Unconditional Acceptance: A Transformative Mindset To Move Forward | BetterHelp
Radical acceptance typically refers to the practice of accepting that which you cannot change or control. It may not mean that you love everything about yourself or the situation you’re experiencing, but understanding how to practice self acceptance can provide a foundation of acceptance from which to move forward and improve.
Working with a clinical psychologist can be the first step in the process of accepting painful situations and unhelpful emotions, such as losing one's job or feeling bad about oneself. Through self-compassion and compassion for others, one can learn to accept negative emotions and avoid feeling worse. Modern society often promotes the idea that negative emotions are wrong, but the concept of radical acceptance embracing your life can make it worth living.
What Is Radical Acceptance?
Radical acceptance is a practice developed by psychologist Marsha Linehan. Often used in dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), this practice was created based on the notion that reality must be accepted, rather than fought against, and that fighting and railing against a situation can be a greater cause of distress than the situation itself.
As its name suggests, radical acceptance generally means accepting everything about yourself, your current situation, your body, and your life without question, blame, or pushback. Far from condoning or embracing your current difficulties and situation, radical acceptance typically advocates accepting yourself and your circumstances in order to better move through and past them.
Radical acceptance can be helpful for a variety of mental health concerns. This is because fighting against something often makes it worse; in one study, people were told to think of white bears, then expressly forbidden to do so a few minutes later. The study’s participants found it virtually impossible to stop thinking of white bears. Once the directive changed to allow students to think of bears, the urge to do so went away. Accepting yourself, your situation, and your mental health status may alleviate some of the symptoms associated with each of these things.
What Causes Suffering?
This question may not be easily answered. What causes an individual, group, or community to suffer can depend greatly on those individuals, their experiences, and the context of the situation. What has become an increasingly common thread, though, may be the notion that attachment (or fixation) can be a significant cause of suffering, separate from any specific religious ideology or philosophical leaning.
Suffering, in this sense, may be a result of an attachment to an idea, a previous situation, or a determination of what should happen, who you should be, or what your life should be.
When Radical Acceptance Is Used
Radical acceptance is typically used in situations that are beyond our control. Radical acceptance should not be engaged in situations that require a change, such as an abusive relationship or a dangerous work situation. Instead, it can be applied to things that occur without us being able to have a hand in them. Each of these scenarios could prompt a response of fury, denial, pain, and fighting – or each of them could be accepted as a new reality and moved on from.
You can be the author of your own life, and when you reframe statements about your life, you may give yourself permission and space to see things differently and grow. Ultimately, the goal of radical acceptance is typically progression and growth in the place of stagnation and clinging to the past.
Radical Acceptance Components
Rather than being a thought or idea, radical acceptance can contain several components to put into practice. It may be good to say to yourself, “I accept myself just as I am,” but unless you live in a way that reinforces that belief, the belief may be useless to you and everyone else. To practice radical acceptance, you might try to:
- Accept yourself and your life for what they are – not for what you want them to be
- Realize and acknowledge what you can and cannot control
- Survey yourself and your life without judgment or condemnation
- Acknowledge the facts of yourself and your situation
- Accept reality
- Practice mindfulness and live in the present moment
Part of refusing to accept reality can be living in the future or the past rather than the present moment. Radical acceptance can be a subset of living mindfully and may require you to leave behind any fantasies you might have about your past or your future. It may ask that you root yourself firmly in your life as it truly is, without any judgment, anger, or denial.
This type of practice is not always an easy one to adopt, and it may require guidance. You might read books, consult with a specialist, or see a therapist to develop the tools required to effectively use radical acceptance in your life. Each of these options may largely depend on you, however; ultimately, you may need to be willing to consistently practice and adopt the tenets of radical acceptance, or the approach may not be effective or useful. Whether you read about radical acceptance and begin practicing at home, learn about it in group sessions, or work one-on-one with a mental health professional, what you get out of radical acceptance as a practice may be wholly up to you and may not be forced by anyone else.
The Roots Of Radical Acceptance
Despite functioning as a recognized mental health treatment, radical acceptance is often believed to have roots in Buddhism. One of the basic notions of this world religion is that attachment can be the root of suffering and that the lack of attachment can mean the absence of suffering. If you are not attached to money and a certain standard of living, why suffer when that money has gone? If you are not attached to your identity as a fixed, definitive thing, you may not need to suffer when aspects of your personality or identity inevitably change throughout life.
Tara Brach, a clinical psychologist and author of "Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha," encourages her clients to approach life with self compassion and radical acceptance. Acknowledging initial pain and accepting difficult situations can be a challenging process, but it can lead to a life with less suffering. By working to accept what feels wrong and acknowledging when you feel bad, you can cultivate healthy relationships and move forward more readily.
This can function as the basis of radical acceptance; accepting yourself and your life can be a form of practicing non-attachment, and it may give you the freedom to live your life from moment to moment, rather than perpetually scrambling to recreate a moment in time or forcing your life to fall into line with the plan you’d previously set forth.
Identifying Sources Of Suffering And Working On Your Own
When you begin a radical acceptance practice, one of the first things you might do is think about what could be causing you the greatest amount of pain or distress. You might identify trauma, a breakup, or some other unpleasant event in your life as the root of your issues. You might find that your need for radical acceptance comes after your life not taking the turns you’d expected or hoped for. Whatever the case may be, determining the source or sources can be an important part of this work; once you can pinpoint the things that are troubling you, you may begin applying radical acceptance to them.
This work can be done on your own. Through journaling and self-reflection, you can identify intense emotions and unhelpful patterns of thinking that may have made you feel worse in the past. As you progress, you can continue writing and checking in with yourself to make sure you are consistently applying the tenets of this treatment and actively working toward healing. Previous entries can be a helpful report to assess how things are coming along.
Online Therapy May Guide You In Your Journey To Radical Acceptance
If you reach a place in your journey to radical acceptance where you feel stuck, you might reach out to a mental health professional for additional help and guidance in your journey. Someone who is trained in this type of therapy can help you identify any weak points in your radical acceptance practice and provide insight and training for a fully developed radical acceptance practice.
An alternative to traditional therapy could be an online therapy provider. Whether you are hoping to tackle death and grief with radical acceptance, or you’d like to overcome an addiction, online therapists may be available to work with you in a more relaxed setting – that is, from the couch in your living room or even from your bed.
A 2022 meta-analysis of 41 studies on the efficacy and feasibility of online DBT (one of the primary therapy methods that utilize radical acceptance) found that it can be effective for a variety of people and could even be considered essential for those who cannot leave home or need help outside of traditional sessions.
Takeaway
To cultivate more meaningful lives, we must accept difficult situations and work to overcome them. Acknowledging that some aspects of our lives are outside our control helps us identify and accept situations that we can change. When working to overcome challenges and achieve personal growth, it's important to accept situations for what they are. Journaling and therapy can aid in this process by providing a space to reflect on thoughts and feelings, allowing for greater self-awareness and insight. You have the power to take control of your life and make positive changes.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
How Do You Practice Radical Acceptance?
Radical acceptance generally means accepting that many parts of life may be beyond your control. Practicing radical acceptance can include focusing on positive things in your life, such as your values, attributes, and characteristics. To practice radical acceptance, it can be important to avoid judging yourself or the situation and view it for what it is. You might accept yourself by acknowledging where you are and where you want to be, or you could think about plans that didn’t go as well as you hoped and how to revise them. Below are some practical steps that may help you on your journey to radical acceptance:
Look at the situation critically. How much of the problem was beyond your control?
Practice mindfulness or cognitive-behavioral therapy. Both techniques can help you discard any self-defeating or negative thoughts you may have. When you feel upset over an event, self-defeating thoughts can work against radical acceptance and moving on.
Remember that radical acceptance doesn’t mean you can’t feel emotions, or that things are alright as they are. If you feel like crying or venting your frustrations, you may feel free to do so, but you might also realize that you’re unable to change what already is. Radical acceptance can require you to handle a recurring challenge: the random events of life.
It may help you to find a therapist or treatment center that specializes in helping others with radical acceptance. Treatment centers specializing in radical acceptance may provide coping support for people with mental health challenges to encourage positive living. An option could be to find teletherapy options that make it simple to learn everything you need to know at home or when it is most convenient for you.
What Is Radical Acceptance And How Can It Help Me?
Radical acceptance can refer to accepting that some things or moments may be beyond your control. It does not necessarily involve accepting that things are alright as they are, but simply that they are without judgment of yourself or the circumstances.
Radical acceptance can make it easier to achieve goals in life by accepting what is and what is not possible, and what you do and don’t have control over. It can include accepting yourself the way you are, learning how to move past disappointments, and viewing reality in a non-judgmental, more neutral way. By doing this, we may release ourselves from limiting negative mindsets and can move forward rather than remain stuck in whatever is challenging us.
It can be very common for many people to fight back against situations or actions they cannot control. For example, if you experience a car crash, you may have a hard time accepting your car is totaled and could get angry when someone says it can’t be repaired. While you may be upset about it, learning to radically accept what happened can help you move on with your life, leading you on a path toward more positive and actionable thoughts and feelings.
Why Is Radical Acceptance Important?
Radical acceptance is generally about accepting that some factors in life are beyond your control, and that what you cannot change is a part of life. We tend to want to believe that we are in control of everything, but that’s not necessarily how life is. When you practice radical acceptance, you may learn to handle the reality in your life, including unwanted emotions and difficult situations. It can put you on the right path to understanding the needs and feelings of yourself and others, rather than only focusing on the negativity or difficulty of a situation.
What Is Radical Acceptance Not?
Radical acceptance may not be approving of the circumstances you’ve experienced, nor is it about not showing feelings towards those circumstances or changes. It may not be labeling situations as either good or bad or not disregarding or rejecting a situation. It may not be giving in to a situation or saying that whatever occurred is acceptable. Rather, it can be about non-judgmentally recognizing that you can’t move past a painful event without accepting the reality what happened.
Radical acceptance often acknowledges the fact that there in things in life outside of our control, but we still have a choice in how we respond to and move past them.
How Do You Practice Acceptance In Everyday Life?
To practice acceptance in everyday life, you might:
Be mindful of your thoughts and feelings. Are they valid, or do they come from biases or things you can’t control? If it’s the latter, you could learn to accept them and move past them.
Try finding the good in everything, even a situation that seems unfortunate. This doesn’t mean that what happened was good or alright, but that good can be found while also acknowledging that the situation or time period was difficult and unpleasant.
Be mindful of your judgments. Is there something about yourself that you dislike and thus judge negatively? Can this thing be changed? If not, learning to radically accept that part of yourself and see how it can be positive can help with feeling more content and accepted by yourself.
Seek help from a mental health professional.
How Do You Accept Difficult Circumstances?
Acceptance can be about accepting even the most difficult of circumstances. Sometimes, we may experience difficult things outside of our control (such as a natural disaster), and it can be a challenge to accept them. Here are some methods that may help you accept difficult circumstances more healthily.
Don’t be in denial of the circumstances. If you’re in denial, you may end up putting these problems on the back burner, which can lead to the problems worsening over time. Accepting reality can be important, even if that means accepting the reality that is uncomfortable for you.
Sort out the problem and figure out if there’s something you can do to change it. Some problems may be beyond your control, but other times, you may be able to make changes. For example, your health may be struggling, but eating a healthier diet could help.
If you can, think of a plan to handle it. Even if your pride tries to get in the way, you should always get help whenever you can.
Accept the things you cannot change. Practice mindfulness and focus on circumstances that you can make changes to, such as your reactions.
How Do You Practice Acceptance Of Others?
Practicing acceptance can mean using empathy. Think about what would happen if you were in the other individual’s shoes. How would you feel if you were criticized or not accepted for being different?
Learn more about their differences. Instead of making judgments, you might do research. If the person is open to questions, you could feel free to ask them about their experiences.
Accepting often means getting past your thoughts. No matter how you accept someone, you may still have negative thoughts that pop up in your head. Practicing mindfulness and cognitive-behavioral therapy can help with that.
If you’re having trouble accepting someone, a therapist or counselor may be able to help. Sometimes, your refusal to show acceptance to someone may stem from something in your past, and a therapist may help you sort that out.
Why Is Acceptance So Hard?
Because of our nature as humans, who we are individually, our biases, and our beliefs, it can be difficult to accept that what we think, feel, or believe is not necessarily reality – or at least, not the only reality. Additionally, some of us can experience difficulty feeling as though we are not in control, and acceptance can feel like relinquishing control. However, radical acceptance is not necessarily about giving up control; it can be about accepting that which we don’t have control over and learning how to healthily change that which we do have control over.
Who Coined The Term “Radical Acceptance”?
The term “radical acceptance” was coined by psychologist Marsha Linehan, who created dialectical behavior therapy (DBT). DBT is typically a form of talk therapy established to help people deal with difficult emotions while understanding ways to change their thinking patterns to encourage positive, more helpful behaviors. The treatment can help people with depression and anxiety, borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder, and eating disorders to confront and change unhealthy thinking habits.
What Are The Four Modules Of DBT?
The four modules of DBT (dialectical behavior therapy) are:
Mindfulness
Interpersonal effectiveness
Distress tolerance
Emotion regulation
When you find a therapist who specializes in radical acceptance, these modules can lay the foundation for what you’ll explore when understanding how to accept things in your life.
What are examples of radical acceptance?
What are signs of radical acceptance?
Is radical acceptance CBT or DBT?
What is the opposite of radical acceptance?
How does radical acceptance change everything?
- Previous Article
- Next Article