To remember what internal unpleasantness is, it is better to start with its opposite, from its positive pole: with internal acceptance. Internal acceptance is a state in which realistic interaction naturally occurs.
Entering the room, we accept that there are walls here — so. Being born into the world, we accept that there is day and night, summer and winter, rain and gravity. We live in it. Faced with various and difficult events, when accepting, we do not internally protest, do not resent, do not rebel against, do not worry and do not experience an involuntary desire to remake, change, object.
Frodo sees the death of Gandalf, but shouts: No! He can’t, doesn’t want to accept it.
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Inner acceptance is generally an exceptionally helpful state and attitude, but is not always present. For people who live more with feelings than with their mind and head, situations are not uncommon when the head understands everything, and the feelings (heart, emotions, body) object, do not understand, do not accept …
If you crashed your car and started to worry: “This couldn’t happen to me!”, “This can’t be!”, “The world is unfair, people are idiots, I’m not lucky again” — internal acceptance is not typical for you.
In the state of acceptance, you internally describe the situation: I was driving at such and such a speed, along such a lane, a foreign car, of such and such a color, under such and such conditions I ran over and so on — as long as you are internally calm and see what is happening realistically, you are in acceptance positions.
At the same time, internal acceptance does not necessarily mean external acceptance: your demonstrated behavior can be anything, and you will build your conversation with the person responsible for the accident, most likely, not radiating gracious acceptance, but in accordance with your interests: once radiating only calmness and directing attention to solve the problem, having once played out an unfortunate hysteria (more typical for women) or rage (more typical for male security officials).
Internal rejection is a problematic state. This is a refusal to include in one’s negative assessment and protest, an objection to what happened or what is happening.
Protest can take many different forms: argument, struggle, butting, indignation, alienation, as well as the whole range of strong negative experiences: grief, despair, longing, anger, frustration, a negative view of the world … Sometimes — ignoring, refusing to see, immersion in illusions. Either way, it’s a protest. For example,
The small child began to misbehave after the birth of the second child. He is used to being the only child in the family, that all parental love belongs to him, he is the birth of a brother or sister and fights for his rights to what he is already used to. His «I want it my way!» It is a struggle for power over the parents.
A teenage girl wants to be beautiful, like a girl who has already blossomed, and she looks with hatred at her somewhere angular forms. And this, too, is the childhood habit “I don’t want to wait, give me everything I want at once”, along with the desire to attract attention to oneself (at least in the form of pity) and, possibly, reduce the demands of others on oneself (the motive of avoiding failure) .
An adult man has done a series of stupid things and now he blames himself for them, engages in self-criticism … And this is also an option, revenge on himself.
Interestingly, earlier it was simply called: the child behaves badly, the girl is fooling around, the man is doing something incomprehensible. And without any psychology: the child was gradually brought up, the girl was distracted by business, the man was reminded that he was actually a man and it was time for him to return to business. Today the situation is different: people now have serious, respectable internal psychological reasons, officially called “internal rejection”. Previously, the responsibility was on the person, but now the responsibility has been removed from him: “He behaves this way not just like that, but because of the difficulties of internal acceptance!” At work, in a reasonable business team, such problems do not yet arise. Outside of business relationships, in personal life, non-acceptance of oneself or some difficult events has already become a typical task, which is seriously worked on in psychotherapy today. And the task is often not easy: if a person insists on his rejection, on his inner protest, the bare appeals “We need to accept this!” mean no more to him than any other call like «Get smarter» or «Don’t worry!».
What to do anyway?
If a person is in the position of a child, it is necessary to enter the state of an adult. Internal rejection is a childish bad habit performed by adults: it is a childish habit of arguing, protesting, insisting on one’s own even when it’s pointless to object, the habit of demanding everything that I want for myself, making myself feel bad when I don’t get what I want. There may be other reasons behind this, in turn – the desire to attract attention, the struggle for power, the avoidance of failure, revenge and other problematic dynamics.
It is possible that this is a direct continuation of the crisis of 3 years: there the child was arguing with adults, and now the adult child is arguing with the world.
Accordingly, working with a bad habit consists only in developing a good, useful habit: not mindlessly arguing, but thinking and agreeing with what is reasonable and what is simply a fact. For adults — Total YES, for little ones — we learn to obey smart adults and gradually grow up.
On the other hand, behind every protest emotion there is one or another inadequate belief, such as “Everything that I love should always belong to me” or “Everything that others have good, I should have”. Accordingly, problematic beliefs need to be found and replaced with adequate ones. If a person understands with his head that it is necessary to accept what is happening, and behind the protest there is only resistance of feelings, then you can rely on time: over time, people get used to everything (or almost everything). Is it possible to make this “over time” shorter, or even do without internal resistance? Yes, sometimes it is possible. Many people are helped in this by the Declaration of Acceptance of Reality.