Making Sense of Acceptance for Change

Practice radical acceptance. This advice shows up in memes, self-help columns, and the pages of books on mindfulness.

It’s good advice, in line with an ever-growing literature that documents the benefits of mindfulness- and acceptance-based therapies.

At first pass, though, calls to acceptance can be misunderstood. I’ve found, for example, that the advice can sometimes be heard as asking people to resign themselves to a difficult situation. That acceptance means a sort of begrudging tolerance of the status quo. In the wake of that misunderstanding, talking about radical acknowledgment can help get to the heart of the matter.

Defining Acceptance

I first encountered acceptance as a component of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), though the concept is rooted in Buddhism and integral to other mindfulness and acceptance-based interventions, such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.

Definitions of acceptance converge around the idea of experiencing thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations as they are — without trying to control, avoid, or change them. That is, without fighting reality, as Marsha Linehan, DBT’s developer, put it in her memoir, Building a Life Worth Living (Linehan, 2020).

Radical acceptance goes further. It’s the “complete and total openness to the facts of reality as they are” in which we’re open to “fully experiencing reality as it is in this one moment,” according to Linehan.

Experiences as They Are

Accepting reality as it is makes sense once we start to recognize how much energy goes into (and suffering comes out of) fighting reality.

Consider, for example, a time you felt sad or vulnerable and got angry about feeling that way or invested time criticizing yourself for feeling that way. Or think of a time you urgently wanted someone else, such as a partner, to be different than they were. Perhaps you wanted it so badly that you made excuses for their behaviors or told yourself that you misinterpreted their actions.

In both instances, trying to change reality — what you were feeling or what someone else was doing — was a recipe for adding suffering to an already difficult situation.

Acceptance would mean experiencing the thoughts, emotions, and sensations in those moments as they were, without adding on the suffering that arises from denying or willing reality to be something different. Radical acceptance would mean leaning in with compassion, curiosity, and your whole self to experience this moment as it is.

Acceptance isn’t about putting up with a bad situation. Rather, it’s about recognizing the facts of the current situation.

In the words of one of Linehan’s clients, it’s radically acknowledging reality as it is.

When Linehan described in her memoir the client’s preference for the term radical acknowledgement, I loved it. Sure, as Linehan points out, it’s the same concept. But the phrase cuts to the chase in a way that I have found helpful for my own practice of these concepts, and for talking with people about individual as well as social change. Let’s take a look.

From Acknowledgement to Action

For me, talking about radically acknowledging reality has offered a way around misunderstandings about what acceptance means. To radically acknowledge something invokes being active and engaged, honest and authentic, totally awake, and brave enough to look deeply at ourselves and the world around us, in this moment.

Of course, building something different for the future requires understanding where we are right now, in this moment. Thus, radically acknowledging the reality of our inner experiences or the world around us is key to understanding and building a path forward — whether that path is to each of us building a life worth living, as Linehan talks about with DBT, or a future for our communities.

While much has been written about the importance of radical acceptance to individual change, I’ve become interested in how important radical acknowledgment is to social change, particularly in terms of intimate violence.

After all, intimate violence such as sexual assault and intimate partner abuse is dreadfully common. And yet when people disclose having been victimized, there’s a human tendency to wish it wasn’t true — to wish reality was different than it is. That wish can even lead well-intentioned loved ones to question whether the abuse that someone discloses really happened.

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Denying reality has it is happens culturally too. Over history, backlashes have been common where periods of paying attention to high rates of sexual assault and intimate partner abuse are countered by periods of skepticism and denial, as psychiatrist Judith Herman described in her book Trauma and Recovery (Herman, 1997).

Social change, like individual change, requires that we radically acknowledge the reality of the situation in which we find ourselves. Though we may not have created the current situation, as Linehan points out in DBT, we are responsible for working to make it better. When it comes to intimate violence, we share an interest in working together to prevent and respond effectively to intimate violence, regardless of our genders or life histories. That's because the consequences ripple out to affect individuals and whole communities — from our schools to our workplaces, as I explored in my book Every 90 Seconds: Our Common Cause Ending Violence against Women.

Radically acknowledging the world as it is may sound overwhelming, particularly when we're talking about seemingly intractable problems such as intimate violence. But here's the thing: By radically acknowledging the world in which we find ourselves, we can build a shared vision of a better one, and build a path to that future. Stay tuned for more on radical hope in an upcoming post!