On a walk with a friend today, she talked about the term “radical acceptance.” In a Psychology Today article, radical acceptance is defined as “accepting life on life’s terms and not resisting what you cannot or choose not to change.”

I know that I’ve spent a lot of time and energy worrying about the past or focusing on how things “shouldn’t” be a certain way. The reality is that bad things happen to good people. How we embrace life’s events defines us.

With radical acceptance, we’re choosing to face our problems and reality. That doesn’t mean that we give up and not try to make our lives better, but we admit what we cannot change.

What I think is a bit funny is that for decades I’ve been following the Serenity Prayer and that’s similar to radical acceptance in that we need to see what we cannot change in our lives and accept that.

Neither of us can change what happened to us as kids growing up in an alcoholic or dysfunctional family. However, we can make decisions today that will help us grow, mature, and heal.

Radical acceptance lays the groundwork on acknowledging the pain we experience in life, but then we can decide to go a different path. For example, if we accept that a loved one has a drinking problem and that we cannot “fix” that person, we’re creating the emotional and psychological space to accept the person for who they are. That doesn’t mean that we need to continue to try to save the person or sacrifice our own well-being for their sake.

Instead, radical acceptance means that we accept the facts as they are—messy and complicated and then move onward.

Imagine how you would feel if you choose to make decisions based on your well-being and health, rather than trying to solve other people’s problems. Or imagine the freedom you’d feel to accept life for how it is. For good or bad, we’re now living in the time we are. There’s no judgment there. It’s just a fact.

And once we have the facts, we can then decide on how best to move forward to help ourselves.

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