one of my least nice opinions is that i think questions like "what the hell is wrong with me???" are serious questions that deserve serious investigation, and that it's not actually a kindness to paper over them with platitudes like "i'm okay exactly as i am"
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it's really frustratingly difficult to talk about this because the words "wrong" and "okay" carry enormous amounts of baggage and oceans of depths of meaning, which are going to be different for different people at different times, and which can become part of the investigation
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i have believed that something was deeply wrong with me on some level since 2016 and on another level my whole life, and i think taking that sense of wrongness seriously and investigating it has been net extremely good for me, although it also made me vulnerable to manipulation
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(if i believe something is deeply wrong with me i become vulnerable to manipulation by people who claim to know what it is and how to fix it)
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in any case it’s not as if “just feel okay” was an option on the table. i could either take the feeling of wrongness seriously or ignore it, which wouldn’t have made it go away. gendlin: “because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with”
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there is a shift i did learn how to make in relating to that feeling of wrongness. byron katie calls it not believing your thoughts, i might call it unblending or taking as object. there’s a kind of distance you can learn to take from a thought or a feeling (not dissociation)
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you aren’t pushing it away but you aren’t inside it either, your awareness isn’t collapsed onto it, you’re aware that you are not the thought or feeling. from this comfortable distance you can investigate what is actually going on
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when you have a thought like “what the hell is wrong with me???” and can take it as object then you can take it seriously as a message from a part of you without getting sucked into it. you can investigate what bodily sensations come with this thought, what memories it brings up
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and you can ask what “wrong” means, concretely. it’s both a very abstract word and one charged with meaning and feeling. what does this part of you mean by it? how does it know? what specifically have i experienced that produced this sense? many options
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this is a long-winded way of saying that self-acceptance includes accepting the ways you can’t accept yourself. it can recurse: if you can’t accept that can you accept the ways you can’t accept the ways you can’t accept yourself? etc.
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In some fantasy world where I get my shit together and start writing a blog, one of the posts is about how when your mindfulness kicks in, you have to start by loving the TOP of the stack, which might be 18 recursive "hating myself for hating myself" - and how you can't skip 'em.
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There is something beautifully paradoxical about puzzling out these sorts of emotions. Figuring out why it's so right to having this feeling of wrongness.
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Recursion is such a good model for that, lots of problems of the mind are a matter of getting an exit out of an infinite loop, and only then you can execute on the root cause
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Ironically self-care/therapy culture has the potential to set another unattainable standard of acceptance and awareness but it also needs to be let go like any other conceptual framework when it becomes suffocating