Acceptance is the vital first step to move forward in life
SOMETIMES, life gives us lemons. Maybe you’re in a rush and get caught up in traffic. Maybe you didn’t get a promotion you felt you really deserved. Or maybe your partner leaves you.
Whether we’re facing a minor problem or a major difficulty, the first step to moving forward is accepting reality just as it is.
All life contains some degree of pain, but it needn’t be filled with unnecessary suffering.
Suffering is often the result of pain coupled with non-acceptance. If your partner leaves you, for example, yes this will likely cause emotional pain but this can quickly turn to unbearable suffering if we get caught up in denying the reality of the situation by wishing that somehow life were different.
A common barrier to acceptance is the myth that accepting a difficult situation means that you condone or approve of it but that’s not the case. Whether you approve of something or not, if you don’t accept it then you can’t move on and will stay stuck feeling miserable.
How do we go about accepting a difficult situation? There’s no easy answer to this as acceptance will involve different things for different people. However, the first thing to do is figure out what it is that you need to accept.
Clues to this include questioning reality, for example asking yourself “why me?” and ruminating about why the situation should be different.
Once you have worked out what it is that you need to accept, the next step is to make a commitment to yourself that you are going to accept it. Imagine yourself standing at a fork in the road: one path leads to denying reality and the other leads to accepting reality as it is. Commit to taking the path to acceptance.
The next step is to practise acceptance wholeheartedly. Imagining what you would be thinking, saying and doing if you fully accepted the situation and then think, say and do those things.
To encourage acceptance you can practise adopting an open posture, saying “I accept this” out loud in a confident tone and letting go of any tension in your muscles. Remind yourself that everything that has ever happened was caused. We may not understand the causes, but everything happens for a reason.
Start small and build up to accepting the bigger difficulties in life. Acceptance often involves painful emotions but it also brings the freedom to move on with life. Dr Ellie Milby is a counselling psychologist.