Acceptance and Change
Acceptance and Change not Acceptance or Change
Often when someone experiences emotional distress, the initial reaction might be anger, self-criticism or blame towards others for causing the emotional distress. Unfortunately, these secondary reactions do not help with the initial emotional distress and add on extra difficulty to figuring out how to deal with these difficult experiences.
Does this sound familiar to you? It doesn’t matter who you blame for your distress, your pain still exists and you continue to suffer. Thoughts such as “I’m weak for being upset” or “why is this happening to me” only cause more frustration and anger and may further compound the problem.
Being overly critical about a situation prevents you from taking steps to change the situation. You can’t change the past. And if you spend your time fighting the past – wishfully thinking that your anger will change the outcome of an event that has already happened – you will become paralyzed and helpless and nothing will improve.
Radical acceptance suggests acknowledging your present situation, whatever it is, without judging the events or criticizing yourself. Try to recognize that your present situation exists because of a long chain of events that began far in the past. Attempts to fight the moment or deny whether the chain of events should have happened does nothing to change what has happened and can lead to more suffering.
The first step to accepting distress is to start acknowledging your feelings and emotional experiences in a different way. Emotional discomfort is an expected universal experience. Negative emotions such as sadness, anger and fear are part of being human. These emotions are not just common, normal and OK, they are actually important and useful to us.
Negative emotions are important to our survival rather than experiences to be feared and avoided at all costs. Your emotions are not permanent. Your emotions are changing experiences that are always fluctuating but eventually pass. When we feel distressed, the experience can seem unbearable and unending, but we know this isn’t how emotions work.
Instead our emotions can be described as waves inside of us. These waves at times can increasing become more intense, but inevitably always reach some plateau, subsiding and finally passing.
Accepting distress is not about having to like emotional discomfort, or being resigned to feeling miserable, or wallowing in negative emotions. Instead, accepting distress is about seeing the negative emotion for what it is, and changing how you pay attention to the emotion.
Reacting in an accepting way towards your emotion, often changes the effect the emotion has on you. A good way to develop the skill of accepting distress is to start by being mindful of your emotions generally when you are not feeling distressed. This will give you some practice at the skill of watching your emotions under more tolerable circumstances (i.e., when you are not distressed), so you might be better able to apply the skill under harder circumstances (i.e., when you are distressed).
Acceptance and Change with Dr. Marsha Linehan
Practice:
Ask yourself these questions. You can write/journal on the answers or maybe share them with a friend:
What are difficult emotions that you experienced that are also useful and purposeful?
Can you think of a time when experienced an overwhelming emotion that you thought was not going to end? What did you do? What occurred?
Can you imagine what other possible outcomes could have occurred if you had practiced acceptance of yourself and your emotional experience in that moment? What do you think could have been different?
Further Reading:
How Acceptance Gives You Power (and How to Use It)
Bringing Acceptance and Change Together: What is DBT Therapy
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