Areas › Your body › Touch and bodywork
Deep change tends to follow self acceptance rather than the other way round. Waiting until you have fixed the thing before you are allowed to be kind to yourself usually keeps the thing exactly where it is.
This shows up most clearly with eating, drinking, and everything else people do to manage a feeling. Shame makes the feeling worse, and the behaviour was what handled the feeling, so self attack quietly feeds the very habit it is aimed at. Acceptance is not approval and it is not resignation. It is taking the shame out, so that whatever you try next is not being run by threat.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'lower your wing in humility towards them in kindness' (Quran 17:24). The verse is about how you treat your parents, and the posture it describes, softness rather than harshness, is the one that lets anybody change.
وَٱخۡفِضۡ لَهُمَا جَنَاحَ ٱلذُّلِّ مِنَ ٱلرَّحۡمَةِ وَقُل رَّبِّ ٱرۡحَمۡهُمَا كَمَا رَبَّيَانِي صَغِيرࣰ ا
and lower your wing in humility towards them in kindness and say, ‘Lord, have mercy on them, just as they cared for me when I was little.’
Qur’an 17:24read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A Cochrane review found that holding and feeding infants at the breast reduced their pain responses during procedures compared with nothing. Comfort given during distress does more than distress plus instruction. That is evidence from newborns, and it is offered here as the earliest example of a principle rather than as research on self acceptance.
Shah PS, Herbozo C, Aliwalas LL, Shah VS. (2012). Breastfeeding or breast milk for procedural pain in neonates.. The Cochrane database of systematic reviews doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Change attempted from self attack uses the same alarmed state you are trying to get out of.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Before sending anyone for hands on work, ask what touch has meant in their life. A massage table is a poor place to discover that touch brings something back.
When a treatment is described as approved, ask what it is approved for. Magnetic brain stimulation is licensed for depression, and using it for attention problems is off label.
Some situations do not move, and accepting that is itself a way of coping rather than a failure to cope.