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People arrive in therapy asking whether they want to change or want to accept themselves, as if they must pick one. The order runs from acceptance to change: once someone is no longer at war with reality, they can work on what they want to be different.
The fight is the problem. The minute a person attacks themselves and declares that everything they do is bad, another part of them fights back, and the result is a battle between two parts of one person.
Insecurity is a common example. Many people feel it is horrible and that they must learn to be secure. The first step is sitting with the parts of yourself that you refuse to accept, and dealing with the rest from there. This is the central work for the melancholic child, who argues with every loss and stays in relationships too long.
Why did Carl Rogers put acceptance first?
Carl Rogers, the American psychologist who founded person-centered therapy, gathered his ideas in the 1961 book On Becoming a Person. He wrote that the curious paradox is that change follows when a person accepts themselves as they are. His clinical view was that a client who feels fully accepted can stop defending and start moving. Rogers spent much of his career at the University of Chicago and the University of Wisconsin.
Which therapy balances acceptance with change?
Marsha Linehan, a psychologist at the University of Washington, developed dialectical behavior therapy in the late 1980s. She found that treatments built only around change felt invalidating to many clients, while treatments built only around acceptance left them stuck. Her therapy asks both of the patient at once, which is the dialectic in the name. Her first randomized controlled trial was published in 1991.
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