“Rejecting reality leads to suffering.” Pa Kou Vang, my therapist
As children, many of us dissociated to cope with trauma. While that was a good coping strategy as children, it harms us as adults. It leads to numbing our emotions. We have to feel the unpleasant emotions to feel the pleasant ones.
Last week, I learned a distress tolerance skill called turning the mind. The purpose of the skill is to help us cope with difficult situations and tolerate difficult emotions that arise. The two other distress tolerance skills are radical acceptance and opposite action.
Turning the mind involves accepting reality. For example, I am currently struggling with anemia. I am waiting for the hematologist’s office to call and schedule an appointment for an iron infusion. I started having a pity party last Saturday. I asked myself, “Why me? Why is this happening?” I remembered what my therapist taught me days before about turning the mind. I acknowledged that anemia is my reality now. I chose to accept it and felt peace. No, it did not take away the anemia and the effects of it, but it stopped emotional suffering.
There are two paths before us: we can reject or accept reality. There is suffering that we cannot avoid. However, there is emotional suffering that we bring on ourselves when we reject reality. When I allow myself to question why I have anemia, I am not accepting reality. I feel worried and anxious, and my body tenses. I bring added suffering upon myself. As my therapist says, “Suffering is a choice.”
Accepting reality helps me stop dissociating. I needed to reject reality and dissociate as a child. However, doing so as an adult makes me suffer. I choose not to suffer any longer. This choice puts me further down the healing path.
How to practice turning the mind
Find ways to tolerate pain and not make it worse. Pain is a part of life. It just signals that something is wrong. It becomes a problem when we avoid the pain. Sometimes we face painful and difficult situations through no fault of our own. The website, DBT Self-Help, offers four solutions we can implement when faced with a painful situation:
Solve the problem if possible.
Change how you feel about the problem.
Accept your situation.
Do nothing and stay miserable.
My therapist gave me four tips for practicing turning the mind:
Observe that you are not accepting reality. Look for anger, bitterness, and annoyance. Notice yourself asking, “Why me?” Look out for should have, could have, and would have.
Go within yourself and make an inner commitment to accept reality.
Do it again and again.
Develop a plan to catch yourself when you find yourself rejecting reality.
Radical acceptance and turning the mind go together. By turning our minds from rejection of reality to acceptance we can practice radical acceptance. We can stop struggling against what we cannot change. Praying the Serenity Prayer, developed by Reinhold Niebuhr, can help us practice both turning the mind and radical acceptance:
God, help me accept the things I cannot change, change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
It is okay to admit how you feel. You can accept reality and also admit your feelings. I am irritated that it takes so long for the doctor’s office to schedule an appointment. I am not stuffing down my irritation with a pile of steaming numbness. I acknowledge it and remind myself that this will pass. I also admit my feelings to God in prayer, and that brings a sense of peace. If King David, who wrote many of the Psalms in the Bible could tell God how he felt, then so can I. And so can you. Part of accepting reality is acknowledging your emotions.
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Accepting our reality and learning to deal with it in a healthy way does bring a happier life! Great advice, dear Gina. Love you, <3