What is Radical Self-Acceptance?

Ask anyone their definition of that, and you’re very likely to get a different answer every time.

In essence, radical self-acceptance is understanding and accepting each part of yourself, including the parts you or other people may not like. A definition like that may sound defeatist though. It recognizes flaws within oneself yet and addresses them, but it lacks both depth and recognition that your personal qualities can affect yourself and others around you in both positive and negative ways.

I choose to define radical self-acceptance as above, with the extension of addressing the qualities within yourself that you may not like. This allows room for self-growth, which allows us as people to grow into the version of ourselves that we would find most palatable. Radical self-acceptance is not just self understanding at one specific point in time, it is perpetual to the journey of self-growth that everyone will undertake in at least one point in their life. To understand each part of your personality, identity, and overall characteristics is a very deep level of self-awareness that goes beyond knowing your name and how you are, it is being aware of your actions, thoughts, and words and how they affect both yourself and others in both positive and negative ways. Once you understand your own personality and character can you began to identify which parts need improvement and which need reinforcement and begin building a goal for how you wish to conduct yourself both internally and externally.

Understanding Your Character

To understand your character is to understand aspects of your personality. Take a moment to be introspective and consider each and every aspect of your personality. Are you a leader or a follower? Selfish or selfless? There is no right or wrong answer, all you should consider is: Who am I?

Once you have an idea of who you are as a person, consider organizing descriptors of your character into what you would consider positive and negative. You can make a physical or mental list, but if you are looking for some honest, unbiased truth about yourself, consider asking that one friend who is not afraid to be brutally honest with you. In the next couple sections you will get an opportunity to further reflect on your answers to fully understand every aspect of your character.

The Good

Allow us to focus on the positive items of your personality list first. These are things you identified as being the good things, traits you wish to keep and possibly reinforced on yourself. Think about why you consider them to be so great.

Personally, in this list of mine, the top three items I would describe myself as is generous, nurturing, and stalwart. I consider my generosity to be a good personality trait due to thinking that genuine generosity is in short supply in today’s day and age, my nurturing trait because it enables me to further help those in need whether it is my friends, family, students, or my readers. Finally, I enjoy my stalwart quality as it took me many years to develop in my own journey of self-growth, and it was always a personality goal of mine to be able to achieve the level of confidence and resolution needed to be as unwavering as I am in the face of adversity.

The positive traits you use to describe yourself are considered as such because of the impacts they have both on yourself and in your community. Some of your positive traits may have taken a lot of time and effort to develop within yourself before you can comfortably consider them to be aspects of your personality. No matter how you would describe yourself or how you perceive these traits to be so positive, understanding the good within yourself is a part of self-growth as it identifies parts of your personality that you may want to hold onto and possibly build upon when going through this journey on your own.

The Bad

Now it is time for a introspective look that would take a lot of humility to undergo in a way that is productive: identifying and understanding the parts of us that may not be as savory as our positive traits. Consider these traits just as much as your positive qualities and think about the impact they have on both yourself and on others when you inquire why they can be negative.

For myself, I would consider myself to have both selfish and impulsive qualities, and at times perceive my resolution to be negative. This is okay, you can have a personality trait you consider to be both positive and negative. Sometimes my resolution is unwavering to the point where it can devolve into stubbornness. My selfishness can affect others negatively if it comes into direct conflict with my generosity, as I sometimes feel forced to choose between helping myself and helping others. Impulsivity impacts myself more than it does other people, as I am sometimes left thinking or knowing I should have thought more about my choices before I made them.

At times, I perceive my personality to be somewhat of a double-edged sword. Feeling the same way about yourself is not necessarily a bad thing. That level of self-honesty is necessary in order to identify all aspects of your personality, both good and bad. However, not all negative personality traits are going to be things you wish to change or repress about yourself, such as in my case where the only change I wish to make is to be more thorough and less impulsive in my decisions. Understanding all internal and external impacts of my personality, yet still being unwilling to change entirely is a completely valid conclusion.

Closing Thoughts

Feel free to go and organize your personality as often as you wish and to do so often. Understanding yourself and your personality is essential to self-growth and self-acceptance and allows you to also understand the impacts your thoughts, words, and actions have both within yourself and on the people around you.

My next post in The Current Step series will explore identity labels and how figuring out your personal position on those identifiers can help you to better accept your own identity. Subscribe to my newsletter below so you don’t miss out.