Terrible things can happen. You are diagnosed with an incurable disease. Your accident changes your ability to engage in activities that have made life fun and meaningful. Your spouse decides they want someone else. Even if you are lucky enough to avoid huge life-changing events, you will face disappointments, hurt or humiliation that will require you to consider the many reasons why existence can be painful.
The inevitability of suffering is written into every aspect of our common past. He was engaged in such philosophers as Aristotle, Socrates, Stoics, Epicureans and Cynics. Religious leaders have been explaining the meaning of suffering to believers since humans first conceived of spirits or gods. The belief that our interpretation of events determines our experience of pain was seen in the writings of the 7th-century Buddhist Dharmakirti and the 11th-century Islamic polymath Ibn al-Haytham. The universality of suffering is made palpable through works of art such as Michelangelo's unfinished sculpture Pieta Rondanini (1552–1564) or Chaconne in D minor by J. S. Bach (c. 1710–20s), to name but a few. them.
Despite all this accumulated wisdom and perspective, I still don't know what to say to some of my friends or clients who are in pain. There is no new body for a woman diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer. No new spine for my friend who had a severe spinal cord injury in a skiing accident. There are also no easy solutions for parents whose adult children no longer want them in their lives - an area in which I have specialized for the last 15 of my 40 years as a psychologist. Often such people ask: “Will I really die alone in a hospital bed, without children and grandchildren to console me?” Who will bury me? Will my kids miss me when I'm gone?
No one taught me these questions, and I'm sure I answered clumsily and ineffectively in the first few years when I was bombarded with recommendations after writing my first book on alienation, When Parents Hurt (2007). But after working with so many alienated parents over the past 15 years and doing my own research at the University of Wisconsin Research Center, summarized in my new book Rules of Alienation (2021), I have slowly discovered something important: the more we try to avoid or avoid painful realities, the more we become entangled in the tentacles of their embrace.
I found guidance in the research of psychologist Marsha Linehan, founder of Dialectical Behavior Therapy. “The way out of hell is through suffering,” Linehan wrote. "By refusing to accept the suffering that is part of getting out of hell, you go back to hell." The way out of hell is through suffering. What should this mean? This means that you must start by "radically accepting" where you are now. Radical acceptance means you don't fight what you feel in the moment. Are you sad? be sad. Don't condemn it, don't push it away, don't diminish it, and don't try to control its passage. Turn to the feeling instead of turning away from it.
I learned this lesson the hard way. Part of my interest in alienation began when my own daughter cut contact with me for several years when she was in her early 20s. I was divorced from her mother for a while, but eventually remarried and had more children. , which made her feel displaced, which I didn't fully understand until she was an adult. During those terrible years of my estrangement, I repeated every day every parenting mistake I ever made. Tender memories, seemingly beyond revision, teemed with doubt and self-criticism. The times when I knew that I was far from my best upbringing were thrown into an agonizing cycle of "If only I hadn't said it, done it, wrote it...". At some point, instead of going down this path I thought, "Perhaps your daughter will never speak to you again." Always. Last time you saw her? This may be the last time you see her. You will have to come to terms with this. It wasn't a harsh or critical voice, but rather sage advice from some censored part of me. And the assumption of this grim reality was strangely, paradoxically reassuring. It helped me stop struggling with something that didn't change. It freed me and I became more open to how I failed her, leading to our eventual and blessed reconciliation.
Radical acceptance emphasizes the importance of facing our current state with all its dire consequences. Statements such as "This is not fair", "I don't deserve this", "This is not how it should be", however true they may be, only add to our suffering. To use a mundane example, imagine that you are stuck in a traffic jam, a situation where there is little you can do.
you can control. It's tempting to berate yourself for not leaving early, for living in a congested city, or to hate the person who creates traffic jams because they didn't check their fuel gauge before they left home. At times like these, we can either go berserk at the unfairness of it all, or take a deep breath and accept that this is what it is and that it's out of our control.
However, it is not only the feeling of being a victim of life in a small or large sense that creates suffering: sometimes it is our attempt to replace painful thoughts with happy ones. The title of an article by psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind (2010), sums up this reality. Killingsworth and Gilbert found that people were less happy when they tried to avoid thinking about the present by thinking about the past or the future. In other words, fighting what they felt, even with happy thoughts, was more disgusting than accepting their current state. In a related saying doubtfully attributed to Lao Tzu: "Depression lives in the past, anxiety lives in the future, and joy lives in the present." Of course, living in the present doesn't necessarily mean more joy—or joy at all, for that matter. If anything, focusing on the immediate present may well increase your feelings of sadness, fear, or anger. However, we can gain greater control and awareness of how long and how intensely we experience painful realities as we encounter them in the present. We can rethink the meaning of painful events, take action to lessen the pain and shorten the distance it travels through other aspects of our lives. By coming face to face with our thoughts and feelings, we can also free ourselves to appreciate the positive aspects of our lives that are not related to the event that consumes us: those we love and those who love us.
An example of moving toward painful feelings is illustrated by the work of psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, who advises people to get into the “details” of their emotions. If there is something that upsets you, try to delve deeper into your research and description. Ask yourself if this is just sadness or is it really despair, grief, suffering, agony, rejection, insecurity, sadness or defeat? Is it just anger? Or is it resentment, rage, irritation, jealousy, annoyance or bitterness?
Why do you need to be more specific? Barrett, who wrote the book How Emotions Are Made (2017), found that higher emotional granularity was associated with less need for medication, fewer sick days in hospital, and greater flexibility in regulating emotions. Barrett does not recommend focusing on feeling, but rather tries to explore its form and boundaries in order to increase its clarity.
Barrett notes that culture largely determines what we pay attention to and how our emotions are formed. She disagrees with researchers such as psychologist Paul Ekman, who believes that every emotion has its own neurological signature, which can be identified in a similar way across cultures. Instead, she notes that some cultures do not have a unified concept of experiences, which Westerners call "emotions." She cites the Ifaluk of Micronesia, the Balinese, the Fulani of West Africa, the Ilongot of the Philippines, the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea, the Minangkabau of Indonesia, the Pintupi of Western Australia, and the Samoan as examples of cultures that characterize emotions, not as something that happens within a person, but as interpersonal events. requiring the participation of two or more people.
The power of radical acceptance can also be found in exposure therapy, a form of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). In exposure therapy, participants are encouraged to gradually escalate the events or outcomes that they most fear, fear, or seek to avoid. This form of therapy can be done either by imagining the experience—for example, when a soldier with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is helped through a traumatic war event—or when someone with a fear of public speaking joins Toastmaster and takes time to climb stage and talk to the audience.
Exposure therapy, like radical acceptance, assumes that what remains in the dark grows in the dark; that serenity is achieved by looking deeper into the face of what we fear than by moving in the other direction. For example, when you first watch a horror movie, you will be horrified if it does its job. But how scary is the fifth, let alone the tenth, viewing of the same movie? At some point, your mind comes to the conclusion that since nothing terrible has happened, you should check your mail or buy something to eat. The parallel with the horror film is that the more we expose ourselves to (and radically
eat) what we fear, the less we weaken its influence on us. The more we avoid facing our fears, the less able we are to loosen their grip.
Facing death can allow us to feel more accepting and grateful to be alive.
Another method used in exposure therapy is "flooding", which uses the "down arrow" method. This is where you take the event that bothers you the most and keep going down and down and down until you reach the absolute worst case scenario. For example, Jennifer discovered that her husband was cheating on her. When she confronted him, he admitted it, said he loved another woman and wanted to file for divorce. Jennifer was understandably devastated and in great pain. However, she had a bigger problem, and that was how her mind terrorized her, telling her that it was her fault, that she would never fall in love again, and, perhaps most importantly, that the pain she was experiencing was unbearable. Using the horror movie model, I asked Jennifer to write a paragraph of her most compelling predictions about the future and beliefs about her being worthless, with all their frightening details. I told her to write it down every day and read it over and over again for 5 to 15 minutes until her anxiety and emotions for that day subsided. I talked her out of the distraction because I knew a horror movie couldn't tire her mind unless she watched it carefully. Over time, her anxiety began to subside, and her ideas began to challenge the automatism of her pathogenic beliefs. Like most psychological interventions, this required daily practice and diligence. However, with time and effort, she was able to reduce both the duration and intensity of her suffering by moving closer to it rather than away from it.
Flood and expose techniques may sound similar to what you are already doing - endlessly repeating and re-enacting negative events without any positive consequences. However, the goal is not only to obsess over your worries or difficult emotions; it is to deliberately set aside limited time each day—usually with instruction from a therapist trained in cognitive behavioral therapy—to gradually tolerate more and more of your worst beliefs until the emotions are no longer so overwhelming.
Mindfulness meditation is a common way to practice radical acceptance, as the goal is to observe thoughts and feelings as they arise, and then return to the breath, mantra, or anything else that anchors the practitioner to the present. The difference between meditation and intervention methods is that the latter are deliberately encouraged to recall worst-case scenarios, while meditators are usually asked to simply observe and accept whatever comes up - positive or negative - and then watch it pass.
However, the distinction between exposure and meditation can be subtle. A meditation called maranasati (death awareness) encourages people to often think about their own mortality. The Buddha is reported to have said, "Of all mindfulness meditations, meditation on death is the highest." Facing death can allow us to feel more accepting and grateful to be alive. It may remind us that despite life's pain and challenges, it's better than the alternative. And if you want to practice your inevitable demise, there's an app for that called We Croak (seriously).
Psychedelics can also provide an opportunity for radical acceptance. Although they have been shown to be useful in the treatment of psychological illnesses such as depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and end-of-life problems, their mechanism is not fully understood. I believe that part of the effectiveness of psychedelics is that they take away our ability to regulate or control what comes in and out of our minds while we are under the influence of these powerful agents. The oft-reported experience of being reborn during a psychedelic encounter may be partly driven by the need to radically face and accept your fears—their terrifying or beautiful truths—and see that you are not destroyed. The integrity of the ship is maintained despite being tossed back and forth in rough seas.
Pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott argued that infants and toddlers learn the attitudes and characters of their parents by playing independently in the presence of their mother (almost all psychological research was on mothers about two decades ago when we discovered fathers). In the play scenario, the "holding environment" of parental interest and availability allows infants to explore their environment with more confidence and a sense of security. More recent attachment theorists such as Mary Ainsworth found that infants who felt securely attached
those who were less securely attached were more adventurous in their research than those who were less securely attached.
Winnicott described therapy as a form of play in which clients explore the full range of their thoughts or feelings with the support of their therapist. For example, a lot of what I do as a psychologist is listening. I advise where I can, make suggestions where appropriate, but I also offer a willingness not only to listen to my clients' pain, but to do so without interrupting, advising, or encouraging them to consider alternative explanations. Instead of assuring them that things are not so bad, that things will get better, that things will definitely change, I would rather accept that their pain is understandable, that their situation may not get better, but even get worse. — and that their current painful reality could become the new normal. It took me years to see the therapeutic value of just being silent and letting my clients get into their details without trying to make things better. In the process of simply listening and caring, I expand my radical acceptance of their painful situation.
Of course, most people need advice and direction from their therapist, and I'm happy to help. But first they need to know that I can tolerate when I hear how convincing their painful thoughts or feelings are, how pathetic their actions were, and how much they are to blame for the results of their lives. Once this is done, I will be better able to help them move towards self-compassion, especially when they are burdened with a constant sense of self-criticism. Radical acceptance of our shortcomings—how our actions hurt those we love, that we are not who we hoped to be—is not only our best chance for redemption in the eyes of those we have wronged; this is our best chance to change how we deal with our own deep feelings of guilt, sadness, or regret.
Radical acceptance may be too weak to silence the shrill voices that threaten your well-being.
But why is anxiety so common? This is because our brains did not evolve to make us happy; they evolved to keep us alive. To such an extent, our minds inflate potential dangers because those who failed to appreciate the real threats did not live long enough to pass on their genes. For example, if my Jewish ancestors said: “Dictator, shmiktator. You worry too much! and stayed in Eastern Europe, they wouldn't live long enough to pass on their anxiety genes to me and my offspring. In other words, the collection of annoying, catastrophic, overgeneralizing, self-critical mental characters that create so much suffering has an adaptive value; they just shouldn't be put at the head of the show. Radical acceptance is a way of saying, “You got my attention. Thank you for your concern that things are as bad as you describe and may be just as bad in the future. I took seriously what you want to say, but now I'll see what else pops up in my mind. While many painful feelings pass without our intervention, those that cause the most acute suffering demand more from us. If we don't explore, label, and accept unpleasant thoughts or feelings, the part of us that thinks we're truly in danger can become louder and more insistent.
On the other hand, if there's one thing I've learned as a psychologist, it's that what works for one person won't work for another. The practice of radical acceptance, or any of the other methods I have described here, may still be too weak a tool to silence the shrill and persuasive voices that threaten your well-being. If so, activities and activities that distract you from your reflections, such as intense exercise, loud music, supportive friends, spending time in nature, helping others, and developing self-compassion, can help.
Culture can also determine how hard we need to work to move beyond our painful beliefs. There is growing evidence that cultures with high levels of social inequality, such as the United States, China, or India, experience much higher levels of depression and anxiety than cultures with low levels of social inequality, such as Germany, Japan, and the Scandinavian countries. A recent study by psychologist Iris Moss and colleagues found that the more we pursue happiness as an individual quest, as is commonly prescribed in the US, the more unhappy, lonely, and depressed we become. On the contrary, in those countries where happiness is defined as a form of social activity rather than as an individual pursuit, the result is greater happiness.
This is because our destinies are inextricably linked with others. Americans, despite our staggering wealth, are relationship poor. We are more isolated
rowan, more tribal, more lonely. While the practice of radical acceptance is an important way of facing the truth that we would rather avoid, friends and supportive family can make the act of acceptance less daunting, less lonely, and ultimately less painful. “It is very, very dangerous,” writes Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), “to live even one day.
But it is much more dangerous when we make our way alone.
