What is the role of acceptance in therapy?
Acceptance plays a crucial role in therapy, acting as a fundamental component in the healing process.
Read on to find out what acceptance is (it might not be what you think) and how you can use this valuable tool in between therapy sessions to support your journey.
What is Acceptance?
Acceptance involves recognising and allowing your own experiences, emotions, and thoughts to exist without judgement. It doesn’t mean metaphorically lying down and accepting your fate. While from a nervous system perspective collapse is very much a completely natural and understandable, unconscious or uncontrollable reaction to trauma, when we talk about acceptance in a therapeutic setting, we are talking about an active, conscious decision making process.
In the therapy room, or even in-between sessions when you’ve had a chance to practice it, acceptance can allow for the creation of a safe environment. A place of safety from which you can gently explore your feelings, rather than suppressing or avoiding them. (Which again, is a very natural and normal response to trauma, traumatic experiences, or stressful confrontations or situations).
Let’s take a quick detour for a moment to explore avoidance.
What is Avoidance?
Avoidance is a psychological strategy that we use unconsciously to evade the sensations of uncomfortable feelings, thoughts, or situations. It’s basically a learned (usually from childhood) but unconsciously employed defence mechanism that allows us to escape from stressors, anxiety, or traumatic memories.
It’s really the feeling that those stressors, anxiety or traumatic memories evoke in our bodies that we are avoiding. It is deeply uncomfortable and distressing to have to relive a situation that happened to us AND relive the interoceptive sensations that came with them; racing heart, sweating, feeling like we can’t breathe, panic, a feeling of falling, feeling trapped etc.
While avoidance can provide temporary relief, it may also exacerbate issues in the long term, preventing personal growth and healing. It’s on the continuum of dissociation, meaning that it is a kind of distancing our mind does for us when something is too difficult for us to deal with.
What Does It Look Like?
People may engage in avoidance behaviours in various ways, such as procrastination, distraction, or developing physical symptoms that keep them from facing the root of their distress. In relationships, avoidance can lead to disengagement, emotional distance, or a lack of communication, ultimately impacting interpersonal connections.
Think of avoidance as a part of you that is working hard to keep the experiences of your trauma, stress or anxiety away from your day to day self.
Signs of Avoidance
Here are some signs that you may be avoiding. There’s a lot of cross over here with other mental or physical health conditions and is meant to provide information and is not a diagnostic tool. Please speak to your GP if you are concerned you are avoiding or feeling disconnected from yourself or your life.
Disconnected from your body, thoughts or emotions
Feeling fuzzy or foggy, like a kind of brain fog
Feeling dizzy or nauseous
Withdrawing from friends, family or experiences you once enjoyed
Blaming others
Pushing people away
Being overly critical of yourself or others and only able to see the bad in relationships
Inaccurate beliefs about yourself or others - ‘there’s something wrong with me’, ‘I’m a bad person’, ‘I can’t trust anyone’, ‘everyone is bad’
Back to Acceptance
In somatic therapy, understanding and addressing avoidance is crucial and it is at the core of how I work. One of the most helpful things to understand about yourself is how your nervous system reacts and engages with avoidance behaviours. This can then help you to safely examine your fears in a supportive environment with self-compassion.
Acceptance therefore encourages you to acknowledge your current nervous system state and name your feelings, emotions, and behaviours. Giving them witnessing, oxygen, and light, to be acknowledged and seen.
By accepting where you are in your healing journey, you can begin to understand the strategies you use - patterns, behaviours, reactions - which helps you identify the root causes of your distress. This awareness is vital for making meaningful change. Helping you tell your stories and make meaning of them.
Another benefit of acceptance is that it helps to reduce this resistance to discomfort. When we learn to accept difficult emotions, we can experience them without becoming overwhelmed or flooded (another article coming on that soon).
This shift often leads to a greater sense of resilience and the ability to cope with life's challenges.
Essentially, we get better at feeling. The sensations won’t go away entirely, and indeed that isn’t actually the goal (sadly that’s just another form of avoidance).
But we can become a little more okay with feeling uncomfortable. With the sensations of anxiety and panic that arise within us. Which in time does dampen down the effects of these uncomfortable sensations, meaning they don’t rule our lives so much.
Crucially in my view, acceptance supports self-compassion. By accepting yourself, including the bits you wish you didn’t have, which sometimes gets referred to as our shadow self, and your setbacks, difficulties and experiences, you can be kinder to yourself.
Self-acceptance is at the root of overcoming trauma and chronic anxiety, as it allows you to move beyond self-criticism and towards healing.
The Role of the Therapist in Acceptance
Incorporating acceptance into therapy can also enhance the therapeutic alliance. But that I mean the relationship between therapist and client. It brings it more into a space of a partnership. Which I think is rather beautiful.
When therapists model acceptance, it creates a space where you can feel validated and understood. This means that therapists also accept their limitations, their biases, their blind spots. While we are always striving not to allow these to cloud our work, inevitably they do. But by being really open about this with you, knowing when it is time to try something different and continuing our own healing journey, we can serve you better.
This strengthens trust, encouraging you to explore deeper issues and work through your pain. Knowing that there is no judgement. Just compassion. And that we are all, ultimately, fallible humans just trying our best.
So How Can You Cultivate Acceptance?
Ultimately, acceptance serves as a foundation for change. It helps you examine the past, acknowledge your present feelings in relation to your past and present experiences, and envision a different future. By embracing acceptance, you can unlock your potential for healing and transformation.
Becoming more accepting in therapy involves several intentional practices:
Self-Compassion: Acknowledge that it is normal and okay to have difficulties in accepting different aspects of yourself. Practice self-kindness by speaking to yourself with the same gentleness you would offer a friend or a child.
Mindfulness Practices: Mindfulness can enhance your awareness of thoughts and feelings without judgement. This can create a space where acceptance of all of you becomes easier.
Explore Resistance: Identify areas where you struggle with acceptance. Discuss these feelings openly with your therapist if you have one. Understanding the reasons behind your resistance can pave the way toward acceptance.
Set Realistic Expectations: Accept that progress in therapy is not linear or fast. Allow yourself to embrace both the ups and downs of your journey rather than expecting immediate results. Be compassionate if you feel things go backwards instead of forwards. The reality is that all progress is progress, however seemingly small or circular. And remember that at the root of therapy is to get better at feeling, not just to feel better.
Celebrate Small Wins: Acknowledge and celebrate any moments where you experience even a slight increase in acceptance. Recognising these achievements reinforces that you can do this. And that you’re going to be okay.
Engage in Somatic Awareness: Develop a connection with your body to recognise how it reacts to different emotions. This can help you see your reactions in a different way. That although they are uncomfortable, they are a normal part of how we function. It can also help you become more embodied and grounded, lessening the likelihood for dissociation or distancing from your emotional experiences.
Practice: Try doing acceptance practices outside of the therapy room by embracing situations and people as they are, without trying to change them. This can help build a habit of acceptance that extends to your therapy journey.
By integrating these practices into your therapeutic journey, you can start to build a more accepting mindset. It takes time and practice, and quite a bit of effort to rewire our brain. You may find it difficult to sustain your newfound skills or approaches all of the time. That is okay. All progress is progress.
Resistance
I want to take a moment to acknowledge and explore resistance a little more. It’s a common challenge, simply because our brain has had a long time to get used to a certain way of operating. And has created these coping mechanisms based upon our past experiences. To change, our nervous system needs time to adapt. And it takes sustained effort to keep the work going. Sometimes, it can feel easier to give into the resistance. Or we may not even realise that we are resisting.
What may happen is that you feel blocked, or even angry. You may direct this at yourself, other people, or even your therapist. You may find yourself thinking that this is stupid. That you are stupid. That nothing works.
These could all be signs that you are resisting on a subconscious, nervous system level. And that’s okay.
Here are some steps to consider when faced with this difficulty:
Acknowledge Your Feelings: Recognise that resistance is a natural response. Rather than judging yourself for feeling this way, allow these feelings to exist without supressing them or telling yourself you are wrong or defective.
Explore the Source: Take time to reflect on what specifically you are resisting. Is it a situation, a feeling, or an aspect of yourself? Understanding the root of your resistance can provide insights into your experience. You can try asking yourself ‘Why am I feeling resistance/angry?’ and see what comes up. Repeating the question ‘why’ can be a powerful way to get to the root of what is really going on. Our brains are very clever at hiding truths from us!
Practice Mindfulness: As always, mindfulness exercises can be helpful to ground yourself in the present moment. They don’t have to be super formal or long exercises. Try a few moments of orientation (looking around a space to identify objects that you love or create a feeling of safety in you), sitting still and noticing how your body feels, or gentle movement with breathing. Anything that helps you feel fully ‘here’ and not like part of you is mentally somewhere else.
Embrace Internal Dialogue: Use Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy to talk with the parts of yourself that are resistant. Acknowledge their concerns and fears; this dialogue can be illuminating and can help facilitate acceptance.
Start Small: It’s okay if this journey toward acceptance of your life experiences feels overwhelming. Start with small things that matter less where acceptance may be slightly easier. For example, it might be easier to accept that you can’t control the replacements you get in your online food shop. (I used to get very annoyed by some of the replacements - what are they thinking sending grapes instead of strawberries!? Now I see the funny side. Not to be trivial, but laughter is often a great way to find acceptance!) Gradually working up to larger issues can help build your capacity for accepting more significant challenges.
Seek Support: Reach out for support from a therapist or coach who understands and is trained in the somatic approach. They can guide you through your resistance and support you in the acceptance process. If you are interested in working with me, you can find out more about my services here.
Acceptance – and in fact any therapeutic approach – is a gradual process. Allow yourself the time you need to navigate through your feelings without imposing a deadline on your healing journey.
While it can be helpful to have some vague aspirations in mind (eg ‘I want to feel better at feeling by this time next year’) and it is very understandable to want to feel better right now, putting too much pressure on yourself creates more worry and tension. And can bleed into feelings of poor self-worth and wondering why you’re not doing more, more quickly.
Your journey is uniquely yours. How long it takes and how you get there is also unique. There is no right or wrong. And there is no simple destination. But I totally get why you may be feeling utterly fed up with feeling fed up.
Finding a pathway to greater acceptance of all aspects of you can be a hugely powerful way to getting better at feeling. And more comfortable with discomfort.
Take care
Claire x
