When you are trying to navigate on a hike, in a city (or in a mall) you must know where you are, and where you are going. Mostly these things are straight forward. You need new headphones, and you plug “Best Buy” in to Google Maps, which asks if you want directions from “current location?” and a route shows up to get you there.
But what happens when you don’t know your needs, or where you want to be, or even where you are? This is frequently the territory at the start of therapy. The known quantity is usually “NOT here!” You’ve reached some critical level of distress about a situation or a behavior. Our brains are very good at trying to grant our wishes and make up all kinds of illusions to let us believe that we are not where we are: denial, projection, displacement, regression to name a few. And while these illusions protect us from distress, frequently they are solutions to old problems that are no longer working.
In steps a well-meaning friend, or a professional who says, “you’ve just got to accept it.” And what this feels like is a sense that you need to lower your standards, because this unpleasant state is “as good as it gets.” But that is not the therapeutic purpose of acceptance. It doesn’t mean that you have to be complacent about your situation and just learn to tolerate it for the long term. Though it may take a bit of short-term tolerance in order to see where you really are.
“Happier,” “wealthier,” “more generous,” “more gracious,” these are all comparison words. In order to know if you have gotten “happier” you have to know how unhappy you were to begin with. Because being happier is about moving away from your own distress, not being happier than your neighbor. (If you don’t know how happy you are, how can you even know how happy your neighbor is anyway?) So, acceptance is knowing that on a happiness scale going from 0 = not happy at all to 10 =the greatest possible happiness, you are currently at a 1.5. When you move to a 3 you have achieved “happier.” And accepting that as an achievement means you know you’ve moved on the scale, but you can also keep moving.
Another part of acceptance is when you seem to be backtracking. Something occurs and you move to 2 on your happiness scale. It happens, but probably because you were making movement on a different scale. Like a path up the side of a steep mountain, when you make that hairpin turn, it looks like you are going “backwards” but you are higher up the mountain.
Acceptance is the starting point, a means of saying “right now, I am HERE.” It doesn’t mean giving in, giving up, or not trying. It means gaining clarity, understanding, and beginning.
Where are you right now?