When “this shouldn’t be happening” makes it worse
This shouldn’t be happening. I can’t believe I’m still dealing with this. If I could just figure out the right way to think about it, it would stop bothering me.
A lot of what hurts about a hard situation comes from the fight with it: the part of you that keeps reopening the question of whether it should have happened, long after it already has. You can spend months in that argument, and it has a way of feeling like effort, even like responsibility, while leaving the actual situation exactly where it was.
Radical acceptance is the name for putting that argument down. The phrase comes to most people through one of two routes. Marsha Linehan built it into dialectical behavior therapy as a skill for getting through pain you can’t immediately fix. Tara Brach, a psychologist and meditation teacher, made it the title of a 2003 book drawing on Buddhist practice, which is less about circumstances and more about how you treat yourself. Brach’s name for the problem she’s addressing is “the trance of unworthiness,” and it will be familiar to anyone who has spent a few decades quietly auditioning for their own approval. One is a tool for getting through a crisis and the other a way of relating to your own life, but they overlap on the central move, which is to stop fighting what’s already true.
What acceptance doesn’t mean
The word gets a bad reputation because it sounds like approval, or like giving up. Accepting that your marriage is in real trouble, that your adult kid isn’t going to call back this month, or that your parent is declining faster than anyone planned for doesn’t mean you think any of it is fine, and it doesn’t mean you stop trying to change what can be changed. It means you stop spending energy on whether it’s true. The “radical” part refers to going all the way, including the parts you’d still like to negotiate with, which are usually the parts that matter most.
If you read the earlier post on shoulding, you may recognize the move. This shouldn’t be happening is a should aimed at reality instead of at yourself, and it tends to work about as well. It can add a second layer of distress, the repeated insistence that things be otherwise, on top of whatever was already painful, and that second layer is often the part that keeps you up at night.
Anxiety is a particularly good example, since it responds so badly to being argued with. The harder you insist you shouldn’t feel anxious before a presentation, or at a party, or lying awake at 3 a.m., the more your nervous system reads the insistence as further evidence that something is wrong. People are often surprised to find that letting the anxiety be there, uncomfortable and unwelcome, can allow it to settle on its own, or at least lets them get on with what they’re doing while it’s there. Fighting it mostly gives them another problem to solve.
Acceptance pointed at yourself
Brach’s book spends most of its time on the version that’s usually hardest, which is accepting yourself. That doesn’t mean deciding you’re wonderful. It means being able to look at the fact that you snapped at someone you love, or that you still get tongue-tied around your father, or that you’re further from where you hoped to be at this age, without immediately turning it into a verdict.
This tends to strike people as backward, since self-criticism feels like the thing keeping them in line. Change is hard to make from a crouch. It’s a lot easier to look honestly at something you did when looking at it doesn’t also mean putting yourself on trial.
What it looks like in practice
In my practice, acceptance almost never happens as a single decision. Someone will arrive at it in a session, feel the relief of it, and then find themselves back in the argument by Thursday, which is less a failure than a description of how minds work. Linehan’s term for this is “turning the mind,” the idea that acceptance is something you keep choosing, often many times a day, each time you notice you’ve drifted back into this shouldn’t be happening.
Part of the job in therapy is sorting out which parts of a situation are open to change and which aren’t, since people often have those reversed, pouring effort into relitigating the past while leaving the present alone. Acceptance frees up attention for the part you can do something about. Sometimes it also makes room for grief that the argument was keeping at bay, which is not a pleasant discovery, though it tends to be a more honest place to stand.
If you want to read further
Brach’s Radical Acceptance is a good place to start if the idea resonates, particularly the self-directed version. It’s warm, full of stories, and fairly steeped in meditation practice, which some readers will love and others will find is not their register. You’re allowed to accept that about it, too.
If you’d like to talk about any of this, you can reach me at will@willbaum.com or (323) 610-0112.