Life skills Radical acceptance (reposting since a lot of people like it)

Radical acceptance was the topic of my life skill group this week again i will do my best to explain it well, i hope this helps. The quicker you accept an unpleasant situation, a person that bothers you or you feel hurt by, events of the past, things of the past and present that you can NOT change, the quicker you will move on to a plan of action and feel better. I accept what i cant change or control. Remember, you cant change or control others (the way they feel or act or what they do) YOU are in charge of yourself, your feelings and your reactions and you have the power to change that. NOT ACCEPTING=NOT WORKING FOR YOU Always asking yourself "why? why is it this way? why me? why did this happen? why is this happening? etc " is useless. It is what it is. Look at what you are doing or thinking and see how YOU are letting yourself feel this way, when you feel sad, angry, upset, depressed..etc. It serves no purpose. Yes it is ok to acknowledge that something unfair might have hapenned or someone said something you did not like, perhaps you were rapped or beaten up when you were younger etc, the list goes on. It is ok to feel angry or sad but to stay in that state will prevent you from ever moving on. Acknowledge your feelings and then move on to a plan instead of staying with the pain and acting out by either drinking cutting shopping doing drugs etc... I will give a few examples the first one is very simple You leave the house in the morning and ask your spouse to do the dishes. You get home and the dishes are not done. You are very tired and yell at your spouse "why did you not do the dishes i asked you to, you should have listenned to me" most likely then your spouse will reply in a defensive way and a fight will start. What event happened that led up to this situation: I was TIRED and CHOSE to say something about it and it turned into a fight. (no matter if it is fare or not if the dishes were not done, the fact is they are not done and you were tired and chose to yell at your spouse) so step one acknowledge and own up to the fact that you were tired and said something while you could have handled it differently What rolde did you play in creating this situation? You again were tired and yelled at your spouse and were rude. what do you have control of in this situation? You can do the dishes, talk calmly with your spouse and make a compromise...etc What dont you have control of in this situation? The fact that the dishes are not done and that your spouse chose not to do them. What was your response to the situation? You got angry , hurt, frustrated and the dishes are still not done How did your response affect your own thoughts and feelings? You felt unvalidated, sad, angry, upset, hurt, then guilty etc. How did your response affect teh thoughts and feelingss of the other people in the situation? Perhaps your spouse had a bad day at work, and might feel hurt by this, feel attacked, insulted, sad....etc. What YOU do has an affect on YOU and on OTHERS So basically this situation can ruin your evening and end up in a long fight and you feel like crap. How could you handle this differently...well first ACCEPT it there is nothing you can do about the fact that the dishes were not done, they are not done and that is that. You could sit down with your spouse explain calmly that you are tired and really would have liked to have the dishes done, you can chose to say nothing and just take the 10 minutes to do the dishes (instead of hours of fighting and feeling like shit), you can leave the dishes til the day after. This is of course just a tiny example but it applies to everything in your life. I will give a more serious example and i will use myself. Pretty much my whole life i have been trying to please a certain person to get a certain type of validation and love. I realised this lately only, i have been doing it my whole life. Well evidently it isn't working for me, i am not getting what i want. I did this without realising it most of my life and even now that i see it i still sometimes catch myself doing it. Well one day in therapy a few months ago it dawned on me "hey, this person is NEVER going to change, i am always going to feel this way, why do i keep putting myself through this pain?" I then realised it was time to accept that i will never be able to change this person or they way they act or react to me. I will never be able to change anyone for that matter. But what i do have control over is ME and the way i let it affect me and what i do about it. Whether it is fair or not that i was not getting the attention, validation or type of love i wanted, it is what it is and its not going to change. I have now stopped trying to please this person, and stopped waiting for something i am never going to get. I changed the way I CHOSE TO LET IT AFFECT ME. I can chose to not let it hurt me anymore. I can chose to accept that this is the way it is and from now on, i will not stay in pain over this forever it serves me no purpose except more and more pain. In every situation we always have a choice. As i have said in previous posts i was rapped when i was younger. Is it fair? NO was it my fault? NO Can i change what happened? NO...I can spend the rest of my life in pain asking myself why why why...that will never change anything and it only keeps me in the past and in constant pain. I have to accept it, stop asking why cause there is no answer and move on,,,by moving on i mean, accepting the pain, acknowledging it and doing differently. Catch myself when i start thinking about it, or start wondering why, and stop myself before it escalates into a panic attack or a night of crying and suffering. I try to catch myself, tell myself yes it happened i will never know why then distract myself RIGHT AWAY, by either baking, reading, watching tv, calling a friend...the list is long if you have read my previous posts. You always always have a choice about how you feel or react. Most of us have spent our lives trying to be validated, to feel like we matter. And most of us only got that attention when behaving badly, by either drinking or cutting, or suicidal attempts etc...and as we get older this is such a brainwashed habit that we keep doing it. By cutting and drinking etc is a way to yell at the world I AM IN PAIN, I want attention, i want to be validated. Because this is the way we are used to getting some sort of negative validation. But no one will ever be able to give you the real good healthy validation except YOURSELF. DO DIFFERENTLY. Try something different. When you are starting a panic attack the last thing you want to do is go for an ice cream belive me, but you have the choice, you can let it escalate and be in pain all night, or you can tolerate the pain and instead of acting on it in an unhealthy way FORCE yourself and go for that ice cream, write an angry letter, go for a walk, Do different and you will get different results, Obviously what you are doing now has not worked for you or for me. We have to delay the instant gratification of relieving the pain and suffering by again eithe cutting, shopping, drinking, fighting, crying, panicking...etc,. Delay doing that you know as well as i do it is only a short relief and then afterwards the guilt kicks in, then when you feel guilty what do you do again, cut, shop, drink...and the vicious cycle never ends. You have to basically delay the gratification, accept the situation, reframe the situation, do differently and find solutions. It is not easy at all and takes TONS AND TONS of practice but what do you have to lose by practicing you are already not feeling good anyway. Slowly you will learn a new way to cop with things by practicing this radical acceptance. Soothe yourself, no one else will. Calm down before making any decisions or acting out. SO TOLERATE(feel it)-DISTRACT YOURSELF======RADICAL ACCEPTANCE remember When u know better you do better. take responsibility for your choices and actions Holding a grudge is like having someone living in your head rent free. I always think of a day when i was looking at a fly in my window (which is next to my door) the fly was trying every which way to get out throught the window. If only she would have flown right next to the window the door was wide open. Look around you and try differently there is a door open for you too. I hope this makes some sort of sense, it is a hard concept to grasp and takes a lot of practice, I tried to explain it as best as i could. If anyone has any questions please feel free to ask and i will do my best to answer as clearly as possible. Thank you for reading me :o)