Radical Acceptance - An Introduction
What is Radical Acceptance?
Radical acceptance is about accepting life on life’s terms and not resisting what you cannot or choose not to change. This sings the same chorus as the common life philosophy of letting go of anything that is not within our control.
On top of not letting go of the uncontrollable, radical acceptance also talks about how we can actively make a decision and choose to simply accept life for how it is.
Why Radical Acceptance?
There are many ways to live life and there are many approaches one can take to tackle life’s tough moments as well as different ways we can approach the good times in our lives as well. No one way of living life is superior to another. Even with radical acceptance, this is simply another way to approach life as we will explore further in this blog post.
Understanding the ‘why’ behind this approach can help us better understand if this approach to life might be beneficial to us at this point in our lives.
So, why is radical acceptance an approach some people choose to take toward life? Well, radical acceptance can possibly help in one’s management of pain and suffering in one’s life. It is backed by the philosophy that suffering is caused not by a situation itself but by one’s ‘attachment to pain’. When we speak about pain here we mainly refer to emotional pain.
The inner workings of Radical Acceptance
What does ‘attachment to pain’ even mean?
Well, when we experience pain from a situation, it is natural and a part of life. However, often times we may prolong our suffering more than needed by interpreting the pain in certain ways through harmful practices like overthinking, getting aggressive, or projecting our pain onto others.
This is where radical acceptance comes in to remind us that - while pain may not be a choice, we are able to choose if we want to suffer because of the pain.
Through learning acceptance of our pain and letting go of our suffering, we might be able to break free of harmful cycles like self-defeating thought cycles.
How can we incorporate Radical Acceptance into our lives?
An important step in making radical acceptance a part of our lives is recognition. We need to be able to recognise instances in our lives where we may be unaware that we might actually have the ability to help ourselves out of suffering by paying attention to how we feel or what we are experiencing and having awareness of moments in our lives.
For instance, let’s say you are a leader in your organisation and you have just made a decision based on a moment of misjudgment that led to some negative consequences. You then learned that this incident had churned up some nasty comments about you by your colleagues, teammates, or organisational members. The negative emotions or pain that you may feel from such a situation would quite naturally be unavoidable. This pain you may feel is valid. Such instances of human judgment in life can be common and it is never nice to have people speak ill about you.
You then catch yourself having thoughts like, ‘Why is this happening to only me and no one else?’, ‘Why me?’, ‘This is not fair’, ‘This is all my fault, I am the worst leader ever’.
These are all examples of how we may often speak to ourselves in ways that might be self-critical and this may cause us to suffer more than we already are.
Integrating radical acceptance in our life can start with something as simple as changing the way we speak to ourselves. In this instance, we can recognise that it is normal for human beings to make mistakes from time to time. When any actions or decisions have been made, the response from others is always unknown.
There are many other steps and ways to start to allow for radical acceptance to enter our lives. Practicing the philosophy of radical acceptance t is a key aspect of making it a habit and it will take time.
Look out for a future article where we expand more about the connections between radical acceptance and mindfulness as well as share more ways that we can all practice and incorporate this interesting philosophy in our lives.
