I recently spent a couple of days with an old (literally and figuratively – we had not met for sixty years) friend and his wife. When afterwards he did not respond to emails, I wondered if, perhaps I had offended his wife. They dropped my wife and me at our house and his wife turned down an offer to come in for coffee (right after he had accepted the offer and was about to come inside).
About a week after our meeting, I downloaded “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” a book that had been collecting dust on a shelf somewhere. When I came across the following passage in the book, I understood what had transpired with my friend and his wife.
Recipe for Disaster
“If you want to know how to make people shun you and laugh at you behind your back and even despise you, here is the recipe. Never listen to anyone for long. Talk incessantly about yourself. If you have an idea while the other person is talking, don’t wait for him or her to finish: bust right in and interrupt in the middle of a sentence.
“So you know people like that? I do, unfortunately; and the astonishing thing is that some of them are prominent. Bores, that is all they are — bores intoxicated with their own egos, drunk with a sense of their own importance.”
My sister once told me she never knew what was acceptable and what was not in normal conversation. I am the same. My friend had read my blog and appeared interested. I took this as permission to talk incessantly about myself. I ignored his wife completely.
If I get an inkling someone might be interested, I can go on interminably. I missed out on the learning of social behavior, perhaps because I missed out on the most basic human relationships early on in life.
Unconditional Self-Acceptance
Early on, awareness of a blunder like this might have shattered me. Now I take it as Basic Living 101. I am able to look back at the events of the couple of days with my friend and his wife and have a good laugh — not so much at myself, but viewing the situation as an observer. I was a tremendous — perhaps obnoxious — bore, intoxicated with my own ego.
Got it! Learn from it! Move on!
I am kinder to myself, now. I understand the value of, and the reason and need for unconditional self-acceptance, aka radical acceptance. I am ready and willing to see my faults and make minor and major adjustments.
But it would be foolish not to accept myself. No one but me makes this choice. I am the decider. For more than half a century I chose not to accept myself. Some people picked up on this choice, drove it home and made it official.
Amazingly, here is another passage I fortuitously came across — something written by a girl in my eleventh grade high school English class. I was teaching the talk and she was walking the walk. Here it is just as she wrote it back then:
For some people who look at me
they think I’m a little different from
everyone else. I don’t think of it as
different, I think of it as original
as me. I’m pretty out going, but at times
I get really pulled back. I’m a real
romantic, I think life should be like
the movies. I’m a real bitch too, I’ve been
told. I don’t think I’m mean, I just
speak the truth very bluntly. I think
I’m pretty, people also tell me that, but
then I have bad days. I do things
that make adults and good kids push
me away — like smoke, and drugs.
But I don’t really mind, I’ve got my
group. I like myself most of the time,
but if others don’t like me,
they’re missing something good.
She accepts herself unconditionally. We all had better accept ourselves unconditionally. Unconditional self-acceptance is one of the tenets of Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy. “I choose to accept myself as I am under all conditions.”
If someone chooses to reject me for thoughtless behavior, they are missing something good. I am certainly more than my behaviors. I can learn from my behaviors, try hard to correct them, and move on. That is exactly what I will do.
Self-help books that help:
Total Self-Renewal through Attention Therapies and Open Focus
The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body
