Why Self-Acceptance Plays A Crucial Role In Your Healing

Many of you get to hear me banging on about compassion in our session together. It’s important for me that you are recieving it in some way either from me or from yourself. When I say compassion I will equally use the words kindness, love, tenderness. In this article they all represent the same thing.

So why is compassion so important Lizzie, why?’ I hear you ask!

Here’s what I have learnt through my years of being a therapist and client.

Compassion is the key to unlock our defences and bring us back to our heart. It helps guide us back to the truth of who we really are, to our innocence.
Kindness creates movement where before there was static, stuckness or resistance.

Defences of anxiety, panic, shut down, avoidance, dissociation, judgements, obsessive thoughts and behaviours are reduced or eliminated as love is received and the emotion under-lying  these defences are finally experienced.

Giving love to ourselves or receiving love from another has an incredible ability to help us see beyond the lies and false beliefs we have made about ourselves. There’s not much out there that can crack what often feels like infallible beliefs. You know the kind, like; ‘I’m wrong’, ‘I’m unlovable’, ‘It’s my fault’, ‘I can hurt you’, ‘I’m too much’, ‘I’m not enough’, ‘I’m bad’ and so on.
The kind of beliefs that keep us separated and isolated from others.
When we allow love in we become aware of how permeable those beliefs really are. They just don’t seem to hold as much resonance to us when compassion is experienced at the same time.

Tenderness has an amazing ability to help us go to those places in our minds that before seemed too scary and overwhelming to even go to.
Love gives us a sense of support in the darkness and does not tolerate loneliness.
Love is the opposite of trauma, because trauma is a situation that is, or feels life-threatening —where you feel or are all alone —.
Where as love  is connection, a sense of safety that lets you know you are ok and no longer alone. It is life enhancing.

I’ve noticed that it’s in those moments where one is able to receive love, either from oneself or from another, that a healing takes place.
Often a movement happens within the body (any stuck state becomes an emotion) and a flow of energy is experienced.
A kind of softness happens within the body and you feel a sense of relief as movement takes place.
Often, after this experience of movement and emotion, a sense of expanse is felt in the body.
One may feel as if one can breath deeper; or you may notice the body is more relaxed, any body armouring and defence postures go or are reduced. The symptoms that were originally experienced such as anxiety, depression etc don’t seem as strong or are gone.

The first time I experienced this I was amazed by the sense of expansion and relief I felt in both body and mind. It felt like I had shed years of trapped emotions and I could now fully breath again. I realised that all the anxiety I had been holding for years was covering deep grief that I had denied. Denied to the point where I was in physical pain as well as chronic anxiety and tension. Actually allowing this grief and experiencing it with love was the most profound and deep release for me. The tensions cleared and anxiety dissipated. I was amazed. This was the beginning of my emotional journey back to myself and my body.

Have you noticed that when you are with someone who can truly express compassion and empathy for what you are experiencing, and you allow that in, a shift takes place? The energy naturally moves. The emotions are able to come to the surface and move through.  Even if it’s just through text or voice message. If we are able to receive the compassion and support a change begins to happen.
Though It’s not always easy for many of us to receive compassion, especially when we are in touch with those deep painful beliefs that feel as if we are flawed and unlovable. That I believe is a part of why therapy can be so profound and helpful, because if we can’t give ourselves love, then we need to receive it first from another. Eventually as we are able to do that, we find we are more able to start giving it to ourselves. This may take time and the therapist’s careful nuances to help the other truly allow compassion and love in.

If we are not able to receive compassion from ourselves or another we can either get stuck in sensations such as anxiety, depression or obsessive thoughts or we are caught in a spiral of tears or anger.
In situations like these there is nearly always a subtle or not so subtle judgement of ourselves, mixed in with a dollop of shame.
Or there are beliefs about letting go to the emotions, such as; ‘the feelings are too big’, ‘they will kill me’, ‘they will last forever’ or ‘they will hurt another’.
Often it takes an extra dose of self-compassion towards those beliefs and feelings and a shifts is felt.

Without the judgements, beliefs and shame, emotions are experienced and move relatively quickly through the body leaving the person feeling more connected with themselves and with a sense of relief.
It maybe a trickle at first.. and a bit more next time, as the person starts to trust, to feel safe and allow love to soften their hearts. Many of us are not used to love. We may have never fully received it when we were little or experienced rejection or hurt when we did, as a result there can be much resistance as our defences are up.

With self-love we are repairing the split. The ultimate fall from ourselves (God/Love/Essence).
Early in life, In that moment, or series of moments, where we felt unsafe, under threat and all alone we forgot who we were.
The experience was so painful and it felt so bad that we constructed meaning out of it.
Instead of ‘This is bad’, it became ‘I am bad’.  We lost our sense of wholeness and came to experience ourselves as separated. Here becomes the original lie.

Separate beings with a deep dark wound. A wound that we must endeavour to cover up through out our lives. So creating defences to ensure that no one sees this dark truth; this wound.
When applying compassion to that wound (memories, beliefs) we eradicate the loneliness which helps bring about connection.
As we receive love for that wound we are able to see, either gradually or in one go, that there is nothing wrong with us and that our beliefs about ourselves were lies.

We realise the innocence that we are.

This compassion enables us to experience the trapped emotions that were encapsulated at that time.
As we experience these emotions stuck states are released/integrated and movement takes place. This brings relief and a sense of expansiveness.
When the emotions are felt anxiety, depression, OCD, PTSD, dissociation symptoms, physical pain and the like either disappear or are reduced. Body and mind move to homeostasis as the past resolves itself.
As we experience the emotions we begin to realise that the beliefs about them were false as we feel the release from experiencing them and see how the other is not affected and how the emotion did not last forever as predicted.

And as we integrate these emotions from the past and resolve old traumas we get to know our own wisdom and intuition that we had previously lost amongst the defences.

We get to realise that we have our own internal knowings.

And we can make better and more loving choices for ourselves as a result.

And, most importantly we get to know and fully feel how lovable we really are.

So, that’s why compassion is so important!

 

Hope you’re being kind to yourself today.

Lizzie Bryher