The Inescapable Importance of Acceptance

a small church in the middle of a snowy field.

Penned by Rienhold Niebuhr and popularized by Alcoholics Anonyous and other 12-step programs, the Serenity Prayer has been guiding people for decades. The most commonly used version of it goes like this:  God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. 

 The wisdom contained in this succinct but powerful invocation is timeless, and its central premise resonates with most everyone. On some level, we all know how important it is to accept the things we cannot change.  What the research shows and most of our experiences validate is that our willingness to accept the unchangeable has a great deal to do with our emotional and psychological wellbeing. Whether we’re talking about a financial crisis, a health diagnosis, the loss of an important relationship, or any other unanticipated, unpleasant event, fighting what is won’t make it not so. Instead, when we do battle with reality, we cripple our capacity to cope with the situation and manage all the emotions we experience in response to it.

A big part of healing and recovering from the painful parts of life is accepting what’s taken place. In order to move on, we must first acknowledge what’s happening now. But, as all of us know, this is much easier said than done. Despite being one of the most important life hacks any of us can master, the practice of acceptance is enduringly difficult.

Where many of us get stuck is that we start out with a warped understanding of what acceptance is and how it works. We think that accepting something means getting over it. But this isn’t the case. Being willing to accept that someone we love has died, for example, doesn’t mean skipping the grief process or seeking to place a silver lining on an obviously dark cloud. It doesn’t mean minimizing the significance of what happened or how you’re feeling about it. It simply means being willing to acknowledge what is, without resisting or denying it.

Another major source of confusion shows up when whatever we’re accepting involves somebody else. Let’s say, for instance, that your partner has a temperament that can be terrifying. He loses his cool easily and often, and you frequently end up being the target for his rage. You know from things his mother has shared with you that he’s always been this way, and his friends tell a similar story. Whenever you speak to him about it, he always seems to justify his behavior, saying, “That’s the way I’ve always been. It’s never going to change.” You know that what’s happening doesn’t feel right, but you keep convincing yourself to stick it out, hoping that things will change. Acceptance, in this example, would be a necessary step toward deciding whether or not this relationship is right for you. If you fail to accept this undesirable quality in your partner, you’ll suffer deeply every time it rears its ugly head. You’ll experience confusion, frustration, and anger, and your desire for things to be different will make it difficult for you to connect with what’s happening here and now.

Did the suggestion that you should accept a partner’s pattern of explosive episodes make you uncomfortable? If that’s the case, you might be confusing acceptance with approval. And, you see, the two are not the same. Acceptance is acknowledging what’s already happened; approval is consenting to more of it in the future. To accept that the person you’re in a committed relationship with has a side to him that causes harm to you doesn’t mean that you’re okay with it or want it to keep happening. It simply means that you’re facing reality as it’s being presented to you so you can make a decision about how to proceed.

Failing to accept reality creates suffering where there’s already pain. It creates confusion where there can be clarity, anguish where there can be peace. We don’t accept things in order to change what’s happening, nor do we do it in order to feel better about it. We accept because it’s the only logical thing to do. Whatever is happening is happening; whatever occurred already occurred. We embrace reality because it’s already here, right now, and resisting it won’t make it go away.

Learning acceptance is a lifelong process, and we’re guaranteed to be given plenty of opportunities to practice. With clarity about what it means to accept and what effect it has on our wellbeing, we can approach our experiences differently, perhaps experiencing different results. What becomes possible when you release your ideas about what should be and embrace what is instead? I invite you to explore what new and unexpected things happen when you start accepting reality on reality’s terms.

 

 

Fanning the Flames of Anger

She was mad. No, not just mad; she was enraged. She’d walked into my office for the first time just 20 minutes before, and shortly after launching into her story about why she’d sought therapy, her anger reached its boiling point. She was seething. After finishing a particularly pointed sentence about how furious she was over her husband’s “stupidity,” she looked up to find that I was sitting with my hands folded in my lap, breathing peacefully and looking at her with compassionate interest as she shared her story with me. Upon seeing my expression and posture, she became even more angered and said, quite passionately, “Ughhh! Seeing you sitting there so calm like that just pisses me off even more. It’s exactly what my husband does when I’m yelling at him. It’s like he doesn’t even care that he hurt me.” I gently stopped her then and asked if she could remember and repeat the last three words she’d just said.

“He hurt me.”

As soon as the words left her mouth, her eyes welled up with tears. Her rigid posture softened, and her once tense shoulders slumped down. She leaned forward with her hands in her lap and cried quietly, allowing herself to express the new set of emotions that my question had invited. Then, suddenly, she began to laugh. She looked at me with smiling eyes and tear-stained cheeks and said, “Damnit! It’s so much easier to be mad than sad.”

It is, isn’t it?

Anger is a normal human emotion. Like fear, it’s typically a response to some stimulus in the environment that activates our nervous system and triggers a fight or flight reaction. Whereas fear tends to invoke a flight response, anger gets us into fight mode. It creates a surge of activating energy that’s sometimes accompanied by a motivation to act out on the emotion and somehow discharge it. In this way, anger is energizing and emboldening.  In the English language, words such as “fiery,” “hot,” and “burning” are used to describe it, evoking a sensation of heat that is often associated with the emotion. If you’ve ever been overcome with anger—the way my client started out when she arrived to our first session—you know how intense the scorching flames can be.

Contrary to what some psychotherapists will tell you, anger is a legitimate emotion. It’s not, as some would argue, a cover-up for fear and sadness. It’s important to understand this distinction, because acknowledging what we’re feeling and accepting its legitimacy is an important part of managing, relieving, and overcoming it. I didn’t tell my client she shouldn’t be angry, nor did I ask her to tell me what was beneath or behind all that anger. Instead, I kept her company while the emotion surged through her, making space for it and remaining curious about her experience with it. That’s because I understand that as with any emotion, the first step to letting anger pass is acknowledging its presence.

According to the teaching of the Buddha, “Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.” Because the heat of anger has such an activating effect on us, we can easily become consumed by it. It can erupt in an aggressive outburst or spawn a desire to get revenge. But as the Buddha so wisely pointed out, whenever we hold on to the emotion with the intent of using it to cause others pain, we’re the ones who wind up hurting the most.

The trouble with anger isn’t the anger itself; it’s the automatic assumption that just because we feel it, we have to do something about it. Simply allowing the emotion to pass through, without attaching to it or acting out because of it, gives way to a process that can teach us a lot about ourselves. You see, although anger is more than just a secondary emotion, it usually doesn’t operate alone. As my client discovered, anger is typically associated with other emotions. If we can sit with it long enough for the flames to die down, what we’ll likely discover is a host of accompanying emotions like sadness, frustration, humiliation, disappointment, and fear. What my client realized was that she wasn’t just angry at her husband; she was also feeling hurt by him. The anger, as she explained, was easier to feel. So long as she was charged up with rage, she didn’t have to experience the vulnerability that comes with feeling hurt. But once she made her way through the complex emotions she was experiencing, she was able to get some clarity about her situation. By the time she left my office, she had a better understanding of what happened in the encounter with her husband and what she wanted to do about it.

Anger can teach us a lot about ourselves. It can help us gain access to places inside of us where we otherwise might not travel. If my client had ignored her anger or simply acted upon the impulse to lash out at her husband, she likely wouldn’t have accessed the hurt and sadness underneath it. It was through the process of being with and peeling back the many layers of her emotional experience that she came to a sense of clarity and resolution. Had she dismissed her anger, this process would have been cut short, failing to yield any useful understanding or awareness; had she exploded because of it, she wouldn’t have learned much and might have acted in ways she’d later regret. If we let it, anger can become the source of deep self-awareness and exploration.

In his book entitled Anger, Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh offers the following perspective: “Embrace your anger with a lot of tenderness. Your anger is not your enemy, your anger is your baby. It’s like your stomach or your lungs. Every time you have some trouble in your lungs or your stomach, you don’t think of throwing them away. The same is true with your anger. You accept your anger because you know you can take care of it; you can transform it into positive energy.”

Every emotion we feel is an opportunity to become better acquainted with our inner world. And it’s through this self-understanding that we learn how to navigate life’s challenges, guiding ourselves with the wisdom of our own experiences. What if the next time you felt angry you embraced it? What if instead of dismissing or discharging the anger you listened to it?  What might you learn about yourself? What might you discover?

 

 

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark

the milky above a tree in the night sky.

Most people, if you ask them, will tell you they aren’t afraid of the dark. And since they probably don’t need night lights to help them feel safe in their beds, they’re telling you the truth. But there’s another kind of darkness that even the bravest adults tend to fear. It’s the darkness that life inevitably delivers. The kind that sets in when we fall on hard times; when the unexpected happens; when our faith is tested; when our hearts break. That kind of darkness can bring even the strongest among us to our knees. So, of course, most of us are inclined to fear it.

But the truth is, no matter how afraid we might be of it, the darkness is guaranteed to come. It’s not only unavoidable in life, it’s necessary—for without it, we could never understand or appreciate the light. As the Tao Te Ching—the ancient Chinese text attributed to Lao Tzu—explains, everything in nature and in life exists in pairs of opposites. Day cannot exist without night; good has no meaning without an understanding of bad; there can be no light if there is no darkness.

It’s perfectly natural to prefer the upside of things and to like it better when everything’s going well. And while it’s also understandable to fear things going wrong, it isn’t necessary to go through life carrying around that kind of fear. First of all, because no matter how much we don’t want it, unfortunate things are bound to happen. That’s the way life goes. Secondly, and more importantly, because it’s in our times of darkness that we’re most likely to learn, to grow, to become more resilient, to gain appreciation and gratitude. Think about it: How much could you possibly learn from life if you were never challenged? How could you gain strength if you were never given a reason to be strong? How could you ever appreciate the good times if that’s all there’s ever been? It’s through the challenges, through the times we spend in darkness, that our resilience is fortified.

Many of the clients I work with seek therapy to address issues pertaining to fear and anxiety. They tell me about their worries and share with me how overwhelmed they feel when thinking about the possibilities that exist for terrible things to happen. Of course, this all makes perfect sense to me, and I let them know so. But once I’ve validated their concerns, I start getting curious about some of the challenges they’ve been through in the past. Most of these clients are able to recall times in their lives when things went terribly wrong. They tell me stories of loss, struggle, and intense emotional pain. They’re able to remember how dark it felt when they were going through those past experiences, and they’re also able to acknowledge that eventually, the darkness passed. The night turned into day again. In remembering that they were able to overcome difficult circumstances and dark times—in most cases, emerging from them wiser, stronger, and more resilient—they’re able to recognize that they can do this again. They come to see that no matter what happens or how dark it gets, it doesn’t last forever; and if they can have the fortitude to get through it, they’ll be better on the other side.

I like to say that our dark times are our greatest teachers. When things are going well, we aren’t available to learn; we’re too busy enjoying ourselves. So instead of being afraid of the dark, what if we embrace it? What if we allow ourselves to live life on life’s terms and accept the inescapability of the dark/light dynamic?

If you’ve been living with fear, I invite you to explore how you might allow yourself to start flowing with life and trusting that all things pass. And if this finds you in a time of darkness, remember that it won’t last forever. Soon—maybe sooner than you know it—there will be light.