The last few months, weeks and days have been difficult for Americans across the country. We have all faced challenges that impact our physical, mental and emotional health. You may be experiencing feelings of stress, fear, exhaustion and even anger. You are not alone.
It is a hard truth to swallow, but there won’t be a return to “normal.” We can argue that much about our former life was actually abnormal—its frenetic pace, its inequalities, and its injustices.
We see signs that parts of society are beginning to look more to the future and less to reclaiming an old way of life. In thinking about the tension between the past, the present, and the future, I have come to believe that the only way to move forward is to grieve the life we once knew, and to shift our mindsets to
radical acceptance
of our present reality in order to create a new normal that is better than our pre-pandemic life.
The term
radical acceptance
was coined by the psychologist Marsha Linehan. “Radical acceptance is an act of the total person that allows acceptance of ‘this moment,’ or of ‘this reality’ in this moment,” as she and her co-authors wrote in a chapter of their book
Mindfulness and Acceptance
. “It is without discrimination. In other words, one does not choose parts of reality to accept and parts to reject.” In dialectical behavioral therapy, radical acceptance is often used to help people come to terms with circumstances they can’t change. It requires us to give up the elusive idea that we are in control and instead accept reality as it is.
Linehan and her co-authors write: “Another way of thinking about it is that radical acceptance is radical truth. In other words, acceptance is experiencing something without the haze of what one wants and does not want it to be.” So without the haze, here is the reality we must accept: We are in the midst of a pandemic. Several States require that face masks be worn in public. We are in a recession. We have been in our homes and social distancing for more than two months, and this will continue intermittently until a vaccine or an effective treatment is available.
Presently, the toll on our mental health is unquantifiable, but the tears we cry—and the tears we cannot bring ourselves to cry—are the calculus. This is our reality. An array of emotions (anger, fear, anxiety, grief, etc.) may arise within you in response to reality. Suppressing these emotions can be tempting, but allowing yourself to feel whatever you feel, without judgment, is also a kind of radical acceptance. Radical acceptance can be freeing—accepting what you cannot change enables you to focus on what you
can
.
Acceptance also doesn’t mean throwing our hands up in the air or waving a white flag. To the contrary, once we accept reality, we can consider if we’d like to change it. We can say: “OK, this exists. This is happening or happened. How do I want to handle it?”In other words, practicing acceptance actually leads the way to problem solving.
Radical acceptance takes lots of practice. Understandably, it might feel strange and hard. But remember that radical acceptance is about acknowledging reality – not liking it or contesting it. Once you acknowledge what’s really happening, you can change it or start to heal. Radical acceptance has nothing to do with being passive or giving up. It’s about channeling your energy into moving on.
As always, should you or a loved one need additional support during these challenging times, SYFS is here for you.
Warmly,
Christine Mowry
