Acceptance
ACCEPTANCE - the most effective means to deal with psychological distress of any kind or strength. Acceptance, easy to talk about, so difficult to achieve… WHY and HOW to succeed!
Life is full of challenges on a daily basis. Some we can find responses for, and so the challenge once dealt with successfully disappears… some we cannot find a response or only partly. The latter are thereafter haunting us, they become obsession, anxiety, anger, aggressivity, etc… the more we attempt to put these behind us, the more they dig their heels into our minds spoiling our lives. Were we to totally accept that there is no answer we can find, we suddenly see the issue flies away… this is the blessing of acceptance!
Why is it so difficult for us to accept certain situations? It is the same as having a physical pain… having to permanently live with it, never given a chance to forget it… seeking all the means to not feel the pain. Well, the pain IS NOT, the right target to be addressed. It is the ROOT CAUSE of the pain which needs to be found and accepted, processed, and dealt with! Now it has become part of what we can live with.
So, how about finding the true cause of those impossible challenges. Let’s take insomnia for example:
What is it which really concerns me by not sleeping? One needs to list all the ‘bad’ consequences of a perceived excessive tiredness - loss of control, bad mood, looks, exhaustion, loosing my job, close people getting fed up with me, maybe even illness and death at the extreme…. When considering this list of negative emotions, one could lose sleep over it!!! So, what is actually behind the insomnia is actually FEAR. When seeing this clearly, acceptance is only round the corner… I can see that my insomnia isn’t the cause of my concerns, and the fear I have now unveiled was only a consequence of my imagination working overtime, so it is now easy to ‘accept’ and take a chance that my insomnia will cause none of these consequences, take a view like ‘I don’t care about insomnia anymore’! If the cause is the extreme like if one cannot sleep it will lead to death… the only way is to become so desperate to end the insomnia that even death becomes ‘acceptable’! No sooner one ‘doesn’t care’ anymore that the insomnia will stop!
The above procedure, for insomnia in this case, will apply equally to any other tormenting conditions.
Caution: please consider that, should your emotions emanate from a physical condition, a visit to your doctor is always a wise precaution.