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.
Acceptance does not mean giving up. It is much more dynamic than that. It involves precision, clarity, courage – the willingness to look honestly at what is. Acceptance is active, and in that sense, provides momentum for change to happen. The precision, clarity, and courage of acceptance, actually empowers us to make change happen, but first we have to do the work necessary to accept our current reality exactly as it is—without denial, exaggeration or hesitation.
Let me give an example. If you wanted to cross a busy street (and stay alive), you first would stand on the sidewalk, watching, waiting, and seeing what the traffic patterns are, where the crosswalk is, and what the signals say. When the traffic has cleared or come to a stop, then you cross safely to the other side.
Acceptance is that first piece – waiting, looking, seeing what the traffic patterns are, putting together a strategy to get to the other side of the street without getting hit by a taxi cab or a hockey mom. Acceptance is NOT going out into the middle of the road, lying down and saying, “Go ahead, traffic. You might as well run over me.” That’s something very different from acceptance. Nor is acceptance refusing to stop at the curb, rushing blindly out into the road, praying to your Higher Power to keep you safe while you madly dodge the oncoming cars and truck and busses.
Acceptance may appear to involve some sense of loss: “I want to cross the street right now but I have to wait until the traffic stops,” or, “I want to get over this failed relationship but to do so I have to admit that I’m alone again.” Pushing away the alone-ness doesn’t actually help. Looking at the alone-ness, accepting the alone-ness, provides the very ground whereupon change can take place. It focuses our energy on the one spot where change can really begin to effect change—the present moment and our life as it truly is right now.
Pema Chodron puts this very well in her book The Places that Scare You (Shambhala Classics, 2002):
“Does not trying to change mean we have to remain angry and addicted until the day we die? This is a reasonable question. Trying to change ourselves doesn’t work in the long run because we’re resisting our own energy. Self-improvement can have temporary results, but lasting transformation occurs only when we honor ourselves as the source of wisdom and compassion. Right here in what we’d like to throw away, in what we find repulsive and frightening, we discover the warmth and clarity of awakened heart.” p. 24, The Places that Scare You, by Pema Chodron