Accepting The Possible
Acceptance is the key to starting on the journey of healing. Do you know someone who truly accepts you just the way you are? Do you accept someone else just the way he/she is? Do you even accept yourself the way you are? In order to help someone else grow or to grow ourselves, we must learn to accept exactly who we really are, not who we pretend to be. Only by discovering who we really are, accepting ourselves and others, and loving ourselves in spite of our flaws, can we learn and grow to be better people. This is why one of the basic tenets of marriage is to "love you just the way you are."
We all wish others would accept and love us. We wish we could just be ourselves and not have to hide behind a false front. To achieve that, we need to accept and love ourselves as well as accept and love others. One of the Bipolar Advantages that is illustrated so well in bipolar support groups is our ability to accept others, and support them in spite of their traits that we are so intimately familiar with.
No matter what the issue, you cannot even start to work on it until you accept it. That does not mean surrender to it. You need to admit to yourself that this trait really is a part of you and you can still love yourself in spite of it, while trying your best to be a better person. It takes tremendous strength to admit to yourself that you have both good and bad traits that could use some tweaking. Unless you come to acceptance, everybody else will know the truth about you in spite of how well you hide it from yourself. By looking at the things we judge as bad and balancing them with the ones we see as good, we can come to love ourselves and start on the path of making the good outweigh the bad instead of the bad covering up the good.
Let me repeat, acceptance does not mean surrender. To surrender is to say “There is nothing I can do about it so I might as well keep doing it.” To accept is to give it our best effort while not compounding the problem with thoughts and emotions like guilt and blame that only make it worse. Acceptance is to love yourself for who you are today while striving to be the person you can love even more tomorrow.
Do you love everything about yourself? Why not? Do you even admit to yourself who you really are? Most of us don’t. Do you know anyone who would love you unconditionally no matter what secret you let out? Are you afraid to talk about a part of you with anybody? Are you afraid to find out about it yourself so you just live in fear and denial about your own thoughts and actions? Don’t you think that’s sad?
How can we learn to better accept ourselves? Easier to start out learning to accept others. If someone says something to you, do you give them a look or response that makes them feel like telling you more? Or less? Do you make judgments about other people’s traits? Do you do the same for your own traits? It is easier to accept the things you don’t like in others since you don’t have to live with them internally. You don’t identify with them. What things about people do you disapprove of? Once you build a list you might find you have a lot of those traits yourself. If you can accept that somebody else has a particular trait, maybe you can accept it in yourself.
We also need to start accepting our circumstances. It works the same way. We need to learn to make the best of every situation while striving to make it better. Fighting our own negativity adds a huge burden to a situation that is hard enough on it’s own. Remember, acceptance does not mean surrender.
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