Acceptance

On allowing life, as it is.

The topic of acceptance is taught in a wide range of modalities. It is frequently used in mental health therapy, it’s essential to most meditation techniques, it underpins spiritual understanding, and is absolutely necessary for real personal growth. While all these modalities come at it from different perspectives, they all use this single concept as to underpin their methods, because without it, you cannot move forward.

It is also one of most, if not the single most, misunderstood ideas around.

The concept of “acceptance” is frequently abused, misused and misunderstood, because many people mistakenly conflate it with acquiescence, which is the act of reluctantly agreeing to something, even when one objects to it.

This bastardised and inaccurate definition of “acceptance” has, historically, been used by those in power to try and force people to be compliant in situations that they absolutely disagree with. Religion is at the top of the list of offenders, but many governments, powerful institutions, and even lesser institutions, as well as demanding individuals, occupy that space. The entire patriarchy is utterly dependent on people at the bottom being “required” to “accept” the status quo, and driven, willingly or not, to comply, despite their misgivings, at the risk of retribution if they fail to do so. Thats not acceptance. It’s enforcement.

How often have you been told, when you came up against an issue or situation in life that you didn’t like or believed was wrong, that you just have to “accept it and move on”? Or that you are going to have to “stop complaining, and accept that that’s just the way things are”?

Neither of these specific examples are either the true meaning of acceptance, nor its highest purpose. They, and others like them, do not actually advocate real acceptance, but demand instead that the person MUST put up with a thing, irregardless of how much they disagree with it.

This attitude induces a sense of helplessness and powerlessness, and does not encourage true acceptance, only frustration, resentment, and anger.

I myself struggled with the real meaning of acceptance for most of my life, along with another related concept, that of validation.

Like the large percentage of the human race that grew up in an environment that provided neither unconditional acceptance nor any sense of personal validation, I spent years actively fighting against the deeper truth of it, and even, at times, arguing ferociously for its opposite.

Little did I know how little I understood about the power of true acceptance. Until one day, I finally got it.

(For the fortunate few who figured it out early and/or painlessly, I salute you!)

What is the magic behind acceptance? Well, acceptance is about allowing life, as it is, but it’s perhaps a wee bit more complicated than that suggests. In behavioural therapy circles, the technical term is “radical acceptance”, and it has the potential to be the single most game-changing idea there is. It’s also probably one of the hardest to come to terms with, because it goes against so much of what we got taught…

As the expression goes, just because something is simple, doesn’t make it easy. But before we leap into that, we need to explore exactly what is meant by “radical acceptance”.

Radical Acceptance ≠ Approval

I’ll repeat that:

Radical Acceptance DOES NOT EQUAL Approval.

Just as we asserted earlier that Acceptance DOES NOT MEAN Acquiescence.

Why is this so important to understand?

Because if you ask someone to accept something they don’t WANT to accept, then you are usually going to be met with a barrage of “very good reasons” why they should not have to.

Because most people who dislike things, which is most of us, have been raised to believe that acceptance DOES mean agreement, whether conscious or merely implied.

But once we actually begin to understand the truth, things change.

Do you accept that gravity exists? Of course.

Do you accept that the ocean is full of water? Why wouldn’t you?

These are silly things, obvious things, everybody knows they are true, right?

Well, yes and no. We ACCEPT those things as ‘TRUTH” for the very good reason that we can’t actually disagree with them, without coming up smack bang against solid scientific facts. Gravity doesn’t CARE whether or not I believe in it, if I jump off a cliff, its going to have an effect on my body no matter how much effort I put into believing I can fly! There’s no point in arguing against things over which I have no control.

And that is the gist of the argument for radical acceptance. If I disagree with something, and want it to be otherwise than it is, then it had better be something I actually have genuine control over, because otherwise I’m just wasting my breath and inducing unnecessary stress.

The issue is that there is very little in life we actually DO have complete control over. The Bhagavad Gita has a verse that reminds us “Let your concern be with action alone, and never with the fruits of action. Do not let the results of action be your motive, and do not be attached to inaction.”

We are completely responsible for what we say and do, but we have no control over how the world around us responds to what we say and do. Which isn’t to say that we never bother trying to do anything, just that we do our best, and let go of any expectation that the action will be met with a particular response.

No matter how much we WANT the world to be different, or how much we rail against the unfairness of life, the cruelty of some humans, the self-centredness of people in positions of power, the vagaries of Mother Nature, the unpredictability of the weather, or natural disasters, we have NO CONTROL over any of it. None.

Now, Radical Acceptance teaches us that we do not have to approve of what’s happening, we do not have to agree with other peoples choices, and we do not have to like the conditions we find ourselves in, but we DO have to accept that, at this moment, this is the shape of the world, and for this moment, we must learn to deal with it AS IT IS.

Not by arguing that it SHOULD be different, because life is patently unfair, or painful, or challenging right now, and we are struggling to cope.

Not by refusing to acknowledge the truth, because we fear that somehow speaking the truth out loud means we are stuck with it forever.

Not by trying to convince ourselves and others that if enough of us just wished things were otherwise, somehow the bad stuff would all magically go away and we could be ‘happy’!

The ONLY way to actually move forward in life is to recognise when you are, to use a popular phrase, pushing shit uphill, by trying, even subconsciously, to force the world around you to comply with your particular set of beliefs and expectations.

How do you stop feeling so frustrated and helpless and hopeless and powerless?

By accepting that things are the way they are. Whether we like them or not.

That does not mean we are without options. But we first need to recognise that we have NO CONTROL over another human beings actions. AND more importantly, they have no real control over our actions.

If we still find ourselves doing something we tell ourselves over and over we don’t want to, in a situation in which we believe we have no agency, that IS our choice.

“Whether you think you can, or whether you think you can’t, you’re right” said Henry Ford.

EVEN if someone has a gun to your head, you are still in control of your actions, although of course most people would say the wisest choice is survival. But most of our decisions are not made with an imminent threat to life, and most of our decisions could probably be made with a little more consideration than we habitually apply to them. Far too often we do not respond thoughtfully, we merely react out of habit and preconceived expectations.

The truth is, we have NO CONTROL over the world at large. What happens in other countries can be terribly distressing to observe. What happens in our own living rooms can be even more impactful on our mental, emotional, and physical health.

And the truth is we are all going to grow old, and we are all going to die. Whether we have fully lived, joyously wringing the most out of each moment, or not.

After a lifetime of being a co-dependant people pleaser, constantly trying to control outcomes by “helping” other people with problems and issues that weren’t mine to solve, I was exhausted and confused. I could not understand why, when I had spent my entire life trying so hard to be “nice”, I felt taken for granted, unfulfilled, put-upon, and miserable. But I kept on dong what I had always done. Ploughing on, shoulder to the wheel, running around doing everything for everyone and making the world turn smoothly. Eventually I ran up against my own personal brick wall in the face of a family member who was experiencing their own struggles during the pandemic, and while they were getting therapy, they introduced me to a couple of invaluable concepts they had learned.

Those concepts were:

Radical Acceptance, being the act of letting the world be what it is EVEN IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT,

and Validation, which is act of accepting another persons right to have their own unique viewpoint, feelings, and experiences, EVEN IF YOU DON’T AGREE WITH THEM.

This was revolutionary thinking, for someone who was raised to conform or else.

Honestly, I really, REALLY struggled to wrap my head around these ideas to begin with. Mostly because I had grown up in an environment where healthy boundaries simply didnt exist, so I genuinely had no idea how to either set my own nor respect other peoples.

I finally started working on my own wellbeing, but naturally I didnt do it because I thought I needed to do it for my own benefit.

No, I did it BECAUSE I was co-dependent!! I did it because I felt helpless in the face of someone else’s pain, and I chose to believe that the only reason I couldn’t “fix” things for them was because I was “broken”. Therefore, I reasoned, I needed to “fix” myself, so that I could do an even better job at “HELPING” others by solving their problems for them and protecting them from ever having to deal with the consequences of their own choices.

But as I progressed in my journey, a strange thing happened.

I began to understand that what I had always believed I was doing, helping people, was not as altruistic as I had led myself to believe.

It was a bit of a shock, actually. Finally coming to terms with the fact that what I had always believed was acting through love was, in reality, a thinly veiled attempt at preventing people from causing me stress!!

Stress caused by my abject failure to accept the world as it was.

Stress caused by my internal conflict between how I believed the world was, and how I wished it would be.

By not allowing other people autonomy, by never allowing them to learn to do things for themselves, because I assumed it was “easier” for me to do it, or that I could do it better, by rushing in without actually asking whether or not they NEEDED help, and also, at times, by rescuing people from their own poor decisions, I was preventing them from learning to stand on their own and solve problems through their own actions, and develop a sense of self reliance and the self worth that comes from knowing you can deal with life on your own terms.

I was trying so desperately to “help”, not for the reasons I thought I was, out of the goodness of my heart, but because, deep down, I needed to feel needed. I needed to feel valued, and I needed, most of all, to control other peoples outcomes so that I didn’t have to worry about them all the time and feel helpless and powerless and hopeless and miserable about things over which I actually had no control.

Ouch.

But gradually, over time, I got the hang of this new way of thinking. Slowly recognising my own control issues, slowly beginning to see the hidden expectations I was placing on the world around me, uncovering the “if I do this, then you must do that” thought patterns.

By letting go of the desire to control outcomes, and instead focusing on the only thing I can control, my own actions, I released much of the pressure that I had placed upon myself to try and “make” things happen a certain way.

And now? Look, it’s a work in progress and I suspect that it will be that way for the rest of my life. But i’m a hell of a lot further along than I was even a year ago, a thousand miles further than I was four years ago, and I barely recognise the person I used to think was trying so hard to be. Which is for the better.

At the moment it seems like everything you read or see on tv is deliberately designed to make us thing the word is going to hell in a hand basket and we are all helpless and powerless and there’s no point even bothering to to do anything.

But I’m here to remind you that you are not obliged to agree with that perspective! You do have to accept that things aren’t necessarily the way you would have them be. But the less time you spend worrying about things you can’t do anything about, the more time and energy you have to devote to doing the things you DO have control over: living your best life.

Oh, and while that is obviously an entire topic on its own, in this instance what I mean by that is that when you choose to accept that things are, and stop fighting against reality, you can actually put a better, more positive energy out into the world, even if its just your little tiny corner of it.

When you let others be who they are, and the world be as it is, in this moment, you can choose to shine the brighter, instead of feeling useless, choose to act from the best part of you, and send those actions out into the world with love, instead of complaining about the darkness, you can choose to stop hiding yourself, and step up, to contribute your light to the world.

When you can come to this point, I wish for you that you will be able to find your strength. Own your power, don’t let them make you feel you don’t have any!!

Accept the world as it is, validate the fact that different people have there own unique and differing experiences, do this with love, and then get out there and do what you can to make it a nicer place to be.

Much love to you on your journey.

N