We all have things in our lives that we wish could change.
Maybe you don’t have the job or relationship you want. You lost a loved one, or you’re having health problems. Or maybe you’re in a bad situation and you don’t see a way out.
It can take a huge toll on your mental state if you feel like your life doesn’t look the way you think it should. But what if there was a way to change your situation, or at least the way you approach it?
Practicing radical acceptance can help you embrace or accept your current reality, said Meghan Keane, creator of NPR’s Life Kit and author of the book “Party of One: Be Your Own Best Life Partner.”
“[Radical acceptance] doesn’t mean liking the change even or the bad feeling or the situation, and it certainly does not mean accepting an abusive situation or a situation in which you’re being harmed,” she said. “Radical acceptance is about shifting from a place of rejecting your reality and feeling very frustrated and having a lot of tension about the reality to accepting the facts of what’s happening, so then you can actually make a choice.”
Keane spoke with our host Lisa Mullins about how to practice radical acceptance.
The following interview has been edited for clarity.
Interview transcript
Lisa Mullins: “So you have been through this. You write about having to practice this in your own life when you were 35, single, you had a great job and good friends, but there were all these messages around you telling you that you needed to be married or you needed to have a partner, and I think we all feel that. What was that doing to your mental state and how did you get out of it?”
Meghan Keane: “It was making me pretty miserable. I write about how I thought about that time in my life as being in a haze or a fog. It felt like all those negative messages about singleness was creating this cloud around me about my self-worth and making me feel like the only way to be was to be married and to have a successful relationship. But what I realized was that was just a lot of my own perspective being clouded, and if I could just poke my head out to the side a little bit, I could see a bit more clearly.”
Mullins: “But what does that mean though? Because you’re still getting the messages. You’re just not listening?”
Keane: “You’re rejecting them and seeing them for what they are, which is other people’s stereotypes, stigmas, maybe how they feel about their own relationships, all these other powers that [don’t] have a lot to actually do with you and what you want in your life.
“So it was really hard for me to see all the positives that I actually had in my life when I was so focused on what other people wanted for me, instead of thinking, ‘Well, what do I actually want and what do I want my life to look like?’ ”
Mullins: “So that’s a good point because what if you want your life to look like people’s expectations, you know, what if you do want to have the partner and kids and your life just isn’t going that way?
Keane: “So something that I learned was to treat something like a partner less as a goal and more as thinking about a value. So what I mean by that is a goal is very pass-fail, right? You’re either married or you’re not. You either have a partner or you don’t. But instead, thinking underneath that goal, what is the value?
“This was something that I learned from a psychiatrist, Dr. Pooja Lakshmin. The value says to you, ‘Oh, I want connection. I want love. I want community.’ So then that value becomes a lot more flexible to live out, right? Like maybe it’s not quite the romantic partner that you have in your life right now, but maybe it’s having a really robust volunteer community that you volunteer with a lot, or maybe you do want to date, but you’re like, ‘OK, I’m going to make sure I seek out support from a friend after I go on a date that maybe might make me feel bad.’ So that shift was extremely helpful for me because it’s a lot kinder to think about what are your values and how can you express them rather than did I get this thing or did I not?”
Mullins: “And can you tell us more about that process, exactly how you approached it and when it went well and when it didn’t?”
Keane: “So I would say it went well when I could see all the different versions of what my life could be, and kind of accepting that it could be both one where I do end up with someone and I find a partner — I don’t know when — or it could be I could be single for the rest of my life. But I had to make sure that both of those potential paths were going to be equally as good. And so I was building up a lot of positives in my life, rather than thinking one thing is going to unlock happiness, right?
“It’s like the idea of the hedonic treadmill, right? This idea that if you just stay on this path to get this one thing, then you’ll suddenly be happier. We hear this when people think that a promotion is going to make them happier, or maybe like a prestigious award, but once they get there, what people find is that their happiness levels spike for a little bit, but then they come back down to their general baseline. So I was trying to get off that hedonic treadmill to see, OK, what’s a broader way of looking at happiness and how I can feel fulfilled rather than pinning it on one thing?”
Mullins: “So this seems like it would be rather difficult trying to recognize where you are and detach from negative thoughts about yourself, which we all have, and they can be overwhelming. So how do you stick with that radical acceptance when everything seems to be hopeless or at least going the wrong way?”
Keane: “Hopelessness feels like a lack of options, right? You feel like there’s no other path out. And what radical acceptance starts to do is to help you see, I do actually have some options. I do have some agency. And so for me, it was a real process of being like, ‘OK, I’m feeling resistance and all I can see is the resistance and it’s keeping me spinning my wheels.’
“And so when I’m able to be like, ‘Wait, I can feel that my body is telling me I’m resisting, I’m really noticing it,’ and then a big tenet of radical acceptance is saying to yourself, things are exactly how they are. It doesn’t mean I like them, maybe, but I can come back to, ‘OK, this is how it is right now. I’ve calmed down, and now I can move forward and make a decision.’
“And maybe the decision that day is, ‘I need to connect with a friend. I need connection.’ Or maybe it’s, ‘I need to start applying for a different job.’ Or maybe it’s, ‘I just need to eat something.’ Sometimes I feel like it’s just, ‘I need to eat something and I need or I need to take a nap,’ right? So I think it helps you just gain perspective about like, ‘OK, this is now what I actually have to do’ and move with wisdom rather than just think your way out of this problem.”
Mullins: Meghan, we only have time for one more suggestion that you have for people who are feeling stuck. What would you say?
Keane: “I would say use one of my favorite tools, which is accumulating positives. People always say, ‘OK, I’ve radically accepted. Now what?’ And if you are stuck and feeling like, ‘I still don’t like the situation that I’m in, but I know it’s going to take some time to maybe change jobs or find the partner, etc.,’ I would say use this dialectical behavioral tool, which is just simply do something nice for yourself every day. I know it sounds trite, but it really is about just finding little things in your day that feel positive because you actually want to build up all of these positives like a bank almost. So that when you do experience the negative emotions, you have more of a sense of positivity to pull from and to look to.”
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Samantha Raphelson produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Catherine Welch. Raphelson also adapted it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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