Accepting Difficult Things

Does Radical Acceptance mean accepting bad things that happened to me?

When it comes to applying radical acceptance with things like trauma, it’s important to make a distinction between accepting that something happened and condoning it. This is best illustrated by the use of an example, so let’s use a hypothetical situation where someone says something mean to you and you are angry that they said it. This is perhaps a less intense example than for more significant forms of trauma, but the logic is the exact same.

If we accept that the friend made a hurtful comment to us, all that means is that we recognize the reality we are in: the friend made the hurtful comment, and even though it was hurtful, we recognize that they still should have said it. Why do we believe they should have said this hurtful thing? Because the reality is that they did say it and when we believe they shouldn’t have, we feel worse.

The basic idea here is that it hurts to hear the mean thing our friend said, and then it hurts even more to bang our heads against the metaphorical brick wall of reality by telling ourselves that they shouldn’t have said it. We can’t control that our friend said something hurtful, but we can control how much we continue to make ourselves suffer over the hurtful thing they said.

So now, because we have accepted that our friend made a hurtful comment, and we are not deluding ourselves into believing that something else should have happened, we can simply ask ourselves, “What is the best way for me to respond to this comment?” instead of getting lost in the self-victimizing narrative of “this should not have happened; they should not have done this. This is a problem that I now have to solve.” In the former “this happened, now what” response, there is very little suffering. In the latter, there is a lot of suffering. Sure, in both there is still the painful emotion that arose when we initially heard the mean comment, but that was going to arise inevitably. We can’t really control that we have an immediate tensing up/emotional response to someone saying something mean to us, but we can control the mental spiral that we might fall into after that initial pain happens. The mental spiral is where all of the dissatisfaction, frustration, and anguish live.

Accepting that the mean comment was said to us does not mean pretending that it didn’t happen. It also doesn’t mean that we can’t clearly see it was an unkind thing to say. We can fully accept that someone said something unkind, and, if the circumstances had been different, maybe they could have said something else that was kinder, but that’s not the reality we are living in. The circumstances weren’t different. They said what they said.

Another key thing to reiterate here is that just because we accept that something bad has happened and believe it should have happened, does not mean that we cannot still respond to what happened appropriately. I can stub my toe and feel the throbbing sensation and feel a bruise forming and still know it would be helpful to go grab some ice and ibuprofen regardless of whether or not I believe I should or should not have stubbed my toe. The only real difference is that I spend less mental energy arguing with the reality of my situation when I accept it, and thus I suffer less. I can hear someone saying something mean to me, and not think they should be saying something other than the exact words that are coming out of their mouth, and still communicate a boundary to them of “I do not care to listen to you say these hurtful things, so I’ll be leaving now.”

At the heart of radical acceptance is the fact that we can’t change what we can’t control, and every moment that we spend trying to change things that are impossible to change, we suffer. Unfortunately, we can’t control that bad things have happened to us over the course of our lives, but we can control the way we relate to those bad things in the present. Your life is lived from present moment to present moment, so why would you want to waste a single one of those present moments in a self-imposed argument with the reality that is right there in front of you?

Some may be turned off from radical acceptance with the thought that on some level it could be interpreted as victim blaming to say that we are the architects of our own suffering when we fail to accept reality. I believe the opposite. When we recognize that we create our own suffering when we fail to accept reality, our suffering then becomes something that is within our control. This is empowering. Instead of being fated to forever be a victim of whatever horrible circumstances life throws our way, we are instead able to take an active role in preventing ourselves from suffering, and thus transition from being a victim of life’s circumstances to being an active architect of our experience of life.