Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Acceptance and Change

Introduction
I stole the title for this sermon, “Acceptance and Change,” from the title of a book on couple counseling¹. Now, couples usually come to counseling because each wants to change something about the other. Sometimes counseling can facilitate that kind of change. But the book’s viewpoint is that it’s often more effective to encourage the partners to be more accepting of each other.

Stated that way, the idea hardly seems controversial. But it stirred up some strong feeling in a therapists’ book group that I belong to. Some members objected to the whole idea. They wondered, “Should people really be encouraged to put up with things they don’t like about each other? Doesn’t that let people off the hook for bad behavior? Won’t it just lead to resignation? Isn’t it settling for a relationship that is less than it could be? Anyway, there are some things that just shouldn’t be accepted, like abuse.”

I don’t think this group was unique in its reaction. I’ve heard similar reactions when talking about acceptance in other settings.

Yet, in spite of concerns like these, advocating acceptance is a popular trend in psychotherapy^2,3. There are a number of new therapeutic approaches with names like “Acceptance and Commitment⁴” and slogans like “Wise Mind Accepts⁵.” Most of them draw on spiritual traditions, typically Buddhist. Especially popular is mindfulness meditation, in which one pays attention to one’s experience in an open and non-judgmental way. The Rumi poem⁶ that Phyllis read presents a similar celebration of acceptance, in this case from the Sufi spiritual tradition.

So we find that a notion of acceptance is considered desirable in certain spiritual traditions and psychotherapies. There is a belief, which we’ll discuss later, that acceptance can lead to peace of mind and a more effective life.

At the same time, acceptance is a word with negative associations. It can stir up resistance, particularly if someone else is refusing to change and telling you to “just accept it.” Acceptance may seem too passive, precluding the possibility of change.

Serenity prayer
In thinking about this tension between change and acceptance, I find that the Serenity Prayer is a powerful anchor. The words are so familiar as to be almost a cliché:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.⁷

Incidentally, although it is phrased as a prayer to God, I think these words speak to the human condition, and have meaning whether or not one is a theist.

There are three phrases in the prayer, and each asks for a specific virtue: serenity to accept, courage to change, and wisdom to know. I’m going to look at each of those virtues in turn.

Courage to change
I’ll start with “courage to change” because I don’t feel that I have to say much about it. We can all feel good about the courage to change — it is glorified in our culture. We idealize the hero who battles on against all odds, refusing to accept defeat. We see this in fiction like the Lord of the Rings, and in real life heroes like Christopher Reeves, with his determined belief that he could walk again. We all admire the courage to change, as we should.

Serenity to accept
Our culture’s attitude toward the second virtue, “serenity to accept,” is less enthusiastic. There aren’t all that many news stories, books, and movies about people who accept difficulties with serenity. (There are some, however, such as Tuesdays with Morrie⁸, a marvelous book about a man embracing life as he deals with a terminal illness.)

In spite of our culture’s lack of enthusiasm for acceptance, I suspect that most of us have experienced a time when acceptance made our life easier. One that stands out for me happened about 15 years ago, when I was a volunteer grief counselor for Kara in Palo Alto. After about a year there, hearing one painful story after another, my anxiety began to mount. It became increasingly real to me that things like the stories I was hearing could happen to me or the people I loved.

With every new story, I found myself planning more protective action. Did that teenager die in a car accident where alcohol was involved? I’ve got to figure out how to make sure my kids never drink and drive. Did that young woman die of cancer? Schedule a comprehensive check-up right away. Were those children left without a guardian? Rush to the lawyer to make sure our wills cover every contingency. And on and on.

Did all this planning help? Alas no. With every new protective action I added to my list, my anxiety got worse.

And then, quite suddenly, the planning collapsed. I finally saw that I had taken on the task of guaranteeing my family’s safety against all possible threats, and that was surely beyond my power. At first this was terrifying. My fear seemed unmanageable, since I now saw there was no protection. But soon I felt relief instead of fear. I could finally put down the burden of trying to do the impossible. The energy that had been tied up in all that planning became available to engage with life in more productive ways. I found that I had more clarity in deciding what precautions were actually realistic to take.

I was fortunate to find the kind of acceptance that brought equanimity, what I might call “acceptance with serenity” following the words of the prayer. Acceptance without serenity is resignation. With resignation, the intellect acknowledges a truth, but the emotions find that truth intolerable. In my Kara experience, I spent a brief time in resignation, when I thought that I couldn’t stand the fear. Fortunately, I was able to move into acceptance with serenity. Resignation leaves one feeling beaten, discouraged, and powerless. The specter of resignation is one of the things that gives acceptance a bad name. Resignation is not the kind of acceptance sought in the serenity prayer.

My experience at Kara illustrates why some psychotherapies are now emphasizing acceptance. My original problem was that I was afraid, and I was unwilling (or unable) to accept my fear. I tried to “solve” the problem of fear by “solving” the problem of safety. Yet my constant thinking about the dangers actually increased my fear. This pattern is surprisingly common. When people feel anxious, they often try to solve the problem of anxiety by thinking of all the things that could go wrong and then planning how they will deal with them. We call this worrying. The hope is that these plans will give a sense of security, but it doesn’t work. There are always more things that can go wrong, and once vividly imagined they seem ever more likely to occur. The very strategy that was meant to reduce fear ends up magnifying it. If, instead, one can find a way to accept the fear, it will be less likely to grow and might even dissipate. The rewards of acceptance include relief, a freeing of energy for more creative uses, and a greater clarity about one’s situation.

A similar pattern exists with other kinds of emotional distress, such as depression. The sufferer tries to solve the problem by ruminating on it, trying to find a solution. But instead of helping, all this thinking ends up intensifying the distress. Accepting the painful emotion, rather than trying to eliminate it, may be a more fruitful approach.

Of course, the problem here is that acceptance of painful emotions isn’t easy. In my experience at Kara, acceptance came through time and good fortune rather than from skill or effort on my part. Fortunately, there are practices for increasing one’s ability to accept, just as one can increase courage by the practice of facing feared situations.

For example, some kinds of meditation strengthen the ability to accept. When we sit in mindfulness meditation⁹, we engage in the practice of accepting whatever comes along without judgment. Whether it is a thought, an emotion, a sore leg, or a noise outside, we simply hold it in awareness. Engaging in this practice, we strengthen our mind’s willingness to accept. We are likely to find that we have more serenity in dealing with the ups and downs of daily life.

A more challenging practice is to hold this moment-to-moment openness to experience in all of our life, not just in meditation. This is the practice described in the Rumi poem:

A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all!

It is called Radical Acceptance by Buddhists. It too has been taken up by psychotherapists. Marsha Linehan, the creator of a psychotherapy that emphasizes the interplay of acceptance and change, describes her use of Radical Acceptance in this way:

Clients are taught and encouraged to use skills for accepting life completely and radically, as well as for changing it. Radical acceptance is the fully open experience of what is, entering into reality just as it is, at this moment. Fully open acceptance is without constructions, and without distortions, without judgments, without evaluation, and without attempts to keep an experience or to get rid of it. Accepting is not necessarily evaluating positively. … Acceptance is experiencing something without the haze of what one wants and does not want it to be.¹⁰

Incidentally, in case it isn’t obvious, Radical Acceptance isn’t a state that one achieves and maintains. One can reach it briefly, lose it, and then return to it again. Fortunately even this intermittent acceptance can enrich one’s life.

Before I move on to the third phrase in the serenity prayer, I want to draw together the three kinds of acceptance I’ve mentioned. The weakest kind of acceptance is resignation, which does not include acceptance at the emotional level. I don’t think this is what is meant in the serenity prayer. The second I called “acceptance with serenity” and it applies to accepting a particular situation. The third is radical acceptance, which broadens the scope of acceptance to all of our ongoing experience. These last two seem to be good for us, increasing our equanimity, clarity, and ability to act.

Wisdom to know

Now let’s look now at the third phrase of the serenity prayer, the “wisdom to know the difference.”

There is actually a large class of situations in which we humans display a shocking lack of wisdom, in that we refuse to accept something that we clearly cannot change. I am referring to what someone has called “the relentless search for a better past.” It is all too easy to spend our time and energies brooding about the wrongs that have been done to us, or the foolish mistakes we have made ourselves. These surely can’t be changed, and yet we often refuse to accept that, getting stuck in rehashing events with the chant “coulda, woulda, shoulda.”

All of us could use more wisdom here. I think part of the problem is that we imagine that accepting past wrongs or follies means saying that what happened was OK. But this isn’t the case — we can accept reality because it’s real, not because we approve of it.

Not only can we not change the past; we can’t change the present moment, either. Whatever we are aware of has already happened, so we may as well accept the present too. But the future is another story. It is here that change is possible. We can radically accept reality in the present moment and radically change it in the next.

So the “wisdom to know the difference” called for in the serenity prayer is mostly wisdom about the future. To have the wisdom to know what I can and can’t change, means being able to predict the outcome of my actions. And that, I think, is not in anyone’s power. Although one may guess about the future, there are too many unknowns to be confident in what one predicts.

In other words, the future is uncertain. Uncertainty is something we humans don’t like at all. Uncertainty can be painful. Think of the times when you felt it would be better to know that the outcome was bad, rather than endure uncertainty any longer. Because we don’t like uncertainty, we often try to avoid it by imagining that we have more knowledge than we really do. That imagining can get in the way of wisdom.

I believe that uncertainty is one of those things that we just have to accept, ideally with serenity. Occasionally we may have “the wisdom to know” what we can change, but most of the time we can only hope for the “wisdom to choose well” in the face of not knowing.

Recognizing how often we need to make choices in the face of uncertainty has been a surprise bonus for me in working on this sermon. Somehow I never quite got that before. I often feel uncertain about my position on issues that arise in a community like our church, and I thought that meant there was something wrong. I thought that my job was to think my way through the uncertainty until I figured out a clear answer. It’s surprisingly encouraging to realize that I can’t do that. Now that I know what the real task is, I’m intrigued by the prospect of learning how to decide well when I don’t know the whole story. It’s actually freeing, just like it was freeing to realize that I couldn’t keep my family safe.

I’ve spoken a good deal about the value of acceptance here. I don’t want to overlook the concern that some things should not be accepted. Injustice and abuse are two clear examples. We have already seen that even Radical Acceptance does not preclude the possibility of making changes. One who is abused may need to accept the reality of the abuse that has happened, and then wisely choose to take steps to end it. That there is injustice in the world can hardly be disputed, and one can wisely choose which injustices to address with change efforts.

Some choices are clear. We have to accept the past, or at least we will suffer needlessly if we don’t. And indeed there are some things that we simply shouldn’t accept. For all the other choices in our lives, we need plenty of wisdom.

The tension between acceptance and change is real. But accepting the reality of what we can’t do can free us to make the changes that are within our power.