Some things are very hard for me to accept. Their reality is a constant source of depression. These include: that I am aging and won’t always have the abilities I have now; that I have a chronic mental illness; that all the people I care about will die.
I cannot change these things. That’s pretty much unbearable.
A DBT idea, grounded firmly in Buddhism, is Radical Acceptance – wholly embracing things we don’t like.
Now, Radical Acceptance has disadvantages:
- The fear that one is giving up too soon, including abandoning a fight against unfairness;
- A related feeling of failure;
- A sense of impotence, helplessness, because it’s literally true that one is conceding a lack of power over what must be radically accepted;
- The sheer difficulty of saying ‘It’s true’ and ‘Yes, I will’ to things which are awful.
These are balanced off by advantages:
- A sense of relief, of weight off one’s shoulders, once it’s granted that this is the reality (it’s exhausting to beat one’s head against the literally inevitable);
- Overcoming rumination on the trap and its awfulness;
- A somewhat paradoxical sense of choosing, of willing oneself, to admit the facts (that one is doing the accepting lessens that feeling of being trapped);
- Being able to focus on the things one can change, and to move forward on those;
[Here’s where the old Serenity Prayer comes in. I need the wisdom to know the difference between the things I must accept and the things I can change.]
My homework for this week is to radically accept things which are hard but not overwhelming. That is, ones that lie between the very easily accepted (e.g., that I need to water the plants) and the really awful things (e.g., the three I began with). I will try to embrace, for instance: that my course hasn’t gone very well; that I have lots of grading to do; that I haven’t the time or energy to go fishing…
The idea is that this repeated practice of Radical Acceptance can build “muscle memory” that I’ll eventually be able to apply to the deepest sources of my depression.