Post by Della Wren on Feb 26, 2023 15:19:28 GMT -6
Acceptance is not just rolling over and sucking it up.
Acceptance is not toleration.
Acceptance is not simply staying stuck.
Acceptance is clarity, understanding, truth, freedom, and change. Acceptance creates freedom because it allows you to change. It keeps you out of the stories of blame, shame, guilt, and victimization. It allows you to just be okay with what is or what was. No, it's not about condoning crappy behavior, it's about understanding that crappy behavior comes from pain. What we want to encourage is healing, understanding, and compassion. When you're busy in the stories of blame, shame, guilt, and victimization, it keeps you from accepting what happened. It causes you to argue with it because you wanted to be able to control it and you couldn't.
You don't have control over your experiences most of the time so that means you have to allow them to be there. They are what they are. The idea that somehow they shouldn't be or that you should have been able to control it gets you into trouble. It doesn't allow you to move on from the experience. The experience happened. You can't change it. You can't go back and un-create it. You can't do anything about it. The only way through it is to accept it. No, you don't have to condone it. We're not trying to make the experience okay, we're trying to make ourselves okay within the experience.
We get caught in a loop because we think that if we accept the experience so that we don't have to argue with it, that somehow that means the experience is okay. If somebody did something awful to you, their behavior isn't okay. You just don't have control over their behavior so arguing with it or complaining about it or keeping yourself upset by it, gets you nowhere. There's nothing you can do. The only way to manage that within yourself is to accept that you didn't have control over the experience, you couldn't do anything about their behavior, and therefore it just is. Defending the wrongness of what happened keeps you stuck in the pain and doesn't allow you to find acceptance.
That's all the argument with acceptance really is. You create a defense around the experience being wrong and it doesn't allow you to heal from the experience. It creates a tug-of-war within yourself that doesn't give you permission to move on. Unhook yourself from the perception that acceptance and condoning behavior are the same thing. Gain the mental clarity around that first and then pick an experience in your past and try to find acceptance around it. Can you make it work that way?
We're using acceptance much the same way we use forgiveness. You'll notice pretty quickly that I don't talk about forgiveness. Without going down a side track, I'll just say that forgiveness is a by-product of healing and letting yourself and others off the hook. Forgiveness comes through acceptance and understanding. It's an outcome, not an action. The action is acceptance. The action is releasing the pain. The action is healing. So, much like we use forgiveness or letting other people off the hook as a way of freeing ourselves, we can use acceptance to do the same thing. We free ourselves to stop defending the wrongness and the pain of the experience.
This takes time and doesn't come easy, but it is possible. Keep working on it.
Love to all.
Della
Acceptance is not toleration.
Acceptance is not simply staying stuck.
Acceptance is clarity, understanding, truth, freedom, and change. Acceptance creates freedom because it allows you to change. It keeps you out of the stories of blame, shame, guilt, and victimization. It allows you to just be okay with what is or what was. No, it's not about condoning crappy behavior, it's about understanding that crappy behavior comes from pain. What we want to encourage is healing, understanding, and compassion. When you're busy in the stories of blame, shame, guilt, and victimization, it keeps you from accepting what happened. It causes you to argue with it because you wanted to be able to control it and you couldn't.
You don't have control over your experiences most of the time so that means you have to allow them to be there. They are what they are. The idea that somehow they shouldn't be or that you should have been able to control it gets you into trouble. It doesn't allow you to move on from the experience. The experience happened. You can't change it. You can't go back and un-create it. You can't do anything about it. The only way through it is to accept it. No, you don't have to condone it. We're not trying to make the experience okay, we're trying to make ourselves okay within the experience.
We get caught in a loop because we think that if we accept the experience so that we don't have to argue with it, that somehow that means the experience is okay. If somebody did something awful to you, their behavior isn't okay. You just don't have control over their behavior so arguing with it or complaining about it or keeping yourself upset by it, gets you nowhere. There's nothing you can do. The only way to manage that within yourself is to accept that you didn't have control over the experience, you couldn't do anything about their behavior, and therefore it just is. Defending the wrongness of what happened keeps you stuck in the pain and doesn't allow you to find acceptance.
That's all the argument with acceptance really is. You create a defense around the experience being wrong and it doesn't allow you to heal from the experience. It creates a tug-of-war within yourself that doesn't give you permission to move on. Unhook yourself from the perception that acceptance and condoning behavior are the same thing. Gain the mental clarity around that first and then pick an experience in your past and try to find acceptance around it. Can you make it work that way?
We're using acceptance much the same way we use forgiveness. You'll notice pretty quickly that I don't talk about forgiveness. Without going down a side track, I'll just say that forgiveness is a by-product of healing and letting yourself and others off the hook. Forgiveness comes through acceptance and understanding. It's an outcome, not an action. The action is acceptance. The action is releasing the pain. The action is healing. So, much like we use forgiveness or letting other people off the hook as a way of freeing ourselves, we can use acceptance to do the same thing. We free ourselves to stop defending the wrongness and the pain of the experience.
This takes time and doesn't come easy, but it is possible. Keep working on it.
Love to all.
Della