Acceptance isn’t what you think it is

Why curiosity, not effort, is what makes acceptance possible

(Part 2 of 2 on resistance and acceptance)

In Part 1 (last week), I left you with a paradox that one of my patients, Maya, named more clearly than I usually manage to: actively trying to let go of an experience is itself a form of resistance to it. The more you try to accept, the more you’re confirming there’s something here that needs to be gotten rid of. Acceptance isn’t and can’t be a form of effort. But then what is it and how can we make it happen?

But first, the pushback that I get from my patients, in case your brain is going or getting stuck there.

If acceptance means not resisting our experience, does that mean accepting an abusive partner? Accepting a cancer diagnosis as if it is not a big deal? Accepting injustice or harm? Of course not. Acceptance is about the internal experience of what is already happening, not the external situation that needs to change.

You can accept the fear in your chest about a diagnosis and also get aggressive treatment. You can accept the grief of losing someone and also keep functioning. You can accept the rage you feel about an injustice and also organize against the injustice (see my previous article on anger for more). The two are not in conflict, and in fact, tend to support each other, because trying to act from a place of unacknowledged feeling is exhausting in a way that acting from a place of acknowledged feeling isn’t. What often gets…