Question: What does it take to get self acceptance?

Self-acceptance comes from within. It is the point in which you are able to truly love the person you are, accepting all of your imperfections as gifts, and begin your life as a gay person. It means coming out to one's-self.
Are you aware of the 5 stages of loss? In this case it would be the loss of your identity.

They are:
Ignorance-I dont like men
anger-fuck I like men, why the hell do I have to like men.
bargaining-I like men, but I thought that girl had pretty hair, maybe I am attracted to her?
Depression-I like men, and nobody will accept me, or love me. Im useless.
Acceptance- I like men, and thats ok (the point of coming out to one's-self)

It sounds sounds as if you are coming to a point of acceptance but again that is something you must find within yourself, and nobody can do it for you. We can be here to love and support you, but we can neither fix things for you, or make you self aware; all we can do is provide you with the tools so that you can help yourself.

My final point is this:
Change happens when the discomfort of how things are become greater then the fear of changing.

Your allot closer than you think

 

For me I had lots of things to accept - and acceptance is key. I had developed an addiction as part of my denial and coping. Not healthy at all. And I learned that for me to overcome my addiction and find any peace I had to adhere to the serenity prayer:

I had to ask myself over and over again - can I change this thing about me that I don't like? Or this thing in my life that I'm not happy about? If the answer was no, then I had to accept them - or risk making myself miserable and having a relapse.

So ask yourself the same thing. Can you change whatever it is that is bothering you? If not, then you must accept it. There really isn't any other option.

 

Self acceptance can come in two ways. You can gain it all of a sudden on your own, or it can come through an outside source. For me it was the latter.

A friend of mine told me he was bi and seeing him and how happy and secure he was about it made me accept my bisexuality. Of course it helped that we fooled around later that night, but my point still stands.:icon_bigg

 

Time.
That's really all it takes. You're grieving for the loss of something important to you (heterosexuality) and you're adjusting to something you don't like (homosexuality). You have to think of the positives about the situation. I'm sure right now all you can see are negatives, but that's just because you're only looking for negatives, so try looking for positives too.
There's really no "step by step" guide on self-acceptance, and although words from others maybe comforting, in the end they are not you. Only you will be able to accept yourself, and you will...in time. So be patient, don't think about it too much. Stay busy, join a society (it doesn't even have to be LGBT), get a hobby, spend time with family...whatever you want. You will find yourself thinking about your sexuality less and less as time goes by, until eventually you find the thought doesn't bother you at all. That's when you've accepted yourself and can start living a better life, hopefully meeting someone in the process (just don't go looking for hook-ups, dates etc. whilst you don't accept yourself).

 

Zizo,

Just build yourself up, devote your life to absorbing knowledge and beauty, realize you are more than a label, you are an individual. You obviously enjoy your orientation, otherwise it would not have developed, it is the things you feel you are giving up and perhaps the characteristics society projects upon you that you are uncomfortable with. Notice heterosexuals do not ponder the plight of their orientation all the time, they just do their thing and deal with life. You may also take some comfort in knowing that the heterosexual life is not exactly a cakewalk either.

 

I still think you should make some gay friends. Hang out more with your gay brother and his friends, or something. Learn that gay people are awesome, and that gay people can have healthy, long-term relationships, and all that. If you come to realize that there is nothing wrong with being gay, it will be easier to accept yourself for who you are.

Are you still planning on coming out to your aunt in Arizona? Coming out can help with self-acceptance, too.

 

Hm.. to get self acceptance, i'd say it took me a really long time. But some of the things that helped me getting there was being extremely frank with myself and the surrounding people. I basically based my decisions all centred around myself and for the future. Of course, having a few LGBT friends helped as well.

 

I think the biggest challenge for me in accepting myself was I didnt want to be bi because that would be harder for my parents to handle. So i had to make a choice between straight or gay and it took a while but after researching and experimenting i feel pretty confident in my choice.
So i would say its getting to a stage were you feel comfortable within your own skin in saying what you want.
I thought self acceptance was a big deal and even though im not fully there i have to say im fine with letting the future run its course and hopfully ill meet someone thatll make it very clear to me.

 

For me, it was seeing all the people in the news (primarily politicians) who were coming out or who were forcefully outed, yet were married to partners of the opposite sex. That was a wake-up call for me. I didn't want to find myself married with kids and still having homosexual thoughts. It would be unfair both to my wife and to myself. After acceptance and the tentative first steps towards coming out, I've been enjoying socializing at Gay and Lesbian events. I even went to my first gay bar and never once looked over my shoulder or tried to hide who I was. The post above referring to 'Change happens when the discomfort of how things are become greater then the fear of changing' is spot on.

 

Oddly, for me, it took permission. From myself. To like myself.

Throughout high school, I tended to keep my actual likes and dislikes hidden. Not just guys. But things like music, and movies, and books, and "what I like doing when I have a Saturday afternoon free". I did a few things that I liked, but I would always do them sort of surreptitiously. I remember really enjoying playing this baseball game with dice. (It was rather complicated.) It was a game you could play solo, and I loved playing it. But I'd always do it in my room, with the door closed. I'd put the dice and the paper (you had to write down the results) away in a drawer when I was done, because playing "baseball dice" was dumb, right? Nobody would want to like somebody who played baseball dice for fun.

It wasn't until I was in college that I sort of allowed myself to start opening up. I saw people in my dorm who liked such a wide array of things. The guy who only listened to doo-wop music. The girl who lived and breathed science-fiction novels. The guy who did his homework while blasting soundtracks to action movies. And nobody thought it was weird. Well, we might joke about it from time to time, but even then, I think we all knew "Hey, this is what he likes - so why can't he just like it?"

Slowly, I started revealing more of myself. I started buying T-shirts with cartoon characters on them (which I'd always loved). I started doodling openly in my notebooks. I started only watching the TV shows I really liked. And had I still had an affinity for baseball dice, I would've played it right on my desk for the whole world to see. And everybody was fine with it. They might not have shared my passion for cartoon characters or 70s pop, but they liked that I was liking it. I started loving what I loved, and that helped me love myself.

Lex

 

Whenever someone says "they have to talk to me", regardless of whether or not words like "important" are in there, I generally run as fast and as far as I can.

This likely has more to do with their past experiences of someone having to tell them something (like their dog died, parent was arrested, a divorce, or some such).

Perhaps there is a more subtle and casual way to find a time and place to tell this person. The whole "i have to tell you something" proposition makes it sound like you feel like you are going to tell them your dying of cancer. It is a good thing that you found yourself, share it as a positive not a negative.

 

For me, after almost 19 years of knowing, I´m not even close. The thing is, this is all my fault. I didn´t have the slightest clue that I was gay until I was almost 16. Up until that point, I was convinced that I was straight and whenever I would play with myself I would think about women (I´m a male) or watch heterosexual porn movies/magazines, as I genuinely believed I was straight. Then, the sudden moment of realisation came in a fraction of a second and I could just not adapt. I started having the odd gay crush at school, which made me hate myself even more. I could just not bring myself to think about men when I played with myself (gay porn material would have been out of the question had it been available) so basically the bigger the gay feelings were the stronger I would go against them. Then at 20 years old I had my first gay encounter, which I enjoyed but felt too guilty afterwards and a year later, at 21 I fell head over heels with a gay male friend of mine. Now, being the self-loather that I am, I was able to not give in to the strong feelings I had for this dude and I think that just fucked me up for good. Even though I did have plenty of gay one night stands 9-10 years ago, I kinda just quit that altogether as it was making me really miserable. I even came out around that period but as crazy as it may sound, I never stopped thinking about women or using heterosexual porn material whenever I would play with myself. Back in 2003, I stopped having gay sex and during this time, I´ve had a couple of female sexual partners but they were pretty short-lived because they would always end up not feeling right; I´ve even had a few encounters with prostitutes, but thank god I have stopped that. I guess right now I´m at a point where I will very quickly realize that a relationship with a woman does not feel right but I just can´t get myself to start getting laid with men again. Of course, I still use heterosexual porn material. Being a pessimist, I think that if you lie to yourself too much, you may end up not being able to find yourself again...ever (I hope I´m wrong about that though).