Accepting reality means less emotional suffering in the long run.
Radical Acceptance means completely and totally accepting something from the depths of your soul, with your heart and your mind. You stop fighting reality. When you stop fighting you suffer less. That means you don’t feel hot anger in your stomach whenever you see the person who got the promotion you deserved and you don’t seethe with resentment when you see your best friend who is now dating your boyfriend. You accept what is, learn and go forward.
This is from a nice little blog post over at Psychology Today, entitled, Three Blocks to Radical Acceptance.
It continues:
Radical acceptance is easier to understand than it is to practice. There are many obstacles to giving up the suffering of resentments and anger toward others, toward God, or toward the world in general.
I’m not going to disagree with that. However, the funny thing is that it doesn’t have to be hard to practice acceptance. It takes precisely that – practice – but it is possible. And, thankfully, there are a number of tools and techniques out there to support us.
The 3 blocks mentioned are:
- I don’t want to let them off the hook.
- Accepting means I agree. I will never agree.
- I need to be angry to protect myself.
Regarding the last point, the blog post makes a wonderfully simple yet profound point:
The answer is not to protect yourself from possible future suffering by doing something that creates suffering in the present. In this case, finding a way to go forward in a different way, with wisdom, so you don’t let the same scenario happen again and again.
You can read the whole post here. Or add your own blocks to the comments below.