Radical Acceptance: How to Acknowledge Pain Without Suffering

Or: How to acknowledge that some things are outside of our control.

I have had a lot of painful things in my past, both from my youth and more recently. I try not to dwell on them too much (which is made easier by my horrible memory), but many of them still bother me. To top it all off, I deal with regular stress from work deadlines, among other things, that make my life hard sometimes.

My therapist, who is full of good insights, recommended that I look into a concept called Radical Acceptance. Since I like to read and research, I did a little digging into the concept.

In a nutshell, Radical Acceptance is the notion that we can acknowledge something that hurts us — a past event, a current stressor — without agreeing with the thing that happened. You have to simply accept that the thing happened, no matter how much you don’t like it.

This is most often used with things that you can’t change: a traumatic life event, the death of a loved one, an event outside of your control that is affecting your life. You work within that framework — that you cannot change or control this thing — and accept the pain as simply part of life.

The idea of Radical Acceptance is that long-term suffering is caused by a lack of acceptance. When you fixate on something outside of your control that affects you without accepting it as part of life, you prolong your suffering. By accepting and therefore detaching yourself from it, you are more able to move forward and reduce your suffering. Again, you don’t have to like or agree with the thing that happened to you, you simply have to accept that it happened.

Another distinction is that forgiveness is not a part of it. Forgiving someone who has wronged you is extending an act of kindness to that person. Radical Acceptance is extending that kindness to yourself. Even if the person who wronged you has atoned for their transgression, you aren’t required to forgive them.

If this sounds like a Buddhist thing, you’re basically right. Radical Acceptance is similar to the Buddhist philosophy of detachment. By acknowledging and accepting the pain, even if you don’t like or agree with it, you reduce the suffering you incur from that pain.

As with many Buddhist principles, this is hard for many people. Buddhism is all about detachment, and humans are emotional beings. When life is going wrong, we generally have an emotional response to it. Forcing yourself to detach from and accept the things that have happened to you is a foreign concept to many people, especially when there are strong emotions attached to the events.

My own experiences with Radical Acceptance are mixed. Again, my memory is terrible, so the fog that falls over past events helps dull the pain and emotions tied up in those events. I also tend to let go of grudges after a while, whether through Radical Acceptance or simply not wanting to waste the energy anymore.

That said, some things still burn. I haven’t talked to most of my family in four years, and the stuff my father did is well behind me, but I still get angry at him from time to time. As much as I like to think I’ve detached myself from those events, they still crop up in my mind and cause me pain.

I also do my best to apply these principles to current life events. I’ve just wrapped up a couple of very large projects, and those pressing deadlines were causing me massive amounts of stress. In talking with my therapist, she suggested that I apply Radical Acceptance to that. I didn’t like the stress and issues that my work caused me at the time, but I accepted that they were part of my life whether I liked it or not. All I could do was focus on getting everything done.

That’s another part of Radical Acceptance: focusing on what you can do. Radical Acceptance was built out of Dialectical Behavior Therapy, which works to help with focusing on things you can control rather than the things you can’t. This means that you need to let go of bitterness and other unhelpful emotions; once you can manage them, it’s easier to focus on finding solutions.

For past events, there is often nothing you can do except manage your emotions in the present. However, for current stressors, oftentimes the best thing you can do is just focus on the things that you can control. As much as I stress out about deadlines and workloads, all I can do is manage my time and work on those projects to get everything done.

So, if you’re having trouble coping with past trauma or current stressors, look into Radical Acceptance. It’s not for everyone, and I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect to apply it immediately with no problems, but it’s something to consider. I’m a big fan of self-care and coping mechanisms, and having another tool to potentially help cope can’t hurt.

And, even if it doesn’t work for you, do your best to practice self-care. Eat your veggies, get some sun, exercise, do things that you enjoy, and be kind to yourself.

Take care of yourself, and be well.

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