How to Have Radical Acceptance
Today we're speaking about radical acceptance and how it can help us be free from emotional pain.
How can you use radical acceptance?
Radical acceptance implies that we recognize what we can and cannot control despite what's happening and what we think or feel about it. The most productive way to use radical acceptance is with events that have happened in the past and with fears or worries about the future. When we are not in radical acceptance, we're fighting something that hasn't occurred yet. This used to be called "borrowing trouble" when we assume that something will go wrong or turn out poorly. Borrowing trouble activates our nervous system and gets us prepared to fight or flee.
How do you balance grief and reminiscence?
When we are in grief, we must stay in the present moment and experience the emotions present with the grief. This needs to be done without telling ourselves a negative narrative about the current situation. Instead, we must acknowledge our feelings in the moment of grief and allow those feelings instead of judging ourselves based on them.
If we find ourselves grieving, we cannot let ourselves fight it, or stuff it down or ignore it. By doing this, we are not giving our body and nervous system the chance to process through it. And so it remains. It can stay for many years. We then spend excessive energy stuck in either the past or our worries about the future.
What are the benefits of radical acceptance?
Being in a state of radical acceptance is incredibly relieving. You can quit fighting things that your energy will not change on. Radical acceptance frees up a lot of extra energy and diminishes emotional pain. When you have radical acceptance, you don't have the additional pain of engaging in maladaptive communication styles that get in the way of relationships. You are freeing yourself from the erroneous, distorted thinking that our brain has about what we can control.
An additional benefit is being able to accept other people's behavior. When we acknowledge this, we then have the opportunity to decide whether or not we are okay accepting another's behaviors. Radical acceptance is not approval of others' destructive behaviors, but our understanding is that we cannot control another person.
