Why Self Acceptance Can Either Help You or Hinder You

“Understanding is the first step to acceptance, and only with acceptance can there be recovery,” - Psychology Today

When it comes to dealing with mental health issues, and essentially anything other aspect of your life, how you think about and perceive the problem is just as important as how you deal with it. One of the main problems in today’s mental health care system is that people don’t accept the various types of treatment methods that our health care system provides due to their own preconceived notions. What I am going to do is describe how accepting and understanding yourself and the role that you play in your mental health treatment, can either benefit or harm you.

Psychological and Therapeutic Issues

Everyone has preconceived notions about mental health issues. These preconceived notions can be very difficult to overcome. As an example, I have a University degree in Psychology and I'm pretty knowledgeable about mental health issues. I've also been diagnosed with ADHD, but my therapist is a lot more educated than I am.

My assumptions sometimes get in my own way, to be honest, but instead of thinking, I have a BA, who does he think he is telling me that I'm wrong?, what I do instead is to try to see it from my therapist's point of view. When you are directly effected by a medical or mental health issue, it's very hard to see your situation from an outside perspective, which is what needs to happen.

We need to accept that sometimes other people, particularly medical and psychological professionals, may know more than us. Accepting what needs to be done and proactively doing those things is as important as any other aspects of your medical or therapeutic treatment plan.

Medication

How many people have heard that “Big Pharma” does more harm than good? The phrase 'big pharma' and the negative way that people view pharmaceutical companies comes from research based on statistics that are decades old. This, and other negative things that we hear about pharmaceutical companies, impacts the way we perceive pharmaceutical products.

We hate taking medication, because we think it changes our personalities and makes us a different person. To the point of thinking that our reflection looks more like a stranger than ourselves.

How does this relate to self acceptance, you ask? Think about it; when we hold this belief, we don't accept having to take medication or recognize the need to take it consistently. Your life will be like a yo-yo, going up and down. It's essential to accept the fact that medication is important and a non-optional part of your treatment plan.

Yes, you will still have good days and bad days just like everyone else, but it's crucial to take your medication, as long as it's the right medication for you. It will make those good days and bad days that much easier to deal with. Remember, medication is there to help; you’ll always have good days and bad days, but medication helps you to deal with those days in a more productive manner.

Without medication, all of those negative behaviours and thoughts, that are sometimes so overwhelming that you can't hear anything else, will, once again, become a dominant part of your life.

From my personal perspective, I know for a fact that, for most of my accomplishments in life, my medication played a vital role in giving me the clarity I needed; without it, I never would have achieved as much as I did.

Behavioral Habits

People have a tendency to not take into consideration how our own behaviour comes into play with our own emotional well-being.

I'll use a metaphor to explain what I mean by this. Imagine a person who continually punches a wall, then blames the wall for their hand hurting when in actuality, it's because they refuse to take responsibility for the fact that they are punching a wall. It's the same thing when we continue to put ourselves in situations with toxic people, things that trigger negative thoughts and feelings and basically anything that causes harm.

Without proper help, or proper understanding of what you do to make the situation worse instead of better, you'll constantly be making those mistakes over and over, whether those mistakes are with another person or the same person. All you are really doing is putting a different face to your problem, instead of looking at what you are doing! Take the example of the person punching the wall; instead of looking at the behavioural mechanisms they need to put in place in order to effectively stop their hand from hurting, what they do instead is stop punching the wall and punch the door.

In other words, you need to accept the things that you do that hinder your treatment; that doesn't mean that you are uneducated or weak. What it does means is that you have the intelligence to look at everything that can potentially be causing the problem. That put things into place that will allow you to resolve that problem.

Even though this may sound easy, it honestly isn't. It takes a lot of time and effort to do this, because mental health issues are more complex than punching a wall. I used that as a metaphor, not to be demeaning regarding a topic that I consider to be very serious.

Stigma

Like I have stated above, we all have preconceived notions about how we think things should be, especially when it comes to dealing with your own emotions and general all around well-being. In a way, the type of stigma that I’m referring to is self stigma. Such as, when people refuse to accept their diagnosis because they feel that mental issues aren’t valid issues. When you refuse treatment, whether it’s therapeutic or pharmaceutical, for no other reason than your own beliefs, then you are essentially harming yourself due to the fact that you can’t see past your own views.

In Conclusion

Stop letting your own beliefs get in the way of your well-being; regardless of whether you are 5 or 50, there really aren't any excuses. Especially when the only things stopping you from getting the proper medical attention and applying it to your life are your own negative thoughts and opinions, and your refusal to see what you are doing to make your well-being worse instead of better.

Sometimes the most intelligent thing a person can say is, I don’t know. When we accept our situation and the things that we need to do to understand it better and improve it, the only thing that is going to happen is that we will start to feel better and live the life that we were meant to live. Lastly, another thing to accept is that treatment is not a quick fix, there are literally thousands of factors that come into play with psychological issues that stem from the outside world and from ourselves. We need to understand how we relate to them, and how they relate to us. Accepting this basic rule is the first step, because you can have every single resource on the face of the earth, but if you refuse to use those resources than they are useless.

On a last note, when patients don’t make improvements, it’s not always the doctor or therapist's fault, especially if they do everything in their power to help you. When the thing stopping your rehabilitation is the fact that you refuse to do anything that lies outside of your beliefs and opinions, then the one to blame for you not getting better, is you. So listen to your doctor or therapist, especially when they are only trying to help you. Granted, there are bad doctors out there, but don't generalize and think that every doctor is the same. There are plenty of doctors who care about you and just want you to get better, so you can reach your full potential.