The Art of Radical Acceptance
This week I'm celebrating eight years of emotional sobriety through a support group I’m part of, called Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families. This peer support group provides a community of people focused on healing and growing, learning from our past to understand the present way we show up for ourselves and with others.
So, as I celebrate this anniversary, I wanted to share what I shared in my group more widely in hopes it can help you feel less alone and accepting of where we are at this moment, with the people and resources around us.
What is Emotional Sobriety?
But what is emotional sobriety, you ask? It sounds like sobriety, which is usually associated with alcohol. But in this instance it’s developing a skill set that enables us to manage our emotions in a healthy way, which stops us from going down the slippery slope that leads us to behaviors or ways of thinking that leads us to harmful behaviors. Emotional sobriety involves three elements:
Building awareness of negative emotions such as shame, anxiety, and fear about the future or fear of success.
Accepting these emotions, and learning to manage them effectively instead of being overwhelmed by them.
Identifying and changing potentially self-destructive or unhealthy behaviors
By working through these things, we stay away from the bottom line behaviors we want to avoid, become less reliant on other humans for our happiness, and become more resilient humans.
In the past month I’ve had a series of tragedies happen in my universe. First, the 29-year-old wife of a family friend was suffering from postpartum depression and took her own life, leaving behind a 1 year old child. Second, a budding relationship was sidelined temporarily because his sister was diagnosed with schizophrenia and he doesn’t have emotional reserves to date, and then a few days later a longtime family friend was killed in a car accident. She was just a few years younger than me, and was a special education teacher and a kind human.
My days have been moving a lot slower these past few weeks, to lean into friends, to my own emotions, and to finding as many moments of joy I can muster. These are moments when my empath nature can become overwhelming by taking on the emotions of other people feeling the weight of the world. It has been helpful to know that I can control how it affects me, but also that I can accept the world as it is, and not try to change it.
Radical Acceptance
The following is a talk that Dr. Esther Boykin, LMFT gave to an audience of creatives at Creative Mornings DC on the theme “acceptance” on May 19th, 2023. It was exactly the thing I needed to hear at the moment, and I think you’ll get a lot out of it as well.
When you first hear it, acceptance sounds like settling. As in, life is painful and we should ignore the pain it causes. Acceptance is not complacent or a resignation to accept the worst and give into the impact it has on our lives.
Acceptance is learning how to embrace something, taking what is offered and learning how to deal with it. We hope to get to a place of radical acceptance, to not mold or modify what life is. And instead, we can get curious about what makes up our lives, and what am I willing to do with a life that is in front of me.
The good thing we can do is change how we embrace acceptance. Using the Buddhist philosophy of attachment, we can stop attaching ourselves to what we’ve experienced and say: “It is what it is, but it isn’t who I am.” Yet, we resist acceptance, and we think: how can we be something that is our authentic self? We've all felt these things. This is not about shaming us for having normal human responses to life. It's more of an invitation to say, “Okay, I feel baseline. I see it, I acknowledge it. And now I want to use that emotional energy to write a new paragraph in my story.” The story doesn't change, but the character development can. And that's a whole new story.
The million dollar question is: how do we get to this magical radical acceptance, that is bound to this special liberatory place, that frees us from so much of the pain and suffering that we have in this life? There is no real one singular path. But I will say that there are five things that for me have become the essential pillar to cultivate a practice of radical acceptance. Life is nothing if it is not continual practice.
Clarity
One of the reasons that we often associate acceptance of resignation and suffering is that a lot of times we lack clarity. People say, “oh, we need to learn to accept--accept ourselves, accept a situation, and accept that this is how another person or relationship is…” But acceptance can easily become saying yes to not only the situation, but how we are currently experiencing the situation. Clarity helps us to step back and decide what I want to accept.
So as an example, if I'm focused on all the ways that my body post 40, is not what it was at 25, it is… more tired. It doesn't really bounce back from staying up till 3 a.m. like it used to. If I’m in that space and without moving into acceptance, what I'm really saying just to is not just getting older, but getting older doesn't feel good.
But the truth is that there's a lot of good things that come from not being younger, anymore. I am wiser, I am more confident, I am more comfortable in my skin, my age and experience, and that brings a lot of positive things. I’ve learned a lot about what I deserve and accepting that at 45 and not not saying yes to a slower metabolism and also saying yes to not really caring at all what anyone else thinks about my body.
Clarity allows you to see that I am accepting a situation and experience about life. But I am not accepting my current relationship to that experience. I stop fighting my age, and that I can't Freaky Friday my way into my 25-year-old daughter's body. And decided that my 45 year old body is actually pretty fantastic. It's carried me through a lot of life experience and it is deserving of more TLC of different foods, of more rest, of more experiences. I'm choosing to accept that I'm out of place. And that I have absolute control over how I'm going to experience that. Clarity is the key for us to move forward empowered rather than in resignation. And then there's because here's the thing.
Presence
Acceptance is right now. I know we talked about this idea of accepting what happened to us, right? So we're accepting a memory of past experience. But what we're really accepting is that something happened and it is affecting us in this way, and at this moment. Acceptance does not happen in the past and it does not happen in the future. It happens now. We have to be present to where we are and what is happening if we would like to reclaim our ability to experience it on our own terms. So it calls us into practice. How can we stay present in this modern era of social media and streaming videos and literally every fact ever living inside of our pockets or bags?
Staying present is no small feat. Personally, I'm in a constant state of starting over when it comes to my own mindfulness practices. But whether it is meditation, prayer, your art, your relationships, nature, returning back to the things that help you to be in flow with yourself, is essential to develop a practice of radical acceptance. Mindful awareness returns us to the very thing that acceptance is trying to give us power over, which is our own experiences. We can't decide how we want to shape the meaning of what's going on, if we're not even living in what's going on. So presence is a lot about practice, and practice also requires patience.
Patience
So when we are thinking about how we get to radical acceptance, patience is essential. My friend, Joel, is a meditation teacher, swimmer, and songwriter. He’s very grounded, and loves to wander in nature. He is really one of the most grounded people right now. And one of the people I love to have anything out, he really has kind of nailed this whole, like, acceptance thing. He just whatever's happening, he's always seen some flow. And one of the things that he attributes it to is his ability to be patient. And I think that for me, as somebody who struggles often with patience, his definition is really helpful.
So for him, patience is getting aligned with the pace of life. Rather than being super focused on wanting things to happen on our timelines, patience is about aligning ourselves to a pace of life to the pace of change. And whenever I think about acceptance on a macro level, like systemic oppression or racism, the idea of figuring out how to accept that is really challenging. And this definition is partially what gives me comfort. Because patience in this way is acknowledging that things are always changing. Life is always moving even when we can't see it. Patience reminds us that we are not accepting a static state, we are accepting a current moment that exists, and the pace at which it is changing, even when that pace is imperceptible.
Gratitude
The fourth pillar is gratitude. And I know, we've all heard about the benefits of gratitude. Some of you probably have a gratitude journal…you write your thankful list every morning or every evening credit posted. The thing is, a lot of us are wrong. But maybe not be the most beneficial. Because we hear gratitude and you know, okay, I have things to be thankful for. Let me write them down. And let me think about that, let me meditate on that.
In their book, Burnout, Amelia and Emily Nagoski talk about the research that really shows when we cultivate gratitude practice around process and people as opposed to outcome and tangible things. It is tremendously more effective. We want to focus on the people in our lives, but not just who they are. But how they are with us. A gratitude practice that focuses on relationships rather than simple characteristics that cross focuses on journey, rather than where that journey takes you. And the lessons learned along the way also creates this clear balance that nothing is all good or all bad. No moment, no experience is all awful, or all joyful. It's both. And this kind of gratitude, I think, is really helpful when we're dealing with things that may not be going away, and that are personally painful and difficult. I think about some of the most challenging aspects, sort of chapters in my life, and it's this kind of gratitude that helped me to accept them and to move through them.
The example that I wrote down is that in the midst of something like an illness, we convey that you're grateful for the medicine. But being grateful for the mere existence of a doctor is actually really, really difficult when you're sick. Because the truth of the matter is, you don't want to be the doctor in the first place. I don't want to have to be grateful for this medication or this hospital or this, you know, health care provider, because I don't want to be here dealing with this at all.
But when we can shift to a place of being grateful that I have a relationship with this doctor, that this is a place that offers me a tiny sliver of comfort, even if it's just for the five minutes that we're talking. And I feel like somebody gets it and understands what's happening to me, and the pain that I'm going through. That kind of gratitude is a lot easier to hold on to, it leaves room for us to honestly acknowledge that we don't always like where we are, and most of it sucks. And also, there are bright spots in the muck. Nothing brings me more joy than like a parking spot, right next to the front door. Or like the friend who you hardly ever talk to, but always manages to send the funniest meme on the worst day of your week. Those moments really carry us through, but they are fleeting. And if we are focused on an outcome, if we are focused only on being grateful for big things, we miss the things that carry us through.
I want to add something else about gratitude. It's amazing when you feel it, right? It is fully embodied, healing, and special and there’s an intensity. But we don't always feel it…and that's okay. Knowing that there are things that you think about being grateful for minus the felt sense, still has a positive impact, still allows us to move to a place of acceptance. No moment in life, as I said, is all suffering and pain. And just kind of knowing that gratitude practice that reminds us that “everything sucked today, but I did get a parking spot, right in front.” Now does that fill me with a warm light of gratitude for life? Not usually. But it does help me to shift my thinking, to be reminded that I can accept all of what is because in that acceptance, there are also good things.
Care
Probably the most important pillar or guidepost towards radical acceptance is care. Care for ourselves, and for each other, just care for life in general. Before anything can change, we have to feel held in a space of care and tenderness. And I want to be clear, when I say care, I think a lot of times we immediately go to like self care, which is great and super important. If you don't have self care practice. Come talk to me later. Let's get it together. Also, self care is not enough. Conversations with different data can be bad. We'll talk about why that's the case. But I want to be really clear that self care is simply a component of the self compassion and self nurturance that I'm talking about when I say care. It is much bigger than just having a morning routine.
It is really about cultivating a way of being with yourself and in the world that centers the feeling of care and tending to who we are, to what we need, and eventually to other people as well. The realization that I need care and it's in the most comprehensive holistic form that you can imagine, this all-encompassing feeling of being able to rest in a space that feels safe and filled with positive regard and kindness. And I hope that every single person in this room has that in their life somewhere, that there are some relationships and communities that hold you that way. But what is most essential is developing the ability to do it for yourself. And that isn't always easy if it wasn't modeled. It isn't always easy when life feels hard and exhausting or depleted, but it is actually probably the most important thing.
I had a session earlier this week, a longtime client, who's just in a space like everything sucks. I haven't had a win in five years. (I've been here for some of those years). But where we landed, I'm not here to convince you that things are good. Because you're not going to be able to see the good, that balances the awful until you feel cared for. That was the word, we have to come back to this space of being able to be cared for, if you want to practice acceptance of what life has to offer. Otherwise, it's really scary: “I feel raw and awful. And now you're saying, oh, just accept this experience at this moment, this whatever is in front of you…and somehow, in that, I'm going to notice the things?”
We need care to create a space for that. Care really works in two core ways, from my perspective. The first is common humanity. The truth is that part of the resistance to acceptance is that we all get very self absorbed: “Why is this happening to me, I am the only one who is struggling right now. I look around, and it's just me” or “nobody understands my pain, or everybody has it easier, or more support, or more opportunities.” Or swing the pendulum the other way. “Whatever is happening to me, is not nearly as bad as what's happening to other people.” And so it is not deserving of the care and attention required to accept it. It's not enough, it's not worthy when we have to think about care, particularly collective care, it reminds us that we're part of a much larger group of human beings, all of whom are going through something. And, many of whom would care about what's happening to you. And in order for them to do that, we have to accept it, so we can talk about it. Which sort of leads to the second thing, maybe the most important part of care, care is the easiest way for us to practice acceptance in the first place.
Just like I did today, most of the time, we talked about acceptance from the perspective of accepting what's hard, accepting what's painful, what's suffering, but what we don't like or we don't want. But acceptance is also accepting love, kindness and care in all of the ways you can imagine it. And so when I say that we need to focus on care, it is also because it forces us to practice a process of acceptance, to notice that even when somebody is as good and wonderful and warm as being cared for, most of us have some resistance to accepting it. There's some meaning we've attached to it, some stories, some narrative we’ve placed on it.
And so care is a practice, a weekly practice before the big game of learning how to allow things to come in, to look at the big picture to maybe sometimes people care for us in ways that we don't. It's not what we wanted, or it may not be exactly the way we imagined it. But can we let that land anyway? Can we let that soak into us? And can we notice what it feels like to accept it. And that feeling of acceptance, that sort of peacefulness and the sort of freedom that comes with no longer fighting what is happening, but being more curious about how we want to experience what's happening. That becomes our blueprint to take with us into much more difficult circumstances.
So I'm gonna end by saying that you're cared for, I’m cared for, we're all cared for. And I hope that you all will be able to take these five pillars and whatever else you've cultivated in your own lives around acceptance, and, and start to practice radical acceptance. So that you can feel free so that you can feel empowered, but also so that you can share that experience with other people. When we move from pouring so much emotional energy into resisting the things that we don't think we want, and start to focus more on how we want to face them, I think that we really empower not only ourselves but our entire communities to show up differently, to face some of the challenges that are in front of us with a different kind of energy and a different sort of optimism.
About Esther Boykin
Esther Boykin is a licensed marriage & family therapist and entrepreneur. Whether in her role as CEO of Group Therapy Associates, a coach, consultant, author, or media expert, she works daily to make mental health accessible, innovative, and culturally relevant for all people. Esther received her Master of Science from Virginia Tech in 2004 and began her career as a marriage and family therapist. Five years later, she opened Group Therapy Associates—a psychotherapy practice in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
After several years as CEO of Group Therapy Associates, Esther expanded the company to include a new division called Therapy Is Not A Dirty Word which focuses on bringing therapy ideas and therapists outside of the office and into modern culture through media, events, and retreats that focus on her relentless mission to increase access and reduce stigma.
Esther is also the author of two books and a sought-after relationship and mental health expert. Esther has been named a top 21 relationship expert by Cosmopolitan magazine, and has appeared on NBC’s Today show, Bravo’s Real Housewives of Potomac, HuffPost, Good Morning Washington, The Wall Street Journal, Coveteur, and a myriad of other media outlets.
You can connect with her online via Instagram @estherbmft.
Photo by Content Pixie on Unsplash
Finding Self Compassion and Love
Unconditional acceptance sounds like it should be easy; however, it is something that is incredibly hard to do.
As we work on building radical self acceptance of what is and what will be, it is highly important for us to also work towards having more compassion and love towards ourselves. Self-compassion can help to alleviate the fear we feel when trying something new.
Inspirational Quotes
"Being comfortable with who you are is the ultimate threat."- Sean Beaudoin
"Self-confidence is contagious."- Stephen Richards
"Envy comes from people's ignorance of, or lack of belief in, their own gifts.” - Jean Vanier
"Love yourself so much that when someone treats you wrong, you recognize it."- Rena Rose
Weekly Skill
Self-compassion is a powerful tool that can help to alleviate painful emotions and situations. Kristen Neff, PhD, one of the pioneers in the field of self-compassion research, has identified three important components to self-compassion:
Mindfulness: simply being aware that you're hurting and in need of attention.
Kindness: providing yourself with the same comfort and encouragement that you would like a good friend or small child.
Realization that you're not alone; many other people have had similar experiences.
This isn't to minimize what you're going through but to let you know that hard times are part of the human condition. Some people question self-compassion practices, imagining something along the lines of, "If I'm nice to myself, won't I just sit around all day watching tv and eating cookies?" A growing body of research shows that self-compassion increases productivity, decreases procrastination, and increases creativity. Here’s a Self-Compassion Exercise you can incorporate this week for yourself:
Think of a situation you're struggling with.
Assume a posture of self-compassion, such as your hand on your heart.
Say to yourself in a kind tone, "This is a moment of suffering," or, "This is really hard right now."
Take a few deep breaths and let the words sink in deeply.
Say to yourself, "Suffering is a part of life. Other people feel the same way." Take a few more deep breaths.
Finally, say to yourself, "May I be kind to myself in this moment and give myself the kindness I need." Repeat these words to yourself as many times as it takes for them to really sink in.
It might feel a little awkward to do this exercise, because we’re not conditioned to give ourselves self compassion. Often, we beat ourselves up over the littlest of things, and get overwhelmed easily. This activity can help us navigate challenges we’re having in our life much easier.