On my journey, which includes taking control of my alcoholism and the urges around addiction, managing general anxiety and agoraphobia and, also, changing negative self-talk in an effort to be the writer of my own story, there are particularly odd days. Days like today.
When you’ve normalized psychological hardship and difficulties over a long period of time, positive situations can be unrecognizable and looked at with suspicion. Feelings of not being “good enough” or deserving of positive outcomes can be the wall that blocks out the blue sky and golden sunlight.
Today is a good day. Today is a cloudless, blue sky day with unusually bright sunshine bathing its gold coloured warmth on everything.
If you’ve cemented in ideas around being undeserving of good things, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, a prophecy with an outcome that leads to drugs, alcohol and all the clingy demons around self-harm and addiction.
Self-acceptance plays a central role in receiving positivity in a changing life.
This idea seems obvious or should be intuitive. But, believe me, its not. A mindful, conscious effort with systems and support in place is essential to positive self-acceptance to happen.
Those systems and support are available in qathet. Bridges are being built for accessibility to help more and more. Compassion and empathy as well as bricks and mortar are changing the landscape for a society suffering with addiction and the well-being of individuals.
Self-acceptance is defined as “an individual’s acceptance of all of his/her attributes, positive and negative.” Self-acceptance includes body acceptance, ability to process negative criticism, and believing in your abilities.
Excessive negativity around self-acceptance can change the regions of your brain that control emotions. Chronic negativity leads to having less grey matter, or tissue to work with, than someone with a healthy sense of self-acceptance.
Regions of the brainstem that control stress and anxiety are affected by changing in grey matter, as well. Controlled trials using brain mapping technology show a direct route from a low self-acceptance to a person’s neurology and psychological well-being.
A word that recurs when reading for this article is “self-regulation,” consciously stopping emotions like self-hatred and trying to see negative situations as a chance to learn. A familiar example is slipping and returning briefly to destructive habits such as drug use should be perceived as an opportunity to grow, not a failure.
A lack of self-acceptance can be underneath layers of thought and habit, in an unconscious place. It’s not as easy as just telling yourself to change negative patterns. Meditation has been one technique that’s helped me with awareness of my thoughts and being less judgmental.
In a sense, self-acceptance and feeling worthy to receive good things in a healthy life is a search for balance. If you’ve focused on negative parts of yourself and life, a move toward balance would be turning toward and embracing the positive.
Make positive the new negative, find the balance and enjoy the gift of warm sunshine and a blue sky.
Robert Skender is a qathet region freelance writer and health commentator.
