How to Embrace What's Happening with Radical Acceptance
Life presents much uncertainty, uneasiness, confusion, and in many cases suffering. But living life looking through this lens can lead to stress, worry, anxiety, and, unfortunately, unhappiness.
It’s not the kinda life we want. In fact, this is the exact reason why the wellness industry is a multi-billion dollar industry. People are often searching for ways to escape those stresses.
In comparison, a life that is lived with a clear idea of who you are, what you are, and where you’d like to see yourself in the future is invaluable. With a mindset like that, you can navigate life with confidence, strength, and, perhaps most importantly, trust that it will all work out.
Yeah, yeah 🙄 That’s all easier said than done, right?
So how do some of us walk through life with that kinda mindset that sets us up for both happiness and success?
It all starts with radical acceptance.
What Is Radical Acceptance?
Radical acceptance is a self-improvement practice developed by Marsha Linehan. Marsha is an American psychologist and author. She is the creator of dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), a type of psychotherapy that combines both behavioral sciences with Buddhist ideology of acceptance and science-based mindfulness approach to mindfulness.
Within Marsha’s teachings, she outlines the use of radical acceptance and why it’s so important.
Radical acceptance is all about accepting life just the way it is, ceasing the need to fight reality. As in, accepting yourself and your current life circumstances without question, blame, or antagonism. The less you resist, the less they are likely to suffer.
That doesn’t mean that you are expected to condone bad behavior or totally embrace unhealthy circumstances. Instead, radical acceptance simply advocates accepting yourself and your situation as it is.
And then moving forward in a healthy way.
The key here is to not dwell on what is not fair or on what is difficult in life. Rather, it is to accept what life has dealt you without any bias or emotion and then taking the steps to move forward.
Here are some tips to start radically accepting your life.
1. Forgive Others As Well As Yourself
Holding onto anger towards someone who has wronged you in some way may feel like you are justly punishing them for their actions, as if your anger will hold them accountable for their actions.
Whoever the offending party is, though, they most likely
Don’t care that you feel the way you do
Have no idea that you’re upset
Understand your behavior, and will retalliate with similar behavior
Whichever is true ultimately doesn’t matter.
What does matter is how you deal with the way you are feeling. If you can, allow yourself to let go of the emotional pain you are feeling and accept it instead. That doesn’t mean to forget, and it may not even mean you must forgive. It simply means that you can’t change everything about your circumstances, and that’s okay.
That doesn’t mean to forget what they have done, it may not even mean you must forgive them. It simply means that you can’t change the circumstances and that’s okay.
As the old adage goes, it is what it is.
Rather than angrily holding onto the pain, accept that things are happening the way they are for reasons totally unseen by you.
Instead of holding onto negative emotional trauma, use it as a lesson to learn from. The anger and resentment serve as a reminder to be more careful in the future, to learn to stand up for yourself in healthy ways, and to use whatever you learned through this experience to be more effective when dealing with a similar circumstance down the track.
The same emotional strategy can also be applied to yourself. If you find you’re angry at yourself for one reason or another, try to forgive. Discontinue from punishing yourself and move onto living your life in a more effective manner with whatever you have learned.
2. Offer Acceptance, Not Approval
Radical acceptance doesn’t mean agreeing to a situation, circumstance, or action. Rather, it means seeing reality as it is and learning to live with it in a healthy way.
Maybe someone has deeply hurt you or a colleague at work has betrayed your trust. Or maybe life has dealt you with a really difficult hand, like bankruptcy or cancer.
However hard it is to accept these things to be true, the reality is that it is what it is. Your refusal to accept this doesn’t change that fact and, at the end of the day, it only really hurts you.
That doesn’t mean that you approve of these circumstances or that you need to gladly welcome them into your life. In fact, pretending to be ok with a challenging situation will likely generate more difficult and explosive emotions, like resentment.
But as much as you may not approve of a circumstance or someone else’s actions, it doesn’t mean it didn’t occur.
The faster you accept, the faster you will relieve yourself of suffering and unhappiness.
The same is true if you have found your own actions unacceptable. The reality is, you did what you did. You don’t have to approve of your actions but it is what it is. Accept them, move forward, and promise yourself you’ll be better in the future.
3. Act Out Radical Acceptance
Radical acceptance can be hard - and sometimes it simply isn’t emotionally possible. If this is the case, try acting out radical acceptance even if you aren’t able to completely conceptualize it.
When practicing radical acceptance, ask yourself, if I were to radically accept,
How would I act?
What would I do differently in this situation?
How would that feel?
When pondering these questions, try playing out how you would act if you were, in fact, able to radically accept a situation or circumstance. In doing so, at the very least, you are considering your actions and how they may affect you and others around you.
However small it may seem, you may even be able to move your mindset towards healthier thoughts and your actions will hopefully follow suit and become more positive.
Even if you aren’t completely accepting something the way you’d like to, at least you are practicing radical acceptance in the best way you can. In doing so, you are creating healthy and positive habits that will only help to bolster the way you deal with future adversities.
Conclusion
Practicing radical acceptance may be difficult and even feel counterproductive at times. However, relieving yourself from suffering is well worth your efforts and will benefit you in the long run.
Radical acceptance is about saying yes to life, just the way it is.