As the saying goes, the only constant in life is change: regardless of your circumstances, developing your ability to accept whatever life throws at you will help your pursuit of living with real wellness. The skill of acceptance is masterful. Some pain in life is inevitable, and when faced with discomfort, acceptance is key to limiting suffering. Having a capacity for wise acceptance allows for open awareness and focus on what is going on. With acceptance, you have a chance to see situations with clarity. Acceptance promotes efficient and effective problem-solving and growth. You can’t effectively solve problems and deal with reality without acceptance. If, for example, the company you work for goes into receivership and you find yourself unemployed, the sooner you accept it, the sooner you can access services and start hunting for a new job. By surrendering to what is genuine, you can appraise your reality with accuracy and effectively move forward to deal with whatever it is you are facing. Being able to accept losses, pain, and other unpleasant events that come up is a vital skill for living a life of contentment and real wellness.
The opposite of acceptance is denial. If you approach your life and reality with denial, how can you ever expect yourself to properly address issues that come up? A lack of acceptance creates an internal state of physical, energetic, and cognitive struggle and strain. This tension is exhausting and stressful for all concerned. Living this way also makes it hard to focus on other things and may further narrow a person’s focus and amplify any pain. Death, our inevitable human fate, is the ultimate example. If we go through life in denial of our mortality and fragility, we’re liable to make harmful choices, which is likely to then set us up for negative consequences: unnecessary suffering.
At the heart of the branch of psychotherapy known as dialectical behavioural therapy (DBT) – an evidence-based intervention for numerous mental health conditions and a powerhouse toolkit of human-mastery skills – is its polar opposite: ‘radical acceptance’. This is when you stop wishing things were different and instead focus on how things are. DBT teaches it as a core skill to help regulate emotions. With radical acceptance, rather than fighting reality, you radically accept – in other words surrender to – what is and turn your resources towards what’s most effective and efficient to problem-solve where able, while avoiding any unnecessary suffering and protracted drama around avoidance of reality.
This skill of radical acceptance is all about:
Noticing the problem.
Acknowledging it’s present.
Realising that wishing it wasn’t so, spending time complaining about whether it’s fair or wondering why it’s happened to you is a choice but also a waste of your time and energy. Non-acceptance is suffering: what do you choose?
Redirecting your focus to what you can do, and needs to be done, while limiting the drama.
Cycle through these steps as many times as you need until your emotional wave naturally subsides or you’re able to move on.
The classic example given in DBT is coming home to find your painter has painted your house pink when you wanted coastal white. Could you imagine! Spending time and energy arguing, lamenting, and ruminating over the error is futile. You could do that, sure, but you’re only creating your own suffering and using up your own resources. With radical acceptance, you wholly accept the house is pink and then do something about it. If something occurs that you’re powerless to control, you use your radical acceptance to connect to the facts, let go of rumination and, instead, turn your attention to what you can control. A mother may not be able to control the outcome of her IVF treatment and magically form a second child, but she could radically accept her fate of having one child and turn her energy, focus, and spare time to nurturing and enjoying them. In this way, she has not only avoided a world of suffering but also created more beauty and bliss in her and her child’s life. It may be hard to accept painful truths that we don’t want, but it may also be helpful, freeing up energy, time and focus to enjoy the things we do have and are real.
Radical acceptance limits suffering and drama and sets a more efficient – and less draining – path forward for solutions, recovery and restoration. It isn’t about forgiveness, understanding, or empathy. It isn’t saying that whatever has occurred is just, fair, or okay by you. It is not about lying to yourself and trying to embrace and want what you are accepting. It is a mindset of allowing what is to be – despite any pain, disappointment, fear, and frustration. It facilitates your capacity to address your reality rather than waste precious resources, time and energy on rumination. It is a tool you can turn to in order to limit misery and rumination and deal with your reality.
Inherent to life is pain and loss. Tough things happen around us and to us that cause pain. Unfortunately, there may be times in your life where grave injustices occur, causing immense suffering and disruption. We may accept the losses around us but can we also accept the secondary pain within us? Losing a loved one can be exquisitely painful. That pain cannot be avoided and needs to be processed. Counterintuitively, accepting and making space for pain limits your suffering. This ability allows us to survive a shared human experience that could otherwise destroy us. Whether your raw, debilitating suffering is ongoing is determined by your response to this hurt. By pushing away pain, avoiding it or numbing out to it, you heighten its grip on you. But with acceptance, time, and compassion it will naturally fade into the background of your life. You may be able to reconnect with certain pains when triggered – it may always be there – but with acceptance you can again make space for it when needed. To limit self-harm, you can turn to this skill to manage challenging inner-world experiences time and time again. Sustaining debilitating injury and illness that changes your functional independence is another extremely painful reality to endure and process adaptively. As a clinician, I aim to support others to adjust to painful struggles they have with themselves, whether that be cognitive changes post brain injury or physical disability from injury or illness. I believe the first step to optimising a patient’s wellbeing is supporting them to accept their reality – pain and all.
An acceptance mindset does not mean feeling apathetic about reality or not caring. It isn’t intended to avoid emotional processing. Rather, being accepting allows you to manage emotions more effectively and with more ease. You can practise acceptance while fuming and grieving. Taking an acceptance approach means nurturing yourself through whatever discomfort you are carrying by acknowledging your predicament until the time comes that you can move on. Rather than wasting time and energy fighting your predicament, you can turn your attention to what is and focus on self-care as you naturally work through the challenge, with all the emotions that come and pass. Developing the ability to grieve and process emotions but also accept outcomes is hard and takes practice, but once cultivated, it helps prevent burnout, mental illness, and disability. To put it another way, what’s called for is to accept the reality, feel the feelings, and simply aim not to make matters worse.
A wise person once wrote what’s known as the ‘Serenity Prayer’, which more or less gives this advice: change what you can, accept what you can’t, and have the wisdom to know the difference. Discerning when to practise acceptance – as opposed to when to attempt to change matters – is a skill to be mindfully developed over a lifetime. Useful questions to consider are: What is really happening? What are the facts? What can I modify or control here and what must I accept? What are my options moving forward? One could argue that an element of acceptance is required for change. Acceptance is how you create a clear vision. By accepting what truly is, you can see the truth, assess the reality, and then make plans for change based on what is happening. If change is called for, a situation must first be assessed truthfully and accepted in order to see clearly the best route forward. With a lack of acknowledgement, problems may drag on and evolve into bigger problems. The acknowledgement of truth (even if painful) is what precedes the action necessary to solve a problem. Without this, problems further evolve and increase.
The skill of acceptance comes into real wellness when it’s applied to ourselves. Self-acceptance is coming to terms with the specific facts of who we are and what we must acknowledge and manage. Accepting a painful truth about your identity and character may feel impossible at times but with self-compassion and self-honesty – it is entirely possible.
