Summary: Whenever you label something as unacceptable, you are knowingly or unknowingly declaring that there will be emotional consequences if whatever you labeled unacceptable happens. Instead of labeling something as unacceptable, a strategy to help you avoid experiencing, doing, or being something you want to avoid, you can focus your efforts on how to avoid the undesired situation or being the way you want to be. There are no reported perfect human beings1, so falling short of your desired way of being is ok. That doesn’t mean you like falling short. You can dislike something without feeling bad about it.
If you self-reflect we think you’ll find that most things you find unacceptable are things you get anxious about. Anxiety is the body’s alarm system. This is why your body triggers anxiety when something you find unacceptable is about to happen or may happen. The idea that you should view certain things as unacceptable is a strategy you created or adopted to avoid doing or experiencing certain things. For more on why and how our body creates anxiety triggers from how we think, see this.
Eliminating an anxiety trigger will require you to stop viewing any behavior/thing/activity you dislike as unacceptable. however sucky it may be if it were to happen. This change in thinking will remove the anxiety you experience whenever you picture or imagine yourself doing or experiencing the thing you want to avoid.
How to stop viewing something as unacceptable
Note: We cover this in some of our anxiety trigger solutions
If you’re finding it difficult to stop viewing something as unacceptable or as something you should be anxious about, you probably have 1 or more reasons (likely unconscious and unique to you) why you think you should view the behavior, action, etc, as unacceptable. Remember: thinking something is unacceptable means your body will register whatever you tag as unacceptable as dangerous and trigger anxiety when the unacceptable thing has the possibility of happening.
To address this, you will have to uncover the reasons why you view the thing you dislike or want to avoid as unacceptable so they are out in plain sight. Uncovering these reasons alone may dissolve the trigger. In other cases, uncovering these reasons will reveal what happened to you (likely in the past) that led to you tagging the thing you hate, dislike, or want to avoid as unacceptable/something to be anxious about. If you recall, the idea that certain things should be or are unacceptable is a way of thinking you picked up sometime in the past. An alternative strategy is to recognize that you dislike — probably extremely — whatever you consider unacceptable.
After understanding why you view something as unacceptable, you can use your personal goals to decide how you’d like to handle the things you previously thought were unacceptable. In service of your goals, this shift in thinking may lead you to avoid or change certain things in your life.
Feel free to leave a comment or contact us directly. We have targeted solutions for social anxiety, anxiety, low self-esteem, and more here.
- Lents NH. Human Errors: A Panorama of our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 01 May 2018. ↩︎
