Ever worry that you aren’t ‘enough’ just as you are? Then you need to read this guide to self-acceptance – and the improved health status that comes along with it
When Jennifer Pastiloff was eight years old, she got into an argument with her dad over smoking. He’d promised to quit his four-packs-a-day habit but wasn’t following through. She flushed a load of his menthol cigarettes down the toilet. ‘I told him he always broke promises, and I said, “I hate you!” the way young kids do in those situations,’ says Jennifer. ‘It wouldn’t have been that big a deal, but it ended up being the last thing I said to him.’
He died from a widow-maker heart attack shortly after, aged just 38. ‘I thought I had caused the stress that killed him,’ she says. ‘I was so ashamed that I wouldn’t allow myself to grieve; I thought I didn’t deserve to be a person. I developed anorexia as I tried to fade away.’ Jennifer eventually recovered from her eating disorder, but she still carried shame from the experience and her father’s death, which destroyed her confidence in other aspects of her life. ‘I lied all the time, saying I wasn’t sad about my dad, or that I was auditioning for acting roles when, really, I was working at a restaurant. And I refused to admit I had a hearing disability.’ When she was 34, Jennifer had had enough and began writing in an effort to heal. To her surprise, her brutally honest essays were met with support online. ‘When I saw how sharing helped people, I decided I was finished hiding,’ she says. Jennifer is now a yoga teacher and the author of On Being Human: A Memoir Of Waking Up, Living Real, And Listening Hard, and also leads ‘Shameloss’ workshops on selfacceptance. ‘Being honest and vulnerable in spite of shame – that’s my superpower,’ she says.
Shame is particularly difficult to overcome because ‘it causes people to feel as if they’re flawed at their core’, says June Tangney, a professor of psychology at George Mason University and author of Shame And Guilt: Emotions And Social Behavior. ‘With guilt, you might think, “I’ve done something bad, but I’m not a bad person,” and that can actually encourage healthy change. With shame, you think, “I am bad.”’ Tainted character feels a lot harder (if not impossible) to change, so it causes people to isolate and withdraw. Women and younger people are the most likely to struggle with this emotion, research shows. And that has very real consequences. Feeling a lot of shame on a day-to-day basis is associated with a higher likelihood of developing anxiety, depression, low self-esteem and eating disorders, studies show. It can also lead to health problems beyond mental wellbeing and disconnection. According to a study in the Journal Of Health Psychology, the shame people feel about contracting herpes (whic
