What's acceptance all about?

Acceptance is not the absence of emotion or an emotion in itself, but rather a psychological stance that holds multiple emotions and realities at the same time.

The road to acceptance is messy, unclear, and difficult to teach. The pain of striving for acceptance in regard to an issue is not a personal weakness, but is evidence that we are engaging honestly with something that matters enough to demand time, reflection, and patience to change.

When we talk about acceptance we often describe it like a it's a destination, and I did so above. We might imagine a person arriving at a place of peace where they have fully "come to terms" with a difficult reality. In practice, however, acceptance may not be that clean. It's a messy and evolving process that involves balancing different thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and perspectives all associated with a meaningful person, place, thing or event.

Consider someone grieving the end of a relationship. Part of them may understand why the relationship needed to end, while another part of them still wishes things had turned out differently. They may feel sadness about the loss, anger about the unfairness, thankful for the good times, and hopeless about the future, all at the same time. Acceptance does not require choosing one of these experiences and rejecting the others. Rather, I think it involves making room for these complex feelings to coexist with less intensity, and that it's from here that a lesson is learned that puts these reactions into a realistic perspective that is more manageable.

One reason acceptance can feel difficult is that we often mistake it for resignation. If I accept that something bad happened to me, does that mean I am forever tainted? If I accept a limitation, does that mean I am giving up? No, we can fully acknowledge a reality while still disliking it, grieving it, wishing it had been different and trying to prevent it from happening again. Acceptance is not about resignation but about accurately orienting oneself with what is true so that we can move forward with an understanding of how our reality was changed and what we need to do to balance our lives given what was lost.