Techniques for Acceptance
From a counselling point of view, everything in the context of acceptance is interesting, when it could be an indication for something which the client rejects and fights within himself – and what he would like to be or what he would like to optimise in himself. Each of these decisions can be examined to see whether they are connected to needs or substitute needs, to self-responsibility or victimisation, to self-perception or self-deprecations/self-aggrandisement, to conscious or unconscious scripts. In this way the psychodynamics of the client can be very effectively researched, because, through their value judgments, much becomes indirectly visible. Unconscious norms (“This is how one does this!”) as well as fixed external references (“In our family we are all like this!”), as well as divided or diffuse self-perceptions (“I am simply tidy, through and through! There is nothing grubby in me.”), as well as repressed needs (“To laugh I have to go into the cellar!”), can enable accessibility to processing, when one reflects upon the evaluations of the client. The second, extensive field of acceptance-related techniques consists of (re)introducing affirmation, or offering it to the client, where, hitherto, he has only experienced lifelong rejection. Caring, nurturing interactions between the client and the counsellor are often the preconditions for the client to open up, to perceive ‘dark’ sides in himself and admit them to himself or accept responsibility for them. By building upon this, he can then discover an affirmative self-representation where, so far, only rejection in relationship to himself has been found. In this way self-love can emerge.