Radical acceptance of ourselves opens the door to knowing and accepting that we are imperfect. This is vital because we spend so much of our lives trying to find some version of perfection. Interestingly, as soon as we build a strong enough practice of accepting ourselves, we usually become more accepting towards other people. This can’t work in reverse – if we try to accept other people while still holding a seething bedrock of anger and hate at ourselves, we will project that anger on to other people.
I rarely speak in absolutes, but I will say it is impossible to feel for someone else what we cannot feel for ourselves. Self-acceptance must accompany any other acceptance.
Acceptance of others is similar to accepting ourselves: noticing (who someone is), accepting (all of them), understanding (why they are the way they are), curiously questioning (to learn more about them) and allowing (imperfections and failures). Many of us have been raised with unrelenting standards – we expect perfection of ourselves and we project this on to other people.
Soften judgments and embrace complexity
Unrelenting standards can be the enemy of acceptance, because of the shoulds we hold in our mind (people should be politically aligned like us, people should always be kind to us). I prefer to replace these shoulds with “it would be ideal/nice” (“it would be nice if people were always kind to us”). This removes the expectation and allows us to tolerate it when people are not so nice.
Once again, radical acceptance of others does not mean approval of them, nor does it mean that we can’t work to influence change in someone, or dislike someone, or disapprove of their behaviour, or set boundaries with them. It doesn’t mean a lack of judgment – being nonjudgmental all the time is hardly ideal. If we have no capacity to judge whether someone is good for us or not, we leave ourselves open to bad behaviour and mistakes. Acceptance means that we acknowledge and understand that other people will inevitably be different from us. We can accept that someone is how they are while still being self-protective and discerning. Perhaps we can even forgive them when they make a mistake.
A simple way to start radically accepting other people is to be curious about them. Asking questions, getting inside someone’s life and learning to see someone’s full self can mean we judge them less harshly. Certain meditation practices can also help building acceptance of others, such as Buddhist loving-kindness metta meditation (a type of meditation focused on helping us see the commonality in all of humanity). Learning to reduce comparisons and noticing the internal judging voice (“I would never do that”) while replacing it with something more compassionate (“That is a different choice from what I would make”) can also help.
Really, many people mean well even if they express it clumsily. Starting from a place of assuming good will is essential. This doesn’t stop us from looking at a person more critically and eventually deciding that they don’t actually mean well. Assuming that we are all doing the best we can, though, might free us up to feel gentler, kinder and more compassionate; and it might reduce some of the hurt and anger we feel.
And don’t forget ... if you fail at radically accepting others, learn to radically accept that in yourself. It’s win-win, really.
Acceptance of the world not going your way
If you live long and hard enough, you are bound to be disappointed by yourself, by other people and by the world itself. It’s important to learn to tolerate rejection, disappointment, regret and failure without exploding in fireballs or directing anger and hate towards other people. When I work with forensic clients who harm other people, they often talk about having responded in a certain way (eg with violence or by stalking) because they were let down by another person. Two wrongs never make a right and we are not entitled to hurt someone else because they have hurt or disappointed us.
Sometimes these disappointments are broader and related to our own sorrows and regrets: the things we have not been able to experience/see/do/have. We probably all want certain things – good health, a beautiful house, people who care about us, a partner, work, hobbies, fun, travel. We may not have all these things, all the time. Some will be out of our control (such as whether we have close and connected families), while others may not click into place despite our best efforts, such as an unfulfilling search for a partner, or infertility. We may have some things and then lose them. We may let other people down and then feel sorrow.
I have seen people respond to these conditions in a few different ways: a desperate, unceasing attempt to find what they think they lack, with increasing anger at the world for not providing it; an absorption of identity into the longed-for thing or regretted thing (“until I find a partner, I will not be happy”, “everything would be fine if I could just get pregnant”); bitterness and anger at other people for having the thing they so want; or grief and acceptance that the world will necessarily hold some disappointments and sadness.
When we want something we don’t have, we tend to hyper-focus on it and assume our life will be so much better with it. Realistically, we know from studies into happiness that we all have a happiness set-point, and even large and positive things (such as winning the lottery or getting married) will only temporarily increase our happiness – we will inevitably settle back into our biologically and physiologically determined grooves and will likely be the same selves we always were.
That thing you really want that will change your life? It probably won’t – or, at least, not in the ways you’re expecting.
We compare ourselves to people who have the thing(s) we want and ignore the lives that do not fit in this mould. And as we focus on the things we lack, we feel worse. I am not discounting the pain of not having some cherished thing, or the fact that having certain things can add to life satisfaction. I am merely pointing out that we are all bound to be disappointed at certain turns in life and have regrets, and it is better to accept this and get on with the tasks of living (including trying to sensibly problem-solve and remedy any lacks you feel) instead of staying buried in regret, anger and sadness.
To manage difficult times, whether personal or global, we need resilience – the capacity to tolerate disappointments and sorrows, to hold on to perseverance and hope and to keep going.
We can increase our psychological flexibility around sadness and regrets by practising acceptance and by recognising we are not alone or unique in our sadness, even though it might feel like it at times. It is important not to amplify or idealise the thing(s) we want so much. Everything has pros and cons, and that much-desired thing is probably more wonderful in our heads than it is in reality, and will also bring some costs (which we usually forget to factor into our thinking).
Lacking a specific thing doesn’t mean we lack the values or the emotions that may come with this goal – such as love, community, companionship or belonging. There are numerous pathways to these emotions and values, and we can hyper-fixate on one pathway and ignore the others. Work with what you have, not with what you lack.
If we can’t fix a problem our choice will be between acceptance or misery. I know which I would rather feel. Life is a wonderful, wandering tapestry, and it brings different people things at various points, sometimes in unpredictable ways. It is helpful to have a general map and sense of what we want, of course, but we will find greater satisfaction in the way we live our lives if we also allow for surprises and twists.
This is an edited extract from Life Skills for a Broken World by Dr Ahona Guha (RRP$27.99, Scribe), out on 9 January 2024
