Acceptance First

And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing or situation - some fact of my life - unacceptable to me. I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment.

~Alcoholics Anonymous

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Let’s cut to the chase. The reason for acceptance is simple:

Nothing we do can be effective when our starting point is a lack of acceptance.

Most likely, we do not understand sufficiently, and the result is we unknowingly become part of the problem, or create some other problem. Our frustration, or pain, or anger, or suffering gets directed elsewhere.

The psychological term for this is “projection.” Something in the external world triggers us. We interpret it wrongly. We react out of our own unresolved confusion, history or wounds. We harm others, or we act ineffectively.

Here’s the irony. None of us set out to make mistakes, do wrong, or hurt others. Yet somehow we get caught up in things and do what we would wish to avoid.

There are two essential matters we need to understand.

The first comes courtesy of Brene Brown.

Her research shows that when we blame someone or something for what we are feeling or experiencing, our ability to be curious and to explore ceases. Once we discharge our emotional response, at a fundamental level in our brain, we have found the problem out there, assigned fault to it, and we move on. Never to learn what it is that triggered us. Never to see what we are bringing to the problem. Never to understand.

The second challenge we face is that we are storytellers. We are built by life itself to interpret the world based on what and how we perceive. Note that this does not mean we interpret accurately. It means we have an experience, tell ourselves a story, which usually assigns blame, then react accordingly. Once again, we find ourselves caught in a dynamic.

Sometimes I imagine us to be like pinballs, unable to do anything other than to carom off an endless array of bumpers and obstacles, each encounter including pain or injury, and yet one more cause to keep on caroming.

Everywhere I go, there I am.

At this point it may seem hopeless, or maybe ridiculous. Yet within our pinballing realities there is an elegant, beautiful design. It is available to us as soon as we shift our perspective. When we can move from resistance to acceptance, possibilities and potential arise for the better.