Marsha, Marsha, Marsha

"You may have a lot of sadness. Acceptance often goes with a lot of sadness actually, but even though you've got sadness, there's a feeling like a burden's lifted. Usually if you've accepted, you feel, well, ready to move on with your life. Sort of feel free, ready to move. So that's what it feels like.

Let's keep going. Pain is pain. Suffering, agony, are pain plus non-acceptance. So if you take pain, and add non-acceptance you end up with suffering. Radical acceptance transforms suffering into ordinary pain." —Marsha Linehan, founder of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy

"Let's keep going." Ha, simple. 

I learned a lot from being with a partner who did Dialectical Behavioral Therapy for a long time. The workbook was around and often discussed. There's a few phrases I picked up from it, such as "emotion opposite action" (like, if one feels defeated and hopeless, doing a workout; or if one feels like dying, staying alive instead. For example). One of the phrases and processes that stuck with me was "radical acceptance," as well as "radical validation," starting with simple framework of "observing and describing." 

Although I do not have the symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder, I have benefited from a lot of Marsha Linehan's approach. Thinking about radical validation and radical acceptance helps me get some traction, when I am otherwise struggling, or fighting with reality. "Shaking my fist at the ocean," a friend of mine used to call it. The idea of radical validation has helped me become a much better listener, more tuned to holding space for the experience of other people without trying to "help" them or even think of "the right thing to say." 

This is a good summary of Linehan's "six levels of validation"

1. Paying attention and being awake

2. Accurate reflection

3. Put yourself in the other person's position (read emotions and thoughts, check for accuracy)

4. Validate based on history

5. Validate based on current circumstances

6. Open, nondefensive, radically genuine ("You're feeling this way, because it IS this way.")

Radical genuineness is a true way to meet people, not just a skill for therapists. 

Marsha Linehan herself on radical acceptance:

So, for Linehan, radical acceptance came through a kind of Westernized Buddhist practice, along with other insights. I think this is a common path toward this way of life. 

There's also the famous passage from one of the stories in the back of the book Alcoholics Anonymous. 

My resistance around these themes of radical acceptance has to do with a misinterpretation, that acceptance means either a passive total resignation in every case, or an endorsement of the way things are. I think it's more accurate to say that this kind of acceptance is simply making friends with what is, and, instead of starting from a defiant, oppositional place of struggle, working to begin at the start of what the actual reality is. That contact with reality is truly my version of a power greater than myself. 

I am not naturally predisposed toward this skill. But I feel like I'm getting better at it.