Self-Acceptance vs Self-Esteem

How hard is it to accept one’s self? It may be harder than you think because true self-acceptance can be difficult to achieve. Simply because acceptance requires us to embrace the positives and negatives of who we are, without any terms and conditions. If you think that accepting all the negative aspects of one’s self sounds difficult you are not wrong! It is not easy to accept that which we undoubtedly want to change about ourselves. On the other hand, self-acceptance is closely related to self-esteem which is at the center of how we feel about ourselves. True self-acceptance can create the foundations needed for positive self-esteem. Failure to accept who we are can also result in poor self-esteem.

Public Policy Consultant, Russell Barrett and Youth Director of East Jamaica Conference (EJC), Pastor Joel Jumpp shares their perspective on self-acceptance versus self-esteem and how the two are related. Watch the full discussion here:

A lack of self-acceptance is believed to be associated with lower levels of well-being, and perhaps even mental illness. However, self-acceptance has many benefits even though this looks different for everyone. For instance, a man going through a divorce who feels like a failure because of it might experience self-acceptance by acknowledging that he made some mistakes and that his marriage failed, but that does not make him as an individual a failure. While a woman struggling with anorexia may accept herself as a human being with a less than perfect body by acknowledging her imperfection from a harmful perspective and committing to working on this perspective.