Acceptance

People sometimes make the mistake of thinking that accepting reality and moving on from the past makes them weak or naive in some way. So they hold onto their pain.
It takes a lot of strength to be the bigger person and say "You know what, the only one this is hurting is me, I'm moving on from that." But it doesn't mean you have to forgive and forget. 

Transcript

Acceptance: 0:00

Happy Friday people. Today I wanna talk about one of the frustrating facts of life. That things won't always go your own way. But disappointment, and it's extremes like grief and anger, takes a lot of mental strength. Which is why people ask me to talk about things like forgiveness, letting go of the past, moving on, letting go of resentment and anger. And although everyone's different, every situation is different and needs dealing with in your own way. I do think a lot of these things boil down to acceptance. Acceptance that something has happened. Acceptance that it hasn't and can't, accepting of other people and their mistakes. If our brain expects everything to go according to expectations, it's going to create an emotional response when it doesn't, the fight or flight response, anxiety, anger, and It can be hard to let things go, even though the only one hurting over it is you. And I think one of the reasons we hold onto these sorts of things is because we sometimes think that in accepting things, we're also condoning it, encouraging it and forgiving someone for something. And forgiveness is proper, hard, impossible in some instances, isn't it? We can't forgive everyone that has ever hurt us. I dunno what you've been through, but if my consulting room is anything like the rest of the world, some of you have been seriously hurt, abused and neglected by someone. So if we don't forgive then how can we let go of the emotion that our experience is created? Well, that's where acceptance comes in. People make the mistake of thinking that it makes them weak or naive to accept and let go of something, but I see it as quite the opposite, in fact. It's really hard. It takes a lot of emotional control and focus to deliberately think about something differently. It takes a lot of strength to be the bigger person, doesn't it? And say, you know what? The only one hurting here over this is me. I'm moving on from that. But it doesn't mean you have to forgive and forget. I get people in therapy sometimes'cause they've either been cheated on by their partner or they've been the cheater themselves and they wanna move on from the past. That's not easy for either of them. They might not ever completely forgive themselves. There might always be some residual guilt over it or leftover anger. We can move on and we can accept, but probably never completely forgive and forget. It's just that we can change the experiences we've had and the feelings associated with them into something easier to manage. Like simply knowledge. We can know that something happened and we can remember it if we think about it, but we can feel that it's not real anymore, that it's the past. In time, we can change the meaning behind the experience and change I am hurt into, I was hurt. I am angry into, I was angry. Maybe change, I am worthless into, they took advantage. So your brain can learn that it's outside of your control.'cause once you've learned and accepted that something is outside of your influence, that it's about someone else rather than you, the brain starts letting go of it. The reason things hang around is often'cause our brain is trying to go over the experience again and again in order to try and learn how to control it.'Cause if we can control it, then we can prevent it happening again. So it keeps us safe. One of the best ways of learning that the past is the past is to talk about it. And I know I'm biased as a talk therapist, but putting the experiences and the way you feel about it into words just seems to do something weird to it in the brain. So it begins to lose its hold over you as if the brain catches up with the reality of it and begins to see it as the past and something that can't be changed. It starts to become accepted. And so, if there is a way of getting the ball rolling on that acceptance, then do it. As always, there's a lot more about this on my Patreon page. Link is in the description. Hop on board if you like. There's a seven day free trial too, so if you don't like my content, after all, you can simply cancel. Have a good week, pod fans. Speak to you soon. See ya.