Lockdown is the perfect time to develop self-acceptance

By | May 6, 2020

It’s Day Eleventy Blah in the Big Lockdown House. So much time with not much to do. So how’s your creativity flowing – are you drafting that novel yet? Taken up the flute? Are you water colouring, making pottery, oil painting, writing poetry? Learning a new language? A new skill? Rigorously working out, honing your lockdown abs? Landscaping the garden? Redecorating? Plotting a new start-up business venture? Or, as one newspaper recently suggested [The Guardian, April 22], prepping for your next holiday by learning sailing and scuba diving online?

Maybe you’re too busy devoting all your energy to diligently home-educating your children across a range of subjects, sharing delicious made-from-scratch meals together, before having fun exercise sessions that you post on the family YouTube channel, TikTok, Instagram. All those golden family moments, to share with everyone.

Or perhaps you are doing none of these things. Perhaps you have no idea how to home-educate anyone, because you are not a teacher. Perhaps you feel like running away from your entire golden family. Perhaps you are crawling the walls, or feeling so overwhelmed that you’ve gone floppy. Perhaps you are not feeling remotely creative, because you are stressed, and stress kills creativity like bleach kills germs (there are numerous studies; one, from Harvard Business Review in 2002, analysed 9,000 corporate diary entries; another analysed stressed rats. The conclusions were identical – stress is kryptonite to creativity).

There are lots of stressful factors at play at the moment – fear, anxiety, uncertainty, a lack of clear end in sight, and confinement, confinement, confinement. Yet because we are so colonised by consumerism and programmed for productivity, there is a sense that we must ‘use’ lockdown to achieve all the life goals we are normally too busy or exhausted to pursue, while simultaneously teaching French and fractions to our fractious kids. Otherwise we are not doing it right.

How about a big fat NO to all of that. How about instead we immunise ourselves from all the internal and external pressures with a double dose of both radical acceptance and radical self-acceptance, so that we do lockdown the way lockdown works for us – whatever that may look like. Because as long as it doesn’t involve actual self harm, or harming others, you’re doing it right. By accepting the external situation and self-accepting our reaction to it, we can eliminate an awful lot of self-critical noise.

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“When stressed, we humans have deep conditioning to judge ourselves for falling short,” says psychologist Tara Brach, whose books include Radical Acceptance, Radical Self Acceptance, and Radical Compassion. “The stress of living during a lockdown is a set up for what I call the ‘trance of unworthiness’, the conviction that we are deficient on all fronts. We condemn ourselves for not using our time productively, for our impatience with our children, for tensions with partners, for slacking off on exercise, for overeating. Our inner judge intends well – it’s trying to make us into a better person. But sadly, our self-judgment rarely helps us grow in positive ways. Typically it only creates distance with loved ones, and blocks us from enjoying our moments.

“One of the most life-changing commitments any of us can take on is to relate to ourselves with kindness, and accept ourselves just as we are. By embracing our imperfect selves, we become more compassionate with others. With self-acceptance, we find that we emerge into the person we most want to be.”

Or as Carl Rogers, founder of humanistic psychotherapy, wrote in his 1961 book On Becoming A Person, “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”

“Radical acceptance is not the same as agreement,” says Mark Smyth, clinical psychologist and president of the Psychological Association of Ireland. “Acceptance is that the situation is what it is, and you can’t control it, because it’s uncontrollable. We can spend a lot of time denying reality. We can’t always change our environment, but we can collectively do small things that feed into the greater good – at the moment, that small thing is staying home.

“We all need a minimum baseline of what is good enough – and when it comes to Covid-19, that baseline is survival. Sentences that start with ‘I should’ are not helpful, because they only serve to increase our expectation of ourselves. We need small, realistic, achievable goals connected to surviving and meeting our daily needs. Self-actualisation can wait – it’s not a realistic target.”

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In our house, those small realistic achievable goals involve getting dressed before lunchtime and not going diabetic from all the home baking. The only work I’m doing is on my tan, even though I have a novel to redraft and a lot of time on my hands – instead, I am sitting in the garden reading, because my concentration has gone AWOL. One of my teenagers is indoors playing Call Of Duty for hours on end, while the other is digging the garden to stay sane. Each is reacting to lockdown in their own way. We go for bike rides, mostly separately, to get away from each other. It’s strangely peaceful, because I have stopped starting my sentences with “Why don’t you….” None of this is normal, so normal standards don’t apply. Nor is it forever, which is why, in the interim, I’ve been prioritising domestic harmony above everything. Much slack has been cut.

But what if your kids are school age, exam age? Will their future careers be derailed because of lockdown, because of your terrible home schooling, your lack of teaching skills? The short answer is no. Remember instead what paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott said in 1953 about being a “good enough” parent. (He said “good enough mother”, because it was the 1950s). The good enough parent, he said, adapts less and less completely to the child’s needs as the child grows: “Her failure to adapt to every need of the child helps them adapt to external realities.” In other words, being an overly protective perfectionist parent can inhibit your child – at the best of times – developing their own sense of the world and how to navigate it.

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“Anxiety projects people into the future, so while being anxious about your child’s academic future is understandable, it’s not going to help anyone,” says Mark Smyth. “What’s good enough today is all the counts. Children learn in peaks and troughs – this is just a trough, and it will pick up again.

“Collectively, we are experiencing high anxiety, around health, when it will end, how long we will tolerate the situation, economic fallout – so we are carrying day-to-day anxiety and future-based anxiety. We are under pressure to adapt. And while this has brought out the best in a lot of people, we need to avoid placing expectations on ourselves. Anything else is a bonus.”

So by all means, write that screenplay in lockdown, or build a shed, or learn Italian – if that’s what makes you feel good in the present moment. But if you’re struggling, or have shifted down so many gears that you are mostly horizontal, then accept this as the current version of yourself. Let the kids go feral – they’ll be fine. Embrace the weirdness of it all, think of it as a temporary social experiment, and most importantly, aim low and keep your expectations tiny. You’re doing great.

Gentle ways …to foster wellbeing

⬤ Get up early, before anyone else. Savour the solitude.

⬤ Wear clothes that make you happy.

⬤ Spend 10 minutes doing a breathing exercise for instant tranquillity. Try ‘anuloma viloma’ (alternate nostril breathing) – it’s easy, and calms the parasympathetic nervous system. See youtube.com/watch?v=RUFzLVf5wL4

⬤ Get some time alone, if you are self-isolating with others. Spend time in nature – any nature. Go for a walk.

⬤ Zoom, Skype, etc are great, but only in small doses. Same with social media.

⬤ Draw and colour your ideal lockdown desert island. It won’t achieve anything, but it’s fun to do.

⬤Try making these high-protein, three-ingredient cookies:

200g tahini, 225g ground almonds, 130ml maple syrup.

⬤ Put music on and dance.

⬤ Go to bed early.

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