Learn to Accept What Feels Unacceptable

Working with ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) is about cultivating psychological flexibility and personal resilience. This involves strengthening six core processes: acceptance, defusion, contact with the present moment, self-as-context, values, and committed action. Today, the focus is on acceptance.

Accepting the world as it is has never come naturally to me. I have spent much of my time resisting what was, while longing for what wasn’t. In hindsight, I can see how deeply I believed things should be different—and could be. That my moment would come, even without any real evidence.

For a long time, acceptance felt like defeat. Like giving up. Like resigning myself to circumstances and throwing in the towel.

ACT has fundamentally reshaped that understanding. It has taught me not to withdraw from experience, but to turn toward it—to engage with whatever shows up on my path.

In ACT in Practice, Russ Harris emphasizes that acceptance is not passive. It is an active process of making space for inner experiences: thoughts, emotions, and memories. It does not mean tolerating your situation without question. On the contrary, ACT encourages you to take meaningful action and to live in alignment with what matters most to you.

Consider a struggle within an intimate relationship. Acceptance does not mean staying and doing nothing. It means allowing painful thoughts and feelings to be present, rather than avoiding them through behaviors such as drinking, smoking, overeating, or rumination. From that openness, guided by your values, you can take deliberate steps—whether that means working to change the relationship or, if necessary, choosing to leave it.

Acceptance, then, is not about approving unwanted experiences. It is about opening yourself to the full range of life: situations, thoughts, images, memories, emotions, impulses, and bodily sensations. You allow them to be as they are—pleasant or painful—without struggling against them.

And in doing so, you create space to act on what truly matters.

Photo: AvO