As someone who struggles with self-esteem issues, the idea of self-love has always seemed very foreign to me. There’s a part of me that cringes at the idea of loving myself. Like, what does it even look like? Is it giving myself a hug every morning, and showering myself with positive affirmations in the mirror? Is it telling myself I’m the best, and walking down the street like I’m on a runway? I don’t know if I’ll ever achieve that kind of confidence, at least not in this lifetime. But maybe self-acceptance—the more approachable, down-to-earth cousin to self-love—is something I can attain if I work at it. It doesn’t seem totally outside the realm of possibility at least. And the good news is the more that I’ve started to cultivate self-acceptance in my life, the more I’ve begun to see myself heal. It’s such a deceptively simple thing to accept yourself, and yet it can be surprisingly hard.
The biggest obstacle to self-acceptance for me was my incomprehensible emotions. I’m very prone to mood swings—my poor mother can attest to this—and for the longest time, my emotions just never made sense to me. The smallest triggers—a social gathering, a hurtful word, even a glance from someone—would catapult me into deep depressive episodes and feelings of self-hate and shame. When I shared these experiences with my parents, they struggled to understand me. In good faith, they doled out words of advice and spiritual guidance to me; they told me not to trust in my negative emotions because they were being used by evil forces against me. They encouraged me to turn to the bible and trust in Jesus’ authority over my identity and worth. (For context, both of my parents are Christian missionaries.)
And yet, despite sharing the same faith and knowing on one level that they were probably right, nothing they said could dissolve my shame. My shame actually got worse whenever they showed impatience or anger towards me when nothing they said was working on me. Not only did I feel shame a lot of the time, I also started to feel shame about my shame. My parents would always encourage me to put my faith in God whenever I struggled with feelings of shame, and so when the shame did not disappear and I fell into the same rut again and again, I began to blame myself for my lack of faith. My parents told me to fight against the shame through faith, but no matter how hard I tried, it always felt like a losing battle.
I realized later that this mentality only ended up fueling my shame. Because I was so busy fighting against my feelings of shame, I became more judgmental towards myself for feeling emotions which I couldn’t help experiencing. Rather than accepting myself and all of my shifting emotional states, including shame, I endeavored to condemn, repress, and resist these emotions when they took over. The problem was that I experienced shame most of the time—pretty much on a daily basis. By rejecting this part of my emotional experience, I was also repeatedly rejecting myself. I didn’t stop to consider that perhaps my emotions were designed to signal important things to me. Perhaps every time I felt shame, my shame was letting me know that I needed compassion and connection in that moment.
Shame as a Cry for Compassion
It was only after digging at the root cause of my shame that I learned that my shame came from a place of not feeling seen or understood when I was a child. I felt ashamed because of the many moments of emotional disconnect between me and my parents growing up. There were times that my parents weren’t there to support me emotionally when I needed them most, and I internalized their inability to meet my needs as shame. What I craved more than anything in my shame was validation and compassion, yet my parents often struggled to understand and assuage my difficult emotions.
When I finally started to understand my story more, I began to see why shame dominated my life. Shame wasn’t just some evil emotion that was being used against me amid the spiritual battle of the Christian life. Shame was the cry of my childhood self who felt confused and alone so often. Shame was the accumulation of past wounds being triggered in the present. Shame was my body telling me I needed comfort, love, and acceptance. The ironic thing is that once I began to tell myself that it’s okay to feel all the shame, that it’s okay to cry as much as I need to, I started to feel better. The more I began to accept myself, the more I passed through my black holes of shame quicker. Emotions are funny like that. The more you fight against them, suppress them, or ignore them, the more they rear their heads again through a different door and disrupt your life.
I’m also beginning to see that my parents were only half right all along. They were right that I needed to put my faith in God and that I needed to base my identity and self-worth on him. They were wrong to suggest that I needed to fight against my own emotions to do so. They were focusing too much on what I needed to do—how I had to change my thoughts, my beliefs, and yes, my emotions—rather than focusing on what God has already done for me. Over time, I began to perceive God the way I perceived my parents: loving, but often disappointed and frustrated with me. I couldn’t change, despite all of my efforts. But slowly I began to see that God’s love is different, and it runs much deeper than my parents’ love for me. The bible is filled with characters who are touched by God’s grace in the midst of their pain and weaknesses. God invites us in the fullness of who we are to come near and experience the fullness of who he is. Ultimately, the reason I can accept myself for who I am is because I am loved beyond my imagination by a God who chose to send his own son to die for me. God accepts me as I am in Christ, not because of what I’ve done, but because of who he is.
God invites us in the fullness of who we areto come near and experience the fullness of who he is.
The more that I do research on self-esteem, the more that I realize that self-esteem is a deeply relational construct. The more we are loved and respected as children, the easier it is to develop high self-esteem and learn to love ourselves and others. We are deeply relational creatures who are loved into loving. Though this idea might come as bad news to those like me who struggle with low self-esteem, the good news is that we have an inexhaustible fountain of love in God our creator. Just as the foundation of self-love for those with healthy self-esteem is the love they receive from others, the foundation of our self-acceptance for those of us who struggle with self-esteem is the acceptance and love given freely to us by God.
A Little Definition
As I wrap up this blog post, I’m realizing that I didn’t even provide a definition for self-acceptance. Here’s one definition I like from the book, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, by Nathaniel Branden: “Self-acceptance entails our willingness to experience—that is, to make real to ourselves, without denial or evasion—that we think what we think, feel what we feel, desire what we desire, have done what we have done, and are what we are. It is the refusal to regard any part of ourselves—our bodies, our emotions, our thoughts, our actions, our dreams—as alien, as ‘not me.’” I want to add to this definition that self-acceptance not only entails owning all aspects of your experience, but choosing to be on your own side, whatever happens. It is being a friend to yourself no matter what. I think this quote in Jane Eyre sums it up beautifully: “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”
I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.
