RAdical acceptance of ourselves opens the door to knowing and accepting that we are imperfect. This is essential because we spend so much of our lives trying to find some version of perfection. Interestingly, once we build a strong enough practice of accepting ourselves, we usually become more accepting of other people. It cannot work the other way around – if we try to accept other people while still holding a seething rock of anger and hatred towards ourselves, we will project that anger onto other people.
I rarely speak in absolutes, but I will say that it is impossible to feel for someone else what we cannot feel for ourselves. Self acceptance must accompanied by any other acceptance.
Accepting others is similar to accepting ourselves: noticing (who someone is), accepting (all of them), understanding (why they are the way they are), curiously questioning (to learn more about them) and allowing (imperfections and failures) . Many of us have been raised with unrelenting standards – we expect perfection from ourselves and we project it onto other people.
Soften judgments and embrace complexity
Unrelenting standards can be the enemy of acceptance, because of the shoulds we hold in our minds (people must be politically aligned like us, people must always be nice to us). I prefer to replace these musts with “it would be ideal/nice” (“it would be nice if people were always nice to us”). It removes the expectation and allows us to tolerate when people are not so nice.
Again, radical acceptance of others does not mean approval of them, nor does it mean that we cannot work to affect change in someone, or dislike someone, or disapprove of their behavior, or set boundaries with them. This does not mean a lack of judgment – being non-judgmental all the time is hardly ideal. If we have no ability to judge whether someone is good for us or not, we leave ourselves open to bad behavior and mistakes. Acceptance means that we recognize and understand that other people will inevitably differ from us. We can accept someone for who they are while still being self-protective and judgmental. Maybe we can even forgive them when they make a mistake.
A simple way to begin to radically accept other people is to be curious about them. Asking questions, getting into someone’s life and learning to see someone’s full self can mean we judge them less harshly. Certain meditation practices can also help build acceptance of others, such as Buddhist loving-kindness metta meditation (a type of meditation focused on helping us see the commonality in all of humanity). Learning to reduce comparisons and notice the internal judgmental voice (“I would never do that”) while replacing it with something more compassionate (“That’s a different choice than I would make”) can also help. .
Really, a lot of people mean well, even if they phrase it clumsily. It is essential to start from a place of good will. That doesn’t stop us from looking more critically at a person and ultimately deciding that they don’t actually mean well Accepting that we are all doing the best we can might free us to feel softer, kinder and more compassionate; and it might lessen some of the hurt and anger we feel.
And don’t forget… if you fail to radically accept others, learn to radically accept that in yourself. It really is win-win.
Acceptance of the world does not go your way
If you live long and hard enough, you will surely be disappointed by yourself, by other people, and by the world itself. It is important to learn to tolerate rejection, disappointment, regret and failure without exploding into fireballs or directing anger and hatred towards other people. When I work with forensic clients who harm other people, they often talk about reacting in a certain way (eg with violence or stalking) because they were let down by another person. Two wrongs never make a right and we have no right to hurt someone else because they hurt or disappointed us.
Sometimes these disappointments are broader and related to our own sorrows and regrets: the things we couldn’t experience/see/do/have. We all probably want certain things – good health, a beautiful home, people who care about us, a partner, work, hobbies, fun, travel. We may not have all of these things, all the time. Some will be beyond our control (such as whether we have close and connected families), while others may not click into place despite our best efforts, such as an unsatisfying search for a partner, or infertility. We may have some things and then lose them. We can let other people down and then feel sad.
I have seen people react to these conditions in a few different ways: a desperate, ceaseless effort to find what they think they lack, with increasing anger at the world for not providing it; an absorption of identity in the desired thing or regretted thing (“until I find a partner I won’t be happy”, “everything will be fine if I can just get pregnant”); bitterness and anger at other people because they have the thing they want so badly; or sadness and acceptance that the world will inevitably hold some disappointments and sorrows.
When we want something we don’t have, we tend to hyper-focus on it and assume our life would be so much better with it. Realistically speaking, we know from studies on happiness that we all have a happiness set point, and even great and positive things (like winning the lottery or getting married) will only increase our happiness temporarily – we will inevitably return to our biologically and physiologically determined grooves and will probably be the same self we always were.
That thing you really want that will change your life? It probably won’t – or at least not in the ways you expect.
We compare ourselves to people who have the thing(s) we want and ignore the lives that don’t fit this mold. And as we focus on the things we lack, we feel worse. I do not discount the pain of not having some cherished thing, or the fact that certain things can contribute to life satisfaction. I’m just pointing out that we’re all bound to be disappointed at certain turns in life and have regrets, and it’s better to accept that and get on with life’s tasks (including trying to make sense of any flaws you may have let go and fix. feel) instead of staying buried in regret, anger and sadness.
To manage difficult times, whether personal or global, we need resilience – the ability to endure disappointment and heartache, to hold on to perseverance and hope and to carry on.
We can increase our psychological flexibility around grief and regret by practicing acceptance and by recognizing that we are not alone or unique in our grief, even if it sometimes feels that way. It is important not to reinforce or idealize the thing(s) we want so badly. Everything has advantages and disadvantages, and that very popular thing is probably more amazing in our heads than it is in reality, and will also come with some costs (that we usually forget to factor into our thinking).
Lacking a specific thing does not mean that we lack the values or emotions that can come with this purpose – such as love, community, companionship or belonging. There are numerous paths to these emotions and values, and we can hyper-fixate on one path and ignore the others. Work with what you have, not what you lack.
If we cannot solve a problem, our choice will be between acceptance or misery. I know what I would rather feel. Life is a wonderful, wandering tapestry, and it brings things to different people at different points, sometimes in unpredictable ways. Of course, it’s helpful to have a general map and a sense of what we want, but we’ll find greater satisfaction in the way we live our lives if we also allow for surprises and twists.
