It is never the case that we are either fully accepting, or not accepting at all. There are degrees of acceptance.
Initially in the anxiety state, we are pretty close to zero on the acceptance scale. We refuse to accept our symptoms and fight them with all our might. We just want them to leave right away and never come back. We don’t want to experience them for another second, and cannot imagine ever developing acceptance for them.
As we practice facing and accepting our symptoms, we gradually reduce our level of fighting. After a while, we reach a point where we are no longer actively trying to get rid of them, but we are not truly accepting them either. We are putting up with them, resent them, and wish they weren’t there. We tolerate them (barely).
Resigned Acceptance
This stage is what I think of as “resigned” acceptance – “putting up with” our anxiety, and the challenge is to change this to one of genuine acceptance, which really acknowledges and welcomes the presence of the thought or symptom.
In this state of putting up with our symptoms, we may still be doing such things as:
- feeling resigned to suffering forever
- wishing things were different
- experiencing resentment of our symptoms
- counting days
- feeling sorry for ourselves
- thinking how things used to be in the good times prior to the anxiety state
- looking past current reality to an imagined “better” future
We may find ourselves having thoughts such as: “Why on earth would I want to accept ‘THAT’!? How on earth could I accept ‘THAT’?! ‘THAT’ is exactly what I want to get rid of!” (‘THAT’ being one or more of our most hated symptoms.)
This thinking is often caused by the mistaken belief that accepting a symptom, welcoming it, means that it will never go away. The truth is in fact a paradox – that when we truly allow a symptom to be there, it is free to fade away.
Genuine acceptance is when we have honestly and completely let go of wishing things were in any way different than how they are right in this moment. We have surrendered fully. But this doesn’t come to us right away – we have to build up to it. The stage that we can move into from putting up with our anxiety is becoming indifferent to it.
Indifferent Acceptance
We make the transition to indifference by repeatedly responding to our anxious thoughts and symptoms with a shrug and an expression such as: “So what?” If we do this over and over, we gradually teach our brain that the anxiety is not that important, and that the symptoms may be unpleasant, but that it is possible to become indifferent to them. This is the beginning of paying less attention to them and feeding them less energy.
Full acceptance of the symptoms, welcoming of them, and surrendering fully and letting them come and go without resistance comes later. In the meantime, the move from resentment to indifference is a big step forward in developing acceptance.
