Week 8 - Mid-Week Update
This week I want to talk about a skill that is central to DBT: radical acceptance. The idea itself isn’t all that radical, but it can feel radical in the moment. The idea is that we need to radically accept reality/life as it is. And maybe your thought is “duh.” But if you think about it a little more, there’s probably a hundred and one things in your daily life that you struggle against and try not to accept. For me, this can range from things as little as the fact that I need to fold the laundry that comes out of the dryer or change my bedsheets to that I need to eat meals to fuel my body to that I need to exercise to keep my body healthy to that I need to shower to maintain good hygiene to that I can’t change my parents, who they are, or what they’re like. There are a lot of things in my life that I have difficulty accepting, and although I was introduced to the idea of radical acceptance a while back, right now I’m working on figuring out the major things in my life that I have been fighting against despite their reality and trying to apply radical acceptance to the small things in my daily life that I have little motivation for, but are necessary.
In the day to day, there are a lot of things that I need to work on radically accepting. I tend to procrastinate on folding laundry because for some reason that task just feels impossibly boring and exhausting to me, although it tends to not be as bad as I think it is once I actually start doing it unless I am in a state of severe depression. I fight and fight and fight against the reality that I need to get the clothes out of the dryer, take them to my room, sit down and fold them, and then put them away, even though I know I will end up doing them. Might as well accept the reality that this is a necessary task and that I will probably do it eventually and just get it done, rather than waiting and refusing to do it and letting them sit until they get wrinkly, which I hate because now the wrinkles are a constant reminder of my failure to put them away in a timely manner and because they feel like a sign to the world that my life is a mess.
Another thing is brushing my teeth and showering (this is common to people with depression) – I know I should do it, I know I will enjoy the results of brushing my teeth and the experience of showering, but I just cannot get myself to do those tasks a lot of the time. Part of it is an executive dysfunction problem, but it also is a lot of me fighting against the reality that as a human being, I need to maintain my hygiene. It’s a part of life, but I frequently find myself fighting against that reality, and then I feel bad for not doing taking care of it. I dread doing those tasks, despite the fact that they leave me feeling better, and because I dread it I will struggle against the part of my brain telling me to do it, which only creates more problems for me.
Then there’s eating. Eating is really hard for me a lot of the times, either because I don’t like the way my body looks and I have the desperate desire to lose weight by starving myself, or because it takes too much energy to do all the things involved with having a meal (cooking, eating, AND cleaning), or because I’m just not hungry, at which point feeding myself feels more like torture than self-care. And I will rationalize and talk myself out of eating and tell myself that it’s okay that I don’t eat, all of which are just ways that I’m fighting the reality that I am a human being, and my body needs fuel, and food is fuel. I KNOW that I should eat, I KNOW that I need to eat to keep doing the life things, I KNOW that my support network would be very concerned about me not eating and would want me to eat, but it’s just so hard to do it, and I find myself trying to work around the reality that I NEED TO EAT, instead of accepting it. When I think about it that way, it’s easy to see why it’s called radical acceptance – it feels radical and revolutionary and both profoundly difficult and profoundly important that I can empower myself to just stop fighting life and go with the current that is reality instead of pushing and fighting and failing to swim against the current. If you’ve ever tried to swim or even walk upstream, you’ll know how impossible and utterly useless it is to fight a current (fun fact: that’s why you should always swim perpendicular to a riptide instead of directly against it!).
I could go on and on about the little things in my life that I struggle against, but you get the idea. Then there’s the big things in life. One of the major things that I’ve noticed that I struggle with accepting people as they are, and that you can’t change them. Again, maybe you think that’s obvious, but I’m betting if you really reflect on it, there are at least a couple people in your life that you have tried to or want to change. Maybe you’ve tried to change the way they’re always running late, or the way they always cancel last minute, or their taste in romantic partners, or their views on some political/economic/social topic. Honestly, I think we’re all a little guilty of trying to change the people we love, and also maybe people we just run into on the street or in social media comments. But we can’t change anyone. We have control over absolutely no one but ourselves. There are certainly ways we can influence people, but usually when we’re actively trying to “influence” someone we love, it’s not in a healthy way. Influence done in a healthy manner generally takes the form of leading by example, not manipulating or nudging people a certain way by our words or actions.
And if you’re like me, the people you most want to (and maybe try to) change are your family. It wasn’t until recently that I realized that I’ve spent my whole life wishing, expecting, and actively trying to change my parents. It’s the people we care about the most that we’re probably the most guilty of trying to change, and I am still trying to accept the fact that I cannot change who my parents are, how they were raised, or how they behave and think. I can share my story with them, I can set boundaries with them, and I can change the way I interact with them, but I cannot actually change them in any way, shape, or form. I can’t change their relationship with each other, I can’t change how they show up in the world, and I can’t change how they deal with their own issues. I’ve noticed that this is something that I don’t just need to accept one time, but that I have to accept over and over again, reminding myself over and over that this is the case, especially when something comes up and I feel that urge in me kick in that tells me to try to do something to make behave or speak differently. But realizing that I can’t change them has also been freeing, because now I am no longer burdened with a task that has always been impossible. Trying to exert control over something that I have absolutely ZERO control over is a recipe for disaster, and realizing that I can only control myself is empowering because now I can focus on doing the things that I actually have the power to do. I’m now working on going creating a list of things that I need to work on radically accepting, and a list of things that majorly affect my life that I CAN change and I’m hoping that this will lead to a greater sense of peace and control in my life.