I think you've got it, or something - I cannot speak to Tillich. A well-done and interesting OP.

I find in this notions of self-acceptance and self-forgiveness. A mature adult comes around to understanding who he or she is, and, perhaps with some difficulty, accepting himself as he is. This runs to understanding the extent of difference - to some extent. That is, difference points to uniqueness. It's useless to want to be other than you are, not because you are different, but because you are unique. Of course there are things you can change....

And at some point you develop a level of confidence - or what I call "attitude" - that is approximately an understanding of how the world works for you,and how you work in the world.

All this is how I explain to myself how guys deficient in every respect in comparison to my own glory always got the girl - I just didn't understand myself well enough to assert my self. It's about becoming a somebody - at least insofar as a person can both speak and answer for himself, even to God.

I've also noticed a similar refusal of acceptance in my relationships. When people show me real affection, I feel a confusing mix of anger and sadness. It feels like an unbreakable barrier. Love can't get in, and I can't let it out.

So, ummm, how does one go about dealing with this? — csalisbury

My amateurish attempt at an answer with the usual disclaimers:

Those who have little power over others (have difficulties embedding themselves socially) can fall back on asserting power over themselves through self-punishment. Sort of a minimal affirmation of identity (if I can at least feel contempt for my weaknesses, I exist in some sense beyond them). To allow affection in then would be to short-circuit that self-sustaining dynamic (if I'm accepting of affection from others, I'm worthy of it and need not punish myself) and leave oneself in a potential vacuum where one is now pushed to identify with one's "weak" self and the locus of power shifts to the unpredictable external (so now what if that affection gets pulled and I've no punisher to fall back on? I'm unified, but I'm nothing. No good). Kind of chicken and egg. You need a strong sense of identity to properly receive and reciprocate love, but what you most need to achieve that strong self is loving relationships or at least stable positively reciprocative relationships.

How to deal with it? I'd say turn it around. Be the one who gives affection first without any expectation of reciprocation. Be the one who helps. Be the one who gives/creates as much as possible for what that is worth in itself. Take everything else as a bonus. Likely positive relationships/interactions will then form naturally on which you can build an identity that doesn't require you-the-sinner as a foil to make it feel real. In that context acceptance of affection becomes less crucial and more organic.

Another thought: if you want something too much for the wrong reasons, you'll find a way to thwart yourself getting it and become reliant more on wanting it than the thing itself (whatever it is) so that it becomes you (in the sense that up until the point you actually get it you exist minimally, but if you get it, you are lost because there is nothing left of you, you were all want). In Dante's hell, as you pointed out, the sinners have become the sin, have achieved its logic and are reduced to a minimal level of identity within it (i.e. that necessary to suffer) from which there is no escape. There is nothing left of them, they were all want, yet they cannot ever achieve oblivion. The worst of all worlds in which forgiveness is impossible because the sinner embodies its obverse and so is beyond even seeing the other side of the coin.

Hmm, you seem to have approached the problem from the wrong angle in my opinion.

I think the Stoic ethos is the right way to approach the issue without unnecessary baggage of sin, redemption, and love. The end product might be displeasing though. Namely stoical apatheia.

When people show me real affection, I feel a confusing mix of anger and sadness.

Speaking for myself (so may/may not be applicable to you), this tends to come from finding myself undeserving or unworthy of such affection. Actually more than this: it comes from a secret(?) desire to be recognized as unworthy ('can't you see who I really am??') and resentment - self and other-directed - that the (apparent) facade is working so well. It's like, you want people to see through the facade, and are saddened that they don't, and you end up hating both them (for not seeing through it) and yourself (for putting it up in the first place).

Or to put it terms of acceptance: what's being accepted by others (from 'your' POV) is the 'wrong thing': they're accepting (or so one thinks), the façade, and not 'you'. And that's hard to accept in turn. In fact breeds resentment. Sorry for all the quote marks. It's hard to speak about this stuff.

If this is it (big if) ... how to fix it? I'm no therapist, but maybe something along the lines of: recognize that the facade is doing more to hurt than help. Also, I know I keep saying facade, but I just mean something like: 'the front that's put up that's everything not to do with the broken bits inside'. It's not 'fake' or illusory (everyone has a facade), just it's disconnected from the hurting bits which is where the problem lies.I dunno if any of this applies to you. But that's my experience of that feeling, and even then it's probably far less intense scale.

We all wear masks, the image we present to others. It's doctored to appear pleasing - all the bad parts filtered out and only the good showing. In other words the image we present to others is a half-truth. Nothing inherently wrong in that. Why expose our ugly traits to others and anyway they're controlled to within acceptable limits.

What's interesting is only the self best knows itself. So to think one is a good judge of oneself seems natural and also reasonable. God is omniscient and so, redundant. We're all books. Each book has two real readers. The self and God. As far as each book is concerned there's no difference between itself and God on account of God's omniscience. So, why burden someone else, even an omnipotent God, for one's own mistakes? Accept the fruits of one's own actions.

The sinners are punished for their sin, but in a manner that the sin itself is the punishment. In hell, they simply replay the sin in its most naked, repetitive form. — csalisbury

Kierkegaard presents this element as a kind of default that needs to be superseded:

When the originality in earnestness is acquired and preserved, then there is succession and repetition, but as soon as originality is lacking in repetition, there is habit. The earnest person is earnest precisely through the originality with which he returns in repetition.......
But this same thing to which earnestness is to return with the same earnestness can only be earnestness itself; otherwise it becomes pedantry.
The Concept of Anxiety, 414, translated by Reidar Thomte

Like "accepting the acceptance" this condition is requiring the individual to change. While the change depends upon the individual, the individual cannot do it alone. Nor would it be important if they could.

Love requires a hell of a lot of patience. There is a demand in expressions of affection that would have them be immediately returned in kind. It is disappointing when they are not. Everyone is so easily injured. The whole set up seems designed to cause optimal pain and confusion. Hell is other people. Gaining some freedom of movement to give and receive honestly is the whole enchilada.

@StreetlightX

I think the facade thing you describe is very close to what I feel. It's almost like that romance trope, where someone enlists another to write his love letters - it works, but everytime the beloved professes her love, there's that cutting feeling that the love is really directed at someone else.

But then it also feels like what @Baden is describing. Or it's weird. Minimal-identity through self-punishment is dead-on. I think this can morph (or metastasize) too - like 'cringe humor.' You can build a way of thinking and being that is recognizing what is undesirable. So, then, you can build a certain kind of relationship over laughing at others. And that's safe.

"Leav[ing] oneself in a potential vacuum where one is now pushed to identify with one's "weak" self and the locus of power shifts to the unpredictable external"

There's the anger at the facade being recognized, and then there's also, behind that -- 'anger is a secondary emotion' -- there's also a really churning frustration that the weak self behind the facade is too weak. And then the anger at the facade being also a frustration that you can't do anything else. Which is a frustration at how you deal with the external! I'm poor, but I think I understand why rich people get mad when their reservations aren't honored at fancy restaurants.

Part of the frustration, for me, is the mixing. Like - there have always been parts of me that I consider real, that I do let out, that do bleed through the facade. It's real sometimes. But then I feel like an actual life, and relationship, requires bringing that self out into the world. It's not enough to be yourself at home. You have to be able to bring it into the world. And then when someone likes myself-at-home - there's the anger, like - you like me now, but once there's some challenge in the world, I'll be laid bare as weak.

So then the anger is mixed. It's like the other person can't differentiate between what's real and what's facade, so can't see what will collapse at a dinner out, if, say, we happen to run into people from my past - or people from other segments of the other person's life. I mean: they can't tell the limits of my being-real, and when that will transition into a facade.

I think that's it. I can handled being liked for a second. What I can't handle is the differential between what they consider lovable and what I do ---- plus the suspicion that, given the right situation, they'll end up agreeing with the criterion I impose (they'll see me through a superior's eyes) - and so abandon me.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, for me, it comes down to not having a good balance between private and public identity. I can feel accepted one on one. I can't feel accepted by a group. So the tension between that causes problems for me, with both poles.

That's all confused, but its confusing.

I find in this notions of self-acceptance and self-forgiveness. A mature adult comes around to understanding who he or she is, and, perhaps with some difficulty, accepting himself as he is. This runs to understanding the extent of difference - to some extent. That is, difference points to uniqueness. It's useless to want to be other than you are, not because you are different, but because you are unique. Of course there are things you can change.... — tim wood

My trouble is I don't want to accept who I am. On balance, I don't like it.

All this is how I explain to myself how guys deficient in every respect in comparison to my own glory always got the girl - I just didn't understand myself well enough to assert my self. It's about becoming a somebody - at least insofar as a person can both speak and answer for himself, even to God. — tim wood

Getting the girl can be damning in itself though.

“My trouble is I don’t want to accept who I am. On balance, I don’t like it.”

I’m not sure if it’s about accepting who I am as a finished product, but about accepting where I am currently in a continuing process of being or becoming that is never really completed. I accept that who I am now is different in a number of ways to who I was this time last year, and to who I will be this time next year...

Acceptance at this stage is not about liking myself, it’s more about being aware of who I am now and honest with myself [i]without[/i] judgement and without fear. There is a starting point that I have to be honest about (regardless of how I feel about it) before I can begin to become anything or anyone else in my own eyes, let alone in someone else’s. This is the hardest part, because judgement and fear tend to be our strongest motivators, so we think they’re our allies. But I think our aim in life is not really to be highly valued or powerful, but to have the courage to say ‘This is who I am, like it or not’ - first to ourselves, and then to others.

There are things I can change, but I cannot control how other people see me, let alone what they think, say or do. I can only control my own thoughts, words and actions - and even that may take some practise, or at least an awareness of how much I allow others to choose for me. I need to be honest about what I can expect to change with any amount of effort, and about who makes the choices.

But most things I shouldn’t be wanting to change even if I could. What I need to change instead is the way I think about these aspects of who I am. It’s about seeing difference not as a value hierarchy (where we judge ourselves based on some ‘objective’ or society-based sense of good/bad), but rather as diversity: which is a goodness in itself.

Lastly, I think it requires being patient about the process of becoming - being honest about how long any change will take, and how much energy it will require from me - and then being prepared to make that time and energy available, without attempting to outsource it (along with the control and responsibility). And remember that it’s not about an end product - life itself is a process, and even when that person comes along who loves me for who I am being or becoming in that moment, it’s more important that they love the process than the actuality, because I will continue to change...