What is Radical Self-Acceptance?

Self-esteem, confidence, and self-love are not radical self-acceptance. They are important in their own right, but they have more to do with how you feel about yourself than with whether you accept your own words and behavior. Are you okay with making mistakes? Are you okay with owning those mistakes? Do you beat yourself up? Those are part of radical self-acceptance.

The mantra for self-acceptance is: “I own and fully accept every word and action I say or do.”

It doesn’t matter if you should have known better. It doesn’t matter if hindsight gave you new information. It doesn’t matter how much pain you realize you were in when you did that thing. It doesn’t matter who you hurt. None of it matters. The only thing that matters is that you can accept and take responsibility for what you created—no matter how good, bad, or ugly you think it might be.

I’m not going to sugarcoat this. It’s not easy. It sounds simple enough, but it’s far from easy to do.

There are a couple of concepts behind radical self-acceptance that we need to understand.

First—and probably most importantly—this does not let anybody off the hook for managing their behavior or words. Radical self-acceptance doesn’t mean we can say or do whatever we want as long as we’re willing to accept it. Instead, it says we understand that we are human, we make mistakes, and that’s okay.

Second, beating ourselves up doesn’t fix anything. It’s self-created pain that has nothing to do with the experience, and everything to do with what’s happening in your mind. Being hard on ourselves doesn’t make our actions or words better. More often than not, it means we opt out of things. We avoid conversations. We avoid trying new things. We avoid relationships—because we’re unable to accept ourselves within those things.

Finally, we need to understand that the past cannot be changed. When we realize we made a mistake because we gained new information, we can’t go back and change the original choice. The way we make room for radical self-acceptance is by asking how we can use that new information to help ourselves move forward.

How can I make sure I don’t repeat that, without creating more pain?
How can I be a better person with this awareness?
How can I break the cycle instead of reliving it?

We answer those questions within ourselves without adding more pain through avoidance, denial, or blame.

Radical self-acceptance is your permission to be a human being and a work in progress. It frees you to heal yourself. It frees you to let others off the hook.

Without radical self-acceptance, you get stuck in the pain. Beating yourself up keeps you there. Think about what that story does to you:
You regret what you did, so you punish yourself. It keeps you stuck in the past. It stops you from letting the experience go. And it makes you avoid similar situations in the future—not because you’ve grown, but because you don’t want to feel that regret again. Beating yourself up is a trap.

When you learn to make peace with your past—when you accept that the experience happened and that you did the best you could at the time—you find freedom.

Side note…

I don’t have a story about struggling with self-acceptance, because I offered it to myself from the beginning. I didn’t beat myself up for things I couldn’t change. I did what I did. Not all of it was great—some of it hurt people I care about—but I did those things. I don’t carry that thing others seem to—the part that holds on forever.

My healing journey wasn’t about fighting to accept my past choices. I did that immediately. My healing was about understanding why I made those choices, so I could stop the cycles from repeating.

Because I gave myself acceptance, I gave others acceptance, too. I was able to immediately let everybody off the hook when I realized that my choices were my own, and what they did was up to them.

What I learned early on in my journey was that my perception was the problem—it wasn’t about other people. It was about me, and how I saw what they were saying and doing. I don’t have that part that says “they shouldn’t have”—because they were making choices just like I was.

Whether those choices were good or bad didn’t really matter. The choices had already been made. It was done, and it couldn’t be changed.

The hard truth was that they were making choices based on what I was doing. It was a simple matter of cause and effect. I make a choice, then you make a choice. Then I respond, and you respond.

We go back and forth like that—because that’s what relationships are: a series of choices taken in turns. Whatever I say or do offers the other person an indirect choice of how to respond—or not.

Most of these choices are made unconsciously, seemingly in an instant—but they’re still choices.

Radical self-acceptance says that I accept those choices. It doesn’t mean I like them. It doesn’t mean they were good choices. It just means I accept that everyone has the ability to choose.

And the more consciously we make those choices, the happier we are in life.

Radical self-acceptance is part of self-mastery and self-responsibility. We have to take full ownership of every thought, feeling, action, or word that we offer ourselves and others. To do that without self-creating more pain, we need self-acceptance. It’s the only way for us to manage ourselves within the experience, and then own our behavior afterward without the story of regret or blame. Self-acceptance is the only way to fully embody self-mastery and self-responsibility.

Radical self-acceptance isn’t a destination—it’s the ongoing practice of showing up fully for yourself, without excuses or apologies, so you can live with freedom, responsibility, and genuine inner peace.

Love to all.

Della