Discerning Authentic Acceptance from “Shoulds”
What does it really mean to accept someone? Does it mean accepting someone’s moods, beliefs, behaviors, opinions, and attitudes? If it’s not all this, what are you accepting?
Rather than analyzing what you are accepting or not in the other person, you can understand acceptance relative to your experience of offering it. What do you notice when you are embodying acceptance? Perhaps you notice a sense of release, ease, clarity, openness, and warmth. In this expansive state of acceptance, you are still able to maintain self-connection, discern life-serving boundaries, and negotiate strategies that honor all needs.
In contrast, when you are thinking you "should accept someone,” you might notice a sense of effort, tension, heaviness, or contraction. You might give yourself little pep talks like, "He just needs acceptance and then he'll be okay." Or, "She is doing the best she can. I just have to be patient." Or, "I can be big-hearted here." Or, "I just need to be more loving." Once in a while these strategies can help you find acceptance, but more often they push you into that which isn’t authentic for you and doesn’t meet needs for anyone involved.
When acceptance gets confused with enduring another’s depression, anger storms, anxiety, or substance abuse, etc., you lose self-connection and the ability to discern life-serving boundaries or negotiate strategies that honor all needs. Relationships become smoldering volcanos that eventually erupt. Unmet needs rush to the surface and get expressed in ways that stimulate pain; like a sudden pulling away, lashing out, or making extreme decisions. Imagining that acceptance is an ability to outlast your own or another’s suffering is a reactive view that doesn’t open to creative possibilities for finding support or accessing change.
Authentic acceptance arises from your own internal process of making peace with what is happening and who is in front of you. It is not agreement, resignation, passivity, or submission. In true acceptance you maintain connection with your heart, wisdom, and skills.
Practice
This week set your intention to notice true moments of acceptance of yourself, things as they are, or the person in front of you. Study how you got there. What were the conditions both in you and around you that supported access to acceptance?
