4 Reasons Why Acceptance Is Essential to Your Recovery

1. Understand the Importance of Acceptance

• Acceptance is necessary for your healing process.

• To practice acceptance, you must acknowledge all of the uncomfortable parts of yourself: your emotions, your thoughts, and your past.

  • Practicing acceptance is kind of like taking care of the dirty clothes hamper in your room.

  • Throughout the weeks, you fill it with your clothes and it piles up.

  • Work is tiring, cleaning the rest of the house is enough of a chore, and life keeps getting in the way.

  • You know that the hamper is there, but you've been ignoring the real mess of the clothes inside.

  • After enough time passes, you may even forget that you own some of the clothes at the bottom of that basket.

  • Finally, the day comes when you acknowledge that the corner of your room is a real mess, you're short on clothes, and it's time to do laundry.

  • As you take out each piece to wash them and dry them, you're acknowledging the separate pieces of the mess, and accepting the situation and the task necessary to clean up - much like when you take your personal inventory and accept that you are imperfect, that there are parts of yourself and your psyche that you must work to heal.

2. Recognize the Gifts of Acceptance

• As you grow and practice acceptance towards yourself, you're able to be more accepting of others.

• When we make peace with the fact that everything is exactly the way it is supposed to be in the present moment, you can make peace with the variables of life around you, including other people.

• Compassion gives you the ability to grow in your own regard, while you also aid in others' personal journey to self-acceptance.

3. Embrace the Freedom of Acceptance

• Acceptance - though not an effortless task - is a freeing habit.

• Anxiety, stress, and depression can often be caused by the unwillingness to make peace with the terms of life.

• It is human nature to think that one can control and manipulate all of the components of reality, but you simply cannot.

• Peace and true serenity can only be found once you accept life on life's terms.

  • As you find yourself troubled, upset by the day to day struggles, situations and others, remind yourself of the component of the serenity prayer in which you ask for the courage to change.

  • When you're feeling dissatisfied in those moments, figure out what you can change about yourself to accept the situations and people as they are in that exact moment.

4. After Acceptance, Comes Gratitude

• It's important to remember that acceptance is not synonymous with tolerance.

• Acceptance is not the reluctant sigh at the end of a stressful day, nor the disgruntled statement, "it is what it is," or "this is just who I am."

  • Acceptance is total mindfulness grounded in reality.

• Acceptance is the realization that your suffering, your anxieties, and stressors, are made worse when in the moments in which you believe that you can successfully live your life or handle your recovery on your own terms.

• As you learn to accept and make peace with the way things are in this very moment, you step out of your own way and step forward on the path to growth.

• The more often you practice acceptance, the more you will see that each moment has a purpose, a lesson to teach you, a reason for unfolding the way that it does.

• As you stay present in those moments and genuinely accept them, you may work to find ways to be grateful for life on life's terms, further strengthening your recovery and improving your quality of day to day life.

"When I stopped living in the problem and began living in the answer, the problem went away. From that moment on, I have not had a single compulsion to drink. And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing or situation - some fact of my life - unacceptable to me. I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment. Nothing, absolutely nothing, happens in God's world by mistake. Until I could accept my alcoholism, I could not stay sober; unless I accept life completely on life's terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and in my attitudes." Alcoholics Anonymous (Big Book), 4th Edition, P. 417