The cute guy you met Saturday night calls and cancels the date you had set up for the following Saturday. Sighing, you think to yourself “I will never have a boyfriend.”
The promotion your boss told you that you were in line for goes to another colleague. “I will never get anywhere,” you tell yourself.
“I look around and see nothing but happy people,” you say to a friend over coffee. “Why doesn’t anything good ever happen to me?”
It is one of those paradoxes in life that a key ingredient for change is acceptance. This can be somewhat frightening: why should we want to accept our depression, our anxiety, our bad relationship, our boring job? Indeed, the reason most people show up for therapy is in fact to change something, not keep it the same, right?
Many people interpret the word “accept” to mean something that involves loss. There’s a definite sense that to accept inherently implies defeat – that accepting involves giving in to feeling worse. On the one hand, this is quite reasonable – if one is depressed, even just admitting we are depressed can further open the floodgates of sadness. On the other hand, without acceptance change never happens. Without acceptance, we’re just expending energy pushing something away, not actually changing it.
“Acknowledging fear is not a cause for depression or discouragement. Because we possess such fear, we also are potentially entitled to experience fearlessness. True fearlessness is not the reduction of fear; but going beyond fear.” ~Chogyam Trungpa in Shambhala: the Path of the Warrior
One of the most interesting things that I’ve noticed in the years I’ve been doing therapy is how each of us has a tendency to recreate that which we are trying to avoid altogether. In trying to avoid what we fear, we back into it, and find our actions have somehow recreated the very scenario we were trying to avoid. Like a bad dream, we see our fear up ahead on the road, and start backing away from it, only to back right into it: