Radical Acceptance Helps You Recover From Trauma
Trauma recovery
“Radical Acceptance offers gentle wisdom and tender healing, a most excellent medicine for our unworthiness and longing.” Jack Kornfield
I heard about the practice of radical acceptance in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). My therapist then lent me a book about it called Radical Acceptance. Tara Brach, author of the book, defines radical acceptance as “recognizing what is happening inside us, and regarding what we see with an open, kind and loving heart.” PsychCentral defines it as a “means practicing a conscious effort to acknowledge and honor difficult situations and emotions.”
Radical acceptance requires that we accept reality. It is accepting your life–your feelings, circumstances, and past. You accept your life with your whole being. Radical acceptance is not approval of abuse or injustice. It is not love or compassion. It is not against change, and it is not passivity.
Studies show that radical acceptance helps trauma survivors. In one study, researchers had 120 people write down personal negative events during six training sessions. The radical acceptance group used a dialectical behavioral skill (DBT) that promotes acceptance of negative events. In another group, the participants reappraised their interpretations of the events but did not use a DBT skill.
The ones who practiced radical acceptance improved their ability to use emotional acceptance and cognitive reappraisal. The other group improved only in cognitive reappraisal. Researchers concluded that “cultivating acceptance can subsequently improve the ability to reinterpret reality for coping adaptively with negative events.”
Trauma Recovery and Radical Acceptance
Radical acceptance cultivates distress tolerance and increases resiliency. As childhood trauma survivors, we tend to dissociate. Dissociation makes sense for traumatized children. It is how our brains protect us. However, as an adult, it leads to more suffering. We lack emotional regulation when we live in a state of dissociation. Practicing radical acceptance means that we embrace our emotions and stop fighting them.
Here are the three tips my therapist taught me to practice radical acceptance:
Observe that you are fighting reality. Do you find yourself complaining about a situation? That’s a sign you haven’t accepted reality.
Remind yourself that reality cannot be changed, and there are causes for reality. Remember the Serenity Prayer? Lord, help me accept the things I cannot change, change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Pray that daily.
Practice accepting reality in your mind, heart, and body. You do this by becoming aware of what is going on in you. For example, if you feel fear, note where you feel it in your body. Sitting in meditation for at least five minutes and observing your thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations will help you practice radical acceptance.
Allowing myself to feel my emotions is radical acceptance. In early February, I had a tremendous amount of sadness come up during an EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) session. I knew it was sadness I buried as a child. I decided that trying to rid myself of the sadness would only be a form of dissociation. Instead, I sit with it when it comes up and release it as I allow myself to feel it.
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