Radical Acceptance

Let’s talk about the most difficult skill, in my opinion, to practice. The way I define and understand radical acceptance is when you stop fighting reality, while also preventing pain from turning into suffering. For example, when I was in treatments and therapy, I had a really hard time accepting the fact that I would live with mental illness for the rest of my life. Even though I knew that logically there is no cure for it, I didn’t want to accept it. Who would want to? Turns out by not accepting that fact as a part of my life, only extended my suffering. My main phrase in therapy was “if I can’t 100% get rid of my suicidal thoughts, then why try to get rid of them at all?”. I know what you’re thinking; stubborn. I didn’t understand that recovery with mental illness didn’t mean cured; and that left me pretty hopeless. I think a lot of people have felt that way. Once I was ready to start accepting that a meaningful life was still possible, was when the changes really started to happen.

I didn’t anticipate how difficult these changes were going to be. I had to relearn everything about my coping skills, defense mechanisms, and thought processes. For quality understanding purposes, I am just going to put some of the things I have learned in recovery in list form.

• The people who said I was “too much” for them, were never my people
• I don’t have to be in crisis for people to love me
• Thoughts are just thoughts, I have a choice whether or not to act on them
• All feelings are valid
• Healthy support people won’t use my vulnerabilities to benefit them
• I don’t have control over how people feel about me
• I deserve to be safe from my intrusive thoughts
• I am in control of how much power I give to my thoughts
• Who I am as a person is separate from my diagnosis
• I don’t want to die, my depression made me think that

It seems that I have strayed a little bit from the point of this post, which is Radical Acceptance. However, this is what the process of RA looked like for me. By accepting the fact that I will live with mental illness the rest of my life, I had to relearn everything that was keeping me in suffering. The contents of that list, before I learned them, were feeding my depression and intrusive thoughts. I also wanted to add that radical acceptance does not mean that you are “okay” or “fine” with everything that happens. That is crap. I am not “okay” with having to live with these challenges, but I do understand that it is reality. We don’t have to like the hand that we are dealt, but by accepting it as is allows us to be in control; rather than it being in control of us.

Ciara