The Self-Curing Effect of
Acceptance
Timar Iren
The title of my presentation is The self-curing effect of
acceptance.
First, I would like to have a look at a tale from the Bible.
We all know the story of Cain and Abel from the Genesis.
This is the first tale after the ‘Paradise Lost’. The tale
which is about Cain who kills his brother Abel.
But what makes Cain kill his brother? What is the spiritual
process that leads Cain to murder?
We hardly know anything about Cain. We only know that he
gives crop as a present to God, but God rejects his gift.
The rejection and exclusion makes him become angry, mad and
finally, sad. It happens just after this that he kills his
brother who has gained acceptance.
What is this story about? It tells us that we all need to
feel that we are accepted just as we are. This feeling can
be seen as a basic need. In order to be able to accept
ourselves we have to gain the acceptance of our parents and
the people surrounding us.
Being accepted is also important in order to be able to be a
member of a group or community. We require both
self-acceptance and the acceptance of other people and the
acceptance of a certain community. To feel that I am a
member of a group, that I belong to somewhere, that I am
important to somebody, are necessities of life. If we are
rejected, non-accepted, are not members of a community then
we will become lonely we will be at the mercy of others and
we will become incapable of living.
And that is the cruelest thing that can be done against a
man. It does not matter what kind of a person you are, the
aim of your behaviour is to find place among others to be
accepted, appreciated and looked upon.
In the groups the participants usually say, that before they
thought they were the only people with such problems, that
they were the only unfortunate people that they felt they
were completely alone with their problems. But there in the
groups they realise that there are others, who have problems
too. From that point they no longer think that their
problems are so unbearable. A mother of a seriously
handicapped child once said,” As I was listening to the
others ‘problems I had a feeling. What feeling was it? Was
it glee? No, it was not. I only felt that I was not alone.
And to feel that was very good.”
We all need to feel that we belong to somewhere, belong to a
group because alone sooner or later we would feel that we
are incapable of living.
During the years I have had groups of people with different
age and with different social backgrounds. In the followings
I would like to show you some episodes which illustrate the
effect and the influence of an IP group on the individual.
Gill and Susanna are the members of an adolescent
psychodrama group. Gill is the oldest child in her family,
who has faced that she cannot be good enough. She is not
good enough for her parents especially for her mother; she
is not good enough to be loved. For 3-4 years she has had
panic attacks and auto-aggressive behaviour. For example she
cuts her hands and arms with a knife or takes medicine.
Susanna is an only child. Her parents were just about to get
divorced when her mother became pregnant with her. When she
was a child she often had to face that her parents were
quarrelling over her. Sometimes she was even physically
punished. Susanna has got serious adaptation problems. She
cannot keep the rules, she is rude, aggressive rarely even
bizarre. For instance she makes planes of murdering students
and teachers in her school. The two girls go to the same
secondary school where both of them separate themselves from
other students meanwhile they are not accepted by the other
students.
In the group Gill is extremely kind, lovely and helpful. She
tries to live up to other members’ expectations even if it
is not good for her, moreover, even if it hurts her. She
does not bare the smallest confrontation; she never tells if
she has a different opinion. Then when the group meeting is
finished she begins to feel bad and she has a panic attack.
In the psychodrama group Susanna tries to do everything to
show, both in the plays and outside the plays, that she is
strong, she is not afraid of anything and that she cannot be
defeated. She does everything to make the other children be
afraid of her. As she says, she is the dark side. She is
frustrated when she cannot be aggressive and frightening
enough and she suffers from not being good in her ‘role’.
The group accepted both Gill and Susanna. Gill is often
encouraged to tell her opinion and when she has a panic
attack 2-3 members of the group help her. Susanna’s
aggressive behaviour is accepted by the group. The children
accept that being frightening is important to Susanna but
the children are not afraid of her.
During the group therapy Gill has became more and more
sociable and Susanna is more often frustrated because of
being unable to act in a frightening and aggressive way. The
appreciation and the tolerance of the group started
inter-psychological changes at each girl. After this, in a
game, Gill fought for herself. She did not turn her power
against herself but she could act out her aggression. Then
she told us that she was afraid of her feelings and rejected
them, rejected the anger and the pain. She feared that if
someone got to know her, he or she would reject her. As she
told us this the girl sitting next to her folded her in her
arms and said “I love this girl.” The other members also
went up to her and that time she did not have a panic
attack.
In another game Susanna played that she fought with somebody
but while fighting she had to take care of the other in
order not to hurt him or her. After the game Susanna told
smiling “It was very strange. And it was very difficult to
take care of me and of the other. But it was good.” At
Susanna an inner process has begun that replaced the revenge
on the world with co-operation. In the group she can feel
that she is loved no matter if she is frightening,
frustrated or even helpless. The members help her and they
do not hurt her.
The members of the group usually organize weekly meetings
apart from the psychodrama group when they talk or go to the
cinema or to the theatre together.
In the case of the girls, the family was unable to accept
the child. Within their families both girls experienced that
they were not good enough. Although due to their different
lifestyles they reacted to this feeling differently. If a
child cannot feel the total acceptance in his or her family,
he or she will be more likely rejected in a nursery school
or in a school.
Here I would like to note that in the case of the schools
which still use traditional educational and teaching
techniques we often see that students who misbehave or
students with worse grades are neglected and separated and
they become more and more problematic and deviant.
Once, in a so called ‘youth class’, a boy drew me the map of
a road leading to him. I asked all the students to draw such
a map and after we looked the maps together. In this class
almost all maps contained the signs of ‘please accept me’.
You have to know about the youth class that its students
were 16-17 years old who had been expelled by schools. These
students gave me a lot of help, because their maps showed me
the way how to get to them, showed their dreams and fears
and their origins.
I strongly believe that rejection and separation are
extremely dangerous in educational institutions. Why do I
believe this? After the family the educational situation is
the next where children take part in. Apart from the
families the child care centres, the nursery schools and the
schools are responsible for affecting children’s
personality. We spend valuable periods of our lives there.
That is the reason why these institutions should provide
acceptance, appreciation and security. The staff of these
institutions should be well-educated to be able to correct
the families’ bad lifestyles and attitudes.
Now let’s have a closer look at the rejection and separation
from the society’s point of view. What do rejection and
separation teach to a community? What are the affects of
them in a community?
-
It shows an example in which solution is separation.
-
It is against community feeling. Instead of the feeling
of us, there is the feeling of me and them. Moreover the
feeling of me and them against each other.
-
It causes frustration and fear because everybody can
become separated.
-
It strengthens attitude of superiority and
overcompensation.
Let us see now from the individual’s point of view
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It strengthens feeling of inferiority
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It strengthens oppositional behaviour
-
It separates from the other members
In schools children have to study how to co-operate with
other children, how to adopt a community. The teachers
should help this learning process.
Apart from the acceptance of the family and from the
acceptance of school the other very important factor is the
acceptance or the rejection of the community we are born in.
In the followings I would like to show acceptance and
rejection caused by background through the example
psychological dynamics of a group and of an individual. This
example shows the influence of group’s acceptance on
psychological changes
In a private school 20 women start a dressmaker training.
They also have to take part in an IP group. All of them were
unemployed before. The youngest woman is 16 and the oldest
is 42 years old. There are also differences between their
education and social backgrounds. There are 4 students with
gypsy origins. The aim of the IP group is to help the women
get to know each others, and to help them form a community.
The IP group works for 5 days, each day for 8 hours.
In this group there is a gypsy girl called Mari. She hardly
speaks on the first day and she laughs at everything. I tell
her several times that I like that she is so cheerful and
that she makes the group lively but I am unable to make her
co-operate in group work. During the following days she
interrupts into everything and then she laughs at what she
just said. I ignore her behaviour and I see that the group
members follow my example. But some of Mari’s ideas are
useful so the group plays her ideas.
On the 4th day she starts to talk about what will
happen if she finishes the training; that she will be a
dressmaker. As she talks I feel that she wants to be a
dressmaker, but she believes it is impossible. She fears of
the training. After 5 or 6 sentences she starts to laugh
again in a way that she is unable to go on talking. She is
in tears. I tell her that her laugh is fantastic as she is
in tears meanwhile. I have the feeling that she is crying
while laughing or is laughing while crying. I tell her. She
says ‘maybe’, but after this she behaves less laud and she
starts to take part in group works but still only as an
observer.
In the morning of the last day she does not appear. The
group members tell me that they miss her. One of the women
tells us that she met her the previous and Mari had a
toothache. After six hours Mari appears with swelled face.
The whole group welcomes her some members even tell her that
they missed her a lot. Mari tells us that she could not
sleep all night because of her toothache and that she came
to the group after the dentist where she had her tooth
pulled. It hurts badly but she wanted to come to the group.
She tells us that she has never felt herself so good than
here in the group. She is very happy. She starts to cry and
the group members cry with her. She says that she has been
thinking of this since the previous day, because until then
she felt herself alone and lonely. The previous day she went
home and she had a toothache. She went to the dentist and on
the way to the dentist she met one of the group members on
the square of the city. She was extremely happy that she had
someone she knew someone she could go to and talk to. “I
have never gone to a non gypsy person before. I was so proud
to talk to her. I felt it helps.”
Then she tells us that at school she used to behave the same
way as in the group and she always used to be sent away by
the teachers. She used to be sent for chalk or to the shop,
just not to be at school. She graduated from the primary
school because the teachers let her through the exams as
they wanted to get rid of her. She tells us that in the
first few days she expected us to rebuke her or send her out
of the room. But as it did not happen she started to feel
more and more comfortable in the group and she was happy to
be there. She says it would be good to hold an annual
meeting after they finished the training.
As the training is over Mari organises the first meeting
where she brings a sheet of paper with her. On the paper
there are the lines of the group members. The lines of what
they like about Mari. She puts the paper on the table and
tell the members that during the training the members were
who helped her with finishing the training and becoming a
dressmaker. She thanks the members and gives a flower to
each of them.
In this group everyone brought her different lifestyles and
different backgrounds. The similar in them although, apart
from being a woman, was being an unemployed who had to start
a new thing, which was learning a new job. This new job
would provide them working facilities.
Mari due to her origin, to her defeats at school to her
constant separation and non-acceptedness brought the feeling
of inferiority into the group and the behaviour to hide this
feeling. In the group she faced that her provocations did
not attain her goal, that she was treated as an equal and
that she was accepted. The feeling of inferiority was
replaced by the community feeling and she, who had
previously experienced being separated, wanted to belong to
the group and wok for the group. Adler taught that the best
cure against inferiority feeling is the community feeling.
In the case of my IP groups I often see that these groups
move to be self-help groups. That after 1 or 2 group meeting
the members meet outside the group and they learn how to
feel themselves well in a community. They learn to pay
attention to others, to help others. The community and the
feeling of belonging to a community become very important to
them.
They learn to understand themselves and the others better
and they learn to accept differences.
I started my presentation with the story of Cain and Abel.
This is humanity’s first story after the ‘Paradise lost’.
This might means that the first, the most important task
here below, in this world is to learn to accept the other
person with his or her differences. I know it is often not
easy.
But we, parents, adults teachers and helpers have to be
patient. We have to wait for the hand because that would be
the basis of the following steps. And what is that? The
feeling of being accepted.
Copyright ©
2005 International Association of Individual
Psychology
