Unconditional personal self-acceptance as a humanistic trait of a psychologist

Abstract

Becoming a future psychologist in a university environment is a complex and multifaceted process. This process includes the formation of professional skills, as well as the psychological enrichment of the inner world of the future psychologist. Personal and professional development of a psychologist are interconnected and combined in the process of self-development. The discovery of self-actualization horizons requires a psychologist to have a number of humanistic qualities, such as a positive attitude toward oneself and others, empathy, congruent self-expression, and confidence. Unconditional true self-acceptance is the basis of the training of an effective psychologist. Undoubted self-acceptance reflects internal recognition and respect for oneself as an individual capable of independent choices and awareness of one’s feelings, thoughts, intentions, and motives. This includes accepting yourself as a whole and benevolent-demanding attitude towards yourself. Conditional self-acceptance, on the other hand, implies a mistrustful and critical attitude towards oneself, which can violate the integrity of the individual, negate one’s own self-concept. The structure of conditional self-acceptance of future psychologists consists of three interrelated components: the inability to consciously perceive and understand one’s own emotional and sensory states, the inability to overcome protective mechanisms that prevent the acceptance of one’s own experiences and emotions, and the rejection of real inner desires and motives, which can lead to personal destructiveness. The functional structure of unconditional self-acceptance contains at least four interdependent components: awareness of one’s own emotions, body states and feelings, a positive attitude towards oneself as an individual that ensures integrity and self-development, empathy for others and their psychological support, existential openness to the world and a tendency to self-actualization. For future psychologists, unconditional self-acceptance is the basis for the formation of professional self-awareness and the ability to provide qualified assistance to clients with the psycho-existential resources of one’s own personality. It is argued that self-acceptance affects the development of such humanistic qualities as unconditional acceptance of others, empathy in relationships, the ability to be internally open to communication, the ability to establish and maintain contacts with others, as well as the ability to tolerate, dialogue, and find a compromise. The listed characteristics are the basic qualification traits-qualities of a psychologist, which effectively determine his professional success in interaction with clients. The model of the development of unconditional self-acceptance of future psychologists proposed in the article reflects a constant progressive change in the orientation of the components of the structure of self-acceptance (from conditional to unconditional), and also reveals the psychological conditions and mechanisms for the development of productive unconditional self-acceptance of an individual. To actualize and implement the latter, psychological training is presented as an integral means of developing unconditional psycho-existential self-acceptance of the personality of future psychologists.As a result, the hypothesis was confirmed that unconditional self-acceptance positively causes the development of such humanistic personality traits of future psychologists as unconditional acceptance of others, empathy, tolerance, congruence, openness.