What is Radical Acceptance in DBT?
Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) is most often used for people with borderline personality disorder. However, it can also be extremely helpful for highly sensitive people who want to learn how to cope with things in healthier, more effective ways.
One of the strategies often used in DBT is radical acceptance. As you might expect, radical acceptance is a concept that helps you stop fighting reality. Unfortunately, many highly sensitive people have a hard time coping with the difficulties of everyday life. So, avoidance becomes a defense mechanism.
However, that’s not a long-term solution, and it’s not healthy for your overall well-being. Let’s take a closer look at what radical acceptance is and how it can help throughout the DBT process.
An Effective DBT Skill
When you’re attending dialectical behavior therapy, radical acceptance can be an important skill to learn. Again, the goal is to stop fighting reality and to stop responding to negative situations with unhealthy, impulsive behaviors.
It’s a common problem for people with BPD or those who are highly sensitive. You might try to cope with something by “distracting” yourself with destructive behaviors. Unfortunately, these behaviors and the attitude behind them often lead to a vicious cycle of bitterness and anger. You’re not fully “letting go” of the problems causing you such distress. Instead, you’re not accepting them, so you can’t work through them.
Radical acceptance helps you to develop an understanding of your past and present, working through the facts of what happened and the things that might cause you distress.
Why is it so effective? In almost any type of therapy, getting to the “root cause” of a problem is the best way to overcome it. That doesn’t mean it’s an easy or comfortable process. In fact, for highly sensitive people, getting to those underlying causes can stir up heavy feelings of discomfort. But it’s often a necessary step on the way to true healing.
Looking Toward the Future
The goal of radical acceptance isn’t just to break a negative cycle of suffering. It’s to help prepare you for the future.
Everyone will experience negative situations and difficult times throughout life. It’s how you’re able to handle those situations that make a difference. Radical acceptance is designed to equip you to handle those situations in healthy, positive ways rather than trying to avoid or ignore them.
Certain disorders can make you feel trapped in your own negative emotions. Radical acceptance helps you accept pain and work through it so you break free from that trap and find more freedom and control.
Acceptance, Not Approval
Keep in mind that accepting reality doesn’t mean you have to approve of the things that happen to you.
Again, everyone experiences difficulty throughout life. There’s a difference between understanding and accepting it and submitting to it. Once you’re able to acknowledge some of the difficult things you’re going through (or have gone through), you can also work on fighting back against them.
Some of the best ways to practice radical acceptance in DBT include understanding you’re fighting against reality, reminding yourself that reality can’t be changed—even when it’s negative, and practicing acceptance with your whole being.
You’ll have to embrace negative feelings as a part of radical acceptance. Once you do, you might start to realize that life will still continue to move forward, even when “bad” things are happening. Practice mindfulness to remain present in the moment and take stock of both your physical and emotional reactions.
If you’re interested in learning more about radical acceptance in DBT and whether it might work for you, feel free to contact me for information.