect foxes. And it’s joyful to watch her discover something new, and beat a twig into submission.

And I think about how she would have felt if I had yanked her about on a short leash to get her where I wanted to go, which is out of this (to me, quite boring) driveway. Would she have been able to enjoy it? Would she have been able to play? Would she have been able to self-regulate if she couldn’t hide or retreat? Would she have been able to honour her physiological states?

Acceptance doesn’t mean no intervention or boundaries.  I’m not going to let her run in traffic or get lost. I will use a laser pointer to channel her attention when I need to get her out from under the car. I will help untangle her when she gets tangled up in the bins and can't see her way out. I can accept my own limits and take her inside when I have things to do,or when I just can't stand around watching a cat inspect a leaf any longer.

But maybe the practice of acceptance is about letting that leash be as long as it safely, tolerably, can be. Maybe it’s about motivating and directing without using more force or restriction than I need, by channelling her love of chasing and treats. Maybe it’s about being ok with not making it out of the drive. Maybe wherever we eventually get to is enough because it's right for her, and she had a good time getting there.

If I had dragged her around on a short leash, or tried to make her a dog instead of a cat, I wonder whether we would have got anywhere at all, and what the cost would have been if we had. Would she have felt overwhelmed? Would she have scratched me? Would she have shut down? Would she have trusted me less and felt less confident? Would I have ended up not her ally in the dangerous terrain of suburbia, but another hostile entity? Would I have ended up engaged in a futile, counterproductive, and frankly absurd battle of wills with a cat?

Loosening the leash

I get that it's not straightforward when we translate this overextended analogy back to the work of self-acceptance. I know that are more vital and more urgent personal, professional, and political goals than walking round the block with a cat — ones that are harder or impossible to compromise on. I’m going to explore that more in an another post as I’m not sure I could do it justice as an aside, but for now I just want to make clear that I’m not saying you must always accept yourself when you fall short of those goals. I’m not saying that it's never worth pushing through or pulling back the self. But I think it’s really important to make a conscious decision about whether and when it is worth it to us. I think we can only do that by recognising the cost that non-acceptance in our striving for goals exacts and the possibilities it shuts off — even as we keep one eye on the goals we want to reach.

I want to invite you to recognise just how exhausting and stressful it can be to push back or push through the state we are in. I want to invite you to explore how much energy it takes to fight yourself. I want to invite you to reflect on how  much harder it can make it to play and explore, to access joy and renewing rest and calm,  and manage fear, when you have yourself on a tight, tight leash. I once watched a documentary that looked at the emergence of self-control in babies and was struck by the tension and strain in baby Monty’s body as he tried to rein himself in. You can check the clip out here. Watching him reminded me that self-control is both a crucial, fascinating development in the brain, and an embodied process that has an embodied impact. It’s so easy to lose sight of that.

There’s a trade-off in relying on  a strategy of self-judgement and self-coercion to pursue goals, over a strategy of dialogue, encouragement, reassurance, and self-facilitation rooted in acceptance. I can’t say that it is never the right trade-off for you to make —  no one outside your life and your constraints can tell you that —  but we need to be able to recognise what that trade-off feels like in our lives and our bodies, so we can decide for ourselves whether it makes sense for us. 

What would it be like to check in and find out how tight a leash you are keeping yourself on in this period of your life, and how hard you are pulling? Maybe it varies for you from year to year or day to day.

Can you sense how tight it is for you today?

Does it need to be so tight right now in this moment?

I wonder if you were to loosen it a little, or pull less hard,  what possibilities of being would that open up for you.

What would it be like to have more freedom to explore?

What would it be like to have the freedom to find your natural embodied rhythm of self-regulation and feel less (often) under threat? 

What would it be like to let yourself come home at times to a place, inner or collective, of rest and security?

Maybe for you the answers to those questions come quickly to mind or maybe the answers to those questions feel inaccessible. Sometimes if we haven’t experienced much acceptance, internal or external, self-acceptance can seem like another continent, an ocean away, that we have never seen, and whose plants and hills we could not describe. That’s ok. It’s a process, a practice,  and a journey — you don’t need to get there overnight or even know what “there” looks like yet.

A final note for the resolutely self-critical

Trying to become someone who is more self-accepting can feel like chasing your own tail (a thing coincidentally that Zelda loves to do) — especially when you have a strong inner critic that doesn’t quite get irony and can’t resist the opportunity to label and criticise your own lack of self-acceptance. So if that’s the block you are hitting at this time, start your acceptance there. Start by trying to accept in this moment that part of yourself that doesn’t accept. Extend a gentle curiosity there.

Is it scared, determined, protective or something else?

It is repeating old lessons it once learnt to survive, feel safe, and be accepted by others?

That’s ok. Meet it there with as little judgement as you can. Right there what that voice is, however harsh or cramped or small or scary or loud or stuck it seems. Wrap your arms around yourself if that feels right. Hold yourself with the particular soft gentleness or containing firmness that your body needs to feel right now.

Let that harsh voice know that you are willing to hear it, are curious about what it is trying to do and where it is coming from, even if and as another part of you disagrees with what it is saying.

Let it know that that other part of you (that part outside the inner critic), is there holding and hearing your fears, present, ready to share with that harsh voice some new possibilities – some interesting new directions to grow in – when it feels ready to explore them.