Acceptance

Acceptance is the ability to accept the good and the bad in life without objecting, including thoughts, feelings, people, events, and the past and future. It can also refer to the quality or state of being accepted or acceptable, or the act of accepting something or someone. In psychology, acceptance means taking a stance of non-judgmental awareness and actively embracing the experience of thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations as they occur.

Back in the 1980s when I was working for the railroad, I had to go into a rehab program for alcoholism. I was the only African American in the treatment program and I wondered how I would be accepted. But I found solace in a paragraph from the “Big Book” that Bill Wilson wrote in 1937.

“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, and 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. Nothing, absolutely nothing, happens in God’s world by mistake.

Until I could accept my alcoholism, I could not stay sober; unless I accept life completely on life’s terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and my attitudes.”

I was in the Nation of Islam, but I was still doing things that went against the Quran. When I was released from treatment, I was looking for the Nation of Islam mosque, but God guided me instead to Masjid Tucson. And I found acceptance.

Megan Bruneau, a therapist in New York City, on the website mindbodygreen.com, has come up with things everyone should know about acceptance.

Acceptance does not mean liking, wanting, choosing, or supporting. There are many things we cannot change, but we can choose to allow it, to “make space for it.” You can “give yourself permission to be as you are, feel what you feel … without creating unproductive shame or anxiety.

The pain might still be there, but some of the suffering will be alleviated.”

When I experience back pain, I need to look for reasons it might be happening, and ask God to relieve it, but I need to also accept it as perhaps a test. I can seek help from doctors and medicine, but first I turn to God. If He doesn’t relieve the pain, at least He helps me accept it and live with it. I have to accept that I can’t do the things I could do twenty years ago, I can’t. But I know that if I can make it to Heaven, it will be a lot better.

Bruneau says: “Remember that accept is a verb. It’s an active process, one that must be practiced consciously.” This may require a lot of time to truly create acceptance of the situation. You need to “create and strengthen neural pathways in your brain.” You may go back and forth between acceptance and resistance, but it gets easier as you work on it.

In the treatment program I attended, they said you won’t be successful unless you work the program—meetings, sponsor, accepting the rules.  In Submission, there are things we need to accept and practice.

Cont'd on page 2