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Insights/Blog

Accept Yourself and Clean Up Your Shit

mark tanaka

Accepting ourselves as we are is so important. I spent so much of my life hating myself. Hating how I looked. Hating my body. Hating my insecurities. Hating my fearfulness. The list goes on. When I first encountered personal growth and spirituality, one of the first things I started to work on was self-love. I know I needed it. I did everything I could to learn to accept myself more and care for myself better. I got really good at being with myself and taking care of myself. I spent an enormous amount of time by myself in self-care land. It was glorious. Walks on the beach, dancing, traveling, taking myself out to dinners. I was in a pretty good marriage. 


Then I started to get lonely. I wanted a companion. A partner. And so I started to have girlfriends. My bubble was burst. I was a selfish dick. I was really good at taking care of myself but I still had a fragile ego. Whenever my partner criticized my shortcomings or poor behavior I got angry. I got defensive. I made it her responsibility to manage her own reaction and reality and threw it right back at her. I couldn’t take criticisms at all. I was horrible at being able to examine the negative impact of my behaviors on my partners and promptly apologize and work to correct my behavior in a timely manner. 


Without me realizing it, part of my “self-love” became enabling my poor habits. 


To my credit the process that was being worked out within me was complex. I had an upbringing where I was yelled at, punished harshly where my needs and feelings were rarely understood and heard. I easily panicked, shut down and closed up when someone got upset at me. I would be terrified and overwhelmed by guilt and self-loathing that made me numb out. That was how I dealt with being punished while having my needs and feelings totally shunned. And that scenario replayed in my body and mind everytime “I was in trouble.”


It took me almost 2 decades to work through this. And actually I’m still working through it.  I had to build enough awareness, resilience and clarity to see what was going on and realize that 

  1. My childhood scenario wasn’t happening now.

  2. My way of dealing with it was preventing me from providing appropriate empathy and care to my partner.

  3. The whole method of coping was preventing me from growing up. 


It was extremely difficult to come to the place where I can see the pattern, override the impulse to shutdown and escape, listen to the feedback I was getting, apologize and work towards correcting my behavior. But now that I’m doing it, it feels So …. Much…. Better….. 


For the longest time I was mistaking self-love with letting myself do whatever and be however I was. But allowing myself to continue playing out my past traumas through projecting them in my relationship, acting in my compensation/protective pattern of numbing and shutting down which would prevent me from empathizing and repairing the impact of my hurtful behavior with my partner and allow me to continue reacting in a way that wasn’t actually making me feel happy, wasn’t SELF ACCEPTANCE. It was SELF-SABOTAGE. So it’s a tenuous balance for some of us to practice Radical Self Acceptance and also clean up our shit:)

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