When You Stop Seeking Approval, You Find Yourself

Stop Seeking Acceptance

Learn to accept yourself.

This is the beginning of emotional freedom — the quiet, often unseen foundation of healing in depth-psychotherapy.

An Endless Chase for Approval

We live in a world that has taught us to chase approval. To prove, perform, and perfect.

We seek status, followers, and praise, hoping that at some point, we’ll feel enough, and will finally feel whole. Yet, the more we reach outward, the more disconnected we become from ourselves. We think the answers live out there, yet it’s only ever sustainable from the root of the source, inside. What truly matters in our psychological healing is examining the relationship we have with ourselves.

The Illusion of Independence

In the West, we glorify independence — yet we’re bound by our dependence on how others see us.

We are shaped by their gaze, by the rules of belonging we learned early on. We grow up believing that love must be earned, that worth must be proven, and that the most important place to focus is outside us.

How Relationships Mirror Our Inner World

The way we relate to others reveals who we are.

We can live in harmony only when there is space for everyone to exist and have equal opportunities to meet and fulfill their needs.

When we feel fearful or threatened, we regress, splitting off the world into sides — right and wrong, good and bad, us and them.
This “othering” gives the illusion of control but only deepens our isolation.

In relationships, we do the same:

If only you were different, I’d feel better.

We wait for someone else to free us from our pain. And in that waiting, we give away our power.

The Cost of External Validation

No wonder we feel tired, anxious, and burnt out.
We pour our energy into what we can’t control — the reactions, opinions, and choices of others — and neglect the only place our power truly exists: within.

Our culture reinforces this cycle. Capitalism thrives on our hunger — convincing us that satisfaction lies in the next purchase, the next promotion, the next version of ourselves.

Yet what we’re really chasing isn’t the thing itself, but the feeling of being enough as-we-are-now.

The Roots of Approval-Seeking

Our conditions begin early.

As children, we needed approval to survive — a parent’s smile, a teacher’s praise. These were lifelines that let us know we were doing okay.
When we never outgrow that need, we live as adults still waiting for permission to belong.

Adolescence was meant to separate us from those scripts, yet many of us never completed that emotional rebellion, often taking care of our parents’ feelings by conforming to what was handed to us. We followed the script. Without investigation, we can confuse safety with familiarity, mistaking what is known for what is good for our souls.

Resistance: The Source of Suffering

So we resist — what’s happening, what we feel, what we can’t control.

We fight against life itself: denying, blaming, explaining, venting.
We ruminate over what others did or didn’t do.

We get stuck in old stories about our ex, our boss, our parents, and miss the quiet question pulsing underneath:

What does this reaction say about me?

Most of our suffering comes from this resistance — our unwillingness to feel the discomfort of what is here.

Learning to Feel Again

We create stories about why we can’t feel our feelings. Maybe we’re only familiar with one or two feelings, and we’ve yet to realize the complexities of our emotional world.
Maybe we don’t know how.
Maybe we’re afraid of what will happen if we go there.

Will I get stuck in my grief if I let myself feel it fully?
Will I lose control if I allow myself to embrace this joy completely?

Sometimes, we get so used to sadness or loneliness that they start to feel like home.
The heart begins to mistake pain for safety simply because that’s what it knows.

The Courage of Acceptance

But healing begins the moment we allow what is.

Acceptance isn’t passivity — it’s courage.
It’s the willingness to see clearly, to stay with what’s real, even when it hurts.

It’s the choice to reclaim the parts of ourselves we’ve given away.

When we stop trying to be accepted and instead learn to accept ourselves, we stop searching for proof of our worth elsewhere.
We stop battling life and begin belonging to it.

That is Freedom. That is Peace.

In a world that pulls us away from ourselves, each moment of turning inward — each breath that says, I am enough as I am — is an act of quiet revolution.

And it’s priceless.