I grew up as the only child of a single parent and moved frequently until we settled down in Santa Cruz when I was 10. I was fortunate in many ways as a child, not so much so in others. Minimization was a tool that I used to help me cope with some of the challenges of my childhood. I always told myself that the things I had to deal with in childhood were ‘no big deal’. Relative to the experience of some others’, that’s true – but it doesn’t make them so in an absolute sense. The net effect of this minimization was that my early adult life was far less than it could have been. I’m grateful for what I’ve learned through my own therapy and my time in AlAnon, as those two experiences have been essential components in addressing my own problems with acceptance. Now, I’m going to talk about how you can get better at acceptance.

How do you improve acceptance? There are a number of important components to acceptance, one of the most important being learning how to ‘stay present’ – keeping your awareness and attention on the present moment, and the experiences and feelings you are having. This gets back to the first ‘A’ – Awareness. Often, one of the first things we do when we get into discomfort is to ‘go away’. We may go into the past or future and let our fears and projections run wild. We may numb or distract ourselves to go into a different reality. The following five-step process will help you become more aware of how you avoid acceptance and how to improve your acceptance skills:

1) When you find yourself having a strong ‘feeling reaction’ to an event of any kind, make a note to yourself that you need to watch for denial, future projection, numbing, and other variants of denial and non-awareness.

2) Allow yourself to have your feeling reactions, but recognize them as just that: feelings. Feelings aren’t facts – they are messages from our brain to try and draw attention to certain things. If the feelings are particularly strong and urgent, it can help to tell yourself that you are going to take action to address the situation, but that first, you need to focus on getting a clear picture of the situation.

3) Work on staying aware of what your mind is doing with that feeling reaction – is it jumping into the future, is it encouraging you to distract or numb yourself, etc. As this happens, just ‘observe’.

4) Keep asking yourself this question: what are the facts about what ‘is’ right now, and what’s the story I’m making up? You’ll develop two parallel ‘tracks’ of information.

5) As you sit with the feelings and observe them and how your brain is interacting with them, you may find that they lessen in intensity. If they don’t, try to stay present with the feelings just a bit longer before letting yourself shift to something else. Much in the way an athlete increases endurance by pushing through their discomfort a bit at a time, you can do the same with your uncomfortable feelings.

As with any skill, practice will make it easier and more ‘automatic’ for you. The mindset you take to any change process is an essential contributor to whether or not it succeeds. Henry Ford once said “Whether or not you think you can, you’re right.” Turns out, as we research this more and more, he was absolutely right. (If you are interested in learning more, check out Carol Dweck’s book “Mindset”).

Now that you’ve got the tools you need to be aware of a situation and to accept it, you’re ready for the third A – Action. I’ll talk about how to tie all this together in my next post.