Personal working notes on self-acceptance and how people change. It's mostly me working through ideas which are standard in various therapeutic traditions. I've struggled to understand those ideas well, though, so wanted to explore them in written form. Some of the examples and framing are unusual, and may be of broader interest.

The following is a striking scene from the television series "Breaking Bad" (spoilers). One of the two main characters, Jesse Pinkman, a drug dealer, is in a therapy group. Jesse is a lost soul, a person who in many respects genuinely wants to live a good life, but whose life has instead spiralled into a hell of violence. He keeps making bad choices. He's murdered someone else in the drug trade, and doesn't know how to deal with it. He can't say this to his therapy group, though; he tells them he killed a dog¹:

The idea of accepting yourself is a popular one in general culture. But it can seem too cheap, a way of letting ourself off the hook. "I love myself, which means I will accept my overweight / lack of hard work / lack of courage / etc". Jesse states the issue starkly:

Counsellor: "We're not here to sit in judgement."

Jesse: "Why not?… Maybe I shoulda done something different… If you just do stuff and nothin' happens, what's it all mean, what's the point? Oh right, this whole thing is about self acceptance."

Counsellor: "Kicking the hell out of yourself doesn't give meaning to anything."

Jesse: "So I should stop judging and accept?"

Counsellor: "It's a start."

Jesse: "So no matter what I do, hurray for me because I'm a great guy? It's all good. No matter how many dogs I kill I just what, I do an inventory, and accept. I mean, you back your truck over your own kid and you like accept. What a load of crap."

The scene bothers me. It presents a false dichotomy between harsh self-judgement and unconditional acceptance. Jesse's right that smiling and saying "I'm a good person" isn't enough. But he's been self-hating for years, and it isn't improving his life. In fact, it's making it worse.

Part of the difficulty in understanding the scene is the gravity of the issues. Murder. Addiction. Deception. Self hatred. They're grave issues, so emotionally intense that it makes them hard to think about well. It helps to consider a less loaded situation.

To that end, the following example has amused me to think about on and off for seven years. I call it "the cupcake incident". In May of 2019 I visited a friend living near Oxford in the UK. We spent a couple of enjoyable hours chatting. He offered me cupcakes. Rather than take a sensible single cupcake, I gobbled down some immoderate number that I fortunately cannot remember.

Later, I was extremely self-critical. I have struggled with weight through much of my adult life. Why had I eaten so much? I'd vowed to eat well on this trip, and instead I was greatly overeating. I was a self-indulgent fool, with no self control. I would no doubt suffer diabetes and heart disease, and my life would be worse, and I would deserve it. And so on.

As a one-off that's just a bad episode. The trouble is the cupcake incident wasn't the first or even the fourteenth time this kind of thing had happened.

One theory of personal change is that you identify some "wrong" behaviour, what you should have done, and then next time you do the right thing. This seems self-evident, and it often works! Sometimes we make big changes in our life with relative ease. But we humans are strange animals. Sometimes it doesn't work. You self-criticise… and then do the same thing (or some variant) the next time. And the next time. And the next time. Some problems stick despite knowing the "right" thing to do. When you're young you wonder what on earth is wrong with you. As you get older you realize: lots of people have the same experience, albeit often with different sticky problems. One person finds it easy to stop overeating, but can't stop biting their nails; another person finds the reverse.

What many people do with these sticky problems is ratchet up harsher and harsher self-judgement. They believe intensity of self-judgement is the key input in causing change.

But intensity of self-judgement is only one input. A very different input is your depth of understanding of your behaviour. In the case of the cupcake incident, this begins (but does not end) with observations like: I was extremely jetlagged, due to travel. I was tired, which tends to reduce self-control. And so on. Such observations are a good start, but are not associated to inputs where I can intervene; in isolation they're closer to excuses. I needed to go deeper to find places I plausibly could intervene². And then try an intervention out to see if I could improve my understanding further.

I tried a few things. I tried to develop a habit of buying my go-to healthy snack food, bananas, whenever I arrived in a new place. This often didn't work: after arrival I was usually too tired to find a supermarket to buy bananas. I tried identifying supermarkets in advance, when I was fresh, making it much easier when I actually arrived. This genuinely improved things. Sometimes I succeeded! But sometimes I'd still forget or be too tired. And even when I succeeded there was a new problem. Bananas tend to get squashed in my bag when travelling, and I didn't want to eat squishy old bananas. So I switched to apples and nuts. Apples are ideal: they stabilize my appetite better than nuts. But unlike apples and bananas, nuts tend to be easy to find in airports. So nuts it often is. So far this strategy is working okay – it's not a full solution, but it certainly helps me eat somewhat better when I arrive in a new place after a long trip.

This is just a small part of the story. I've tried many other things too. It's iterative problem-solving, focused on improving how I eat when I travel, not through self-criticism and willpower, but by improving my understanding, trying stuff out, over and over, testing to see how it changes things, how I can improve things.

Crucially: in 2013 I was diagnosed with a mild arthritis called ankylosing spondylitis (AS). And though I didn't learn it until the 2020s, untreated AS is tiring and people often overeat to compensate, and so become overweight. After I was diagnosed and began receiving treatment, I lost a fair bit of weight. Still, at the time of the cupcake incident I didn't yet understand the connection between AS and my weight. So the understanding I was generating was genuinely useful in keeping my weight lower, but was also incomplete. The world is complicated, and you shouldn't expect a full understanding before intervening. You are much larger than your model of yourself. And sometimes, making other changes in your life, addressing other problems, or simply changed real-world circumstances, can have a surprising impact.

This second theory of change is obvious: "Understand why you behave the way you do, and find interventions so as to get your desired outcomes". It's a kind of criticise-understand-experiment loop. But while obvious, many people skip the understanding or settle for a shallow understanding, and consider self-criticism a better substitute. The attitude often amounts to: "Nah, you just don't have enough willpower. What you need is to shut-the-fuck-up-and-be-more-intense in your commitment. If you were serious, you'd eat well, no need for all this fuss. You're just over-complicating it!" I half-believed this for a very long time. Indeed, sometimes the key step in understanding is noticing that "I'm not being serious here", and just-doing-the-right-fucking thing. But when you hold harsh self-judgement over a long time – as I did with eating well – it can actually inhibit understanding. "I'm a no-good lazy fool who can't even…" becomes a way of avoiding the problem, actually making it harder to go deeper in understanding.

A big part of this is actively working to understand how dark patterns contribute to your behaviour. Maybe you have a high need for control. An ambition to be rich or famous (etc) that you feel is shameful. Or whatever it might be. The question: "What am I not admitting to myself that might be relevant?" is often very helpful. So too: "What am I afraid of?" So too: "What do I want, but am ashamed to admit I want?" And so on³⁴.

In doing this kind of understanding, it's easy to blame the external world, and to feel a victim of forces beyond our control. "It was my upbringing / genetics / illness / mean people" is very tempting. It lets us off the hook. It may well be true, or part of the truth. But they're only useful as a staging point in understanding. If you accept them as the reason, then you cede power to things outside your control. That's something to be very careful about. Of course, sometimes you need to accept your situation. Someone with ALS can't aspire to be a 100 meter runner. But Stephen Hawking found ways he could contribute, despite his illness. And you might think someone 5 foot 3 inches tall couldn't play men's basketball. If so, you haven't heard of Muggsy Bogues. And you wouldn't think someone born into poverty and prostitution could build one of the world's largest armadas of ships. If so, you haven't heard of Zheng Yi Sao. Perhaps all these people occasionally felt sorry for themselves and mad at the unfairness of the world; but they also found places they could intervene in their life to overcome external circumstances.

Let's come back to Jesse. He's actually come a long way. Early on in "Breaking Bad" he was mostly irresponsible, blaming others for his problems. By this point he's at least trying to take responsibility. Unfortunately, his theory of change is based on totalizing self-criticism and self-hatred. It's not helping him change effectively. He's still a monster, trapped in hell. That's not to say monsters can't ever be redeemed. As people outside the immediate radius of damage he's causing, we may well feel sorry for him – indeed, I think such pity is admirable. But as a society we must stop him. This broken man is doing terrible damage to the people around him.

Jesse's later line is also striking. The Counsellor says: "Hey, Jesse, I know you're in pain". And Jesse replies: "No, you know what? Why I'm here in the first place? Is to sell you meth. You're nothin' to me but customers. I made you my bitch."

This sounds terrible. It's delivered with tremendous conviction, and there's no doubt Jesse believes it in the moment. But anyone reflective will realize it's not true. Indeed, Jesse may be the only person in the room who doesn't instinctively realize it's untrue. If it were true, why would he be so tremendously upset about killing "the dog"? Why would he be talking about it with the group? And why would he be so harsh in judgement of himself?

No, the statement isn't true. Instead, it's Jesse's instinctive way of making himself seem so despicable that he will get the negative judgement and shunning he feels he deserves. It's self-punishment: he hates himself so much he wants to sabotage his relationship with the group.

And it illustrates the dangers of such harsh self-criticism. It can distort self-understanding in a way that leads to counterproductive actions. In this case: he isolates himself from the support group, and is driven back to his drug dealer "friends" for their "support". But they're terrible for him.

With that said, Jesse is right that pure unconditional self-acceptance isn't the right thing. It's a bad mistake to just uncritically accept and say "hurray" to your weight, laziness, drug problem, or whatever. It's better to observe that it is a problem. And that you want something different.

But he needs a deeper idea, that of a provisional acceptance which enables you to see and understand deeply the person you currently are. The more deeply you understand that, the more effective you can be in intervention. Such understanding requires suspending what would be an otherwise paralyzing judgement. Not permanently. But for some time. You need to alternate periods of understanding and experimentation, with periods where you step back and judge and decide what you're willing to accept, and what you're going to focus on changing.

This is a pattern familiar to any creative worker. You can't paint or write or compose while allowing yourself too much judgement. "This is crap. This is terrible. This is awful". Well, yes, it often is: it's a work in progress. But thinking this way all the time is not helpful to the work. The writer Anne Lamott memorably described this as Radio Station KFKD (K-Fucked), the voice creatives often hear in their head as they work, and which you must find ways of turning down. But you also, at suitable times, need criticism, even harsh criticism.

This holds not just with the creativity of art or writing or music. It holds with creation of your life. You can't solely self-criticise your way into heaven. Indeed, you can't even mainly self-criticise your way into heaven. And, on the flip side: self-acceptance is wonderfully helpful as a temporary stance. But it can be debilitating as an unconditional stance.

The view I've developed here has been focused on fixing bad patterns. It's good to spend some of your life doing this. But I sometimes meet talented people who think of themselves as bundles of problems to solve, not bundles of abilities to use. It's better to spend more time appreciating and developing your strengths, and using them to contribute to the world. You are not primarily a system to debug; you're a person to contribute.

There's also an underlying assumption that our conscious mind should dictate our behaviour. That what our conscious minds "know" we should be doing is right – we should be thinner, less lazy, and so on. But sometimes our unconscious mind is right⁵. We are, as I said above, much larger and more complex than our own model of ourselves. We need considerable humility about the correctness of our conscious understanding, and respect for both our unconscious self and for the external world.

Let me sum up. For years, my personal folk theory of change concluded that my overeating was mostly caused by lack of willpower. I was a bad person. This harsh self-criticism assumed I already understood what was going on, blinding me to what was actually happening – ranging from lots of small, easily-improved factors, through to chronic inflammation and exhaustion. Relentless self-loathing doesn't produce understanding, and cheap self-acceptance doesn't produce a rich life either. Change needs you to make a judgement, and then put that judgement aside long enough to understand what you're dealing with, and then to try out ways of improving. Simple and obvious, maybe. But a hard discipline to keep, and one I'm still learning.

Acknowledgement

These notes benefited from conversations with many friends and family over the years, but especially with Kanjun Qiu. Thanks Kanjun!

Footnotes

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