Reality Check

Birds chirp. Wind blows. Cats purr. Farts stink and Dogs bark. That’s just the way it is. Except for this one grey-haired lady in my neighborhood. She has turned nasty when my dogs have barked around her. I have made the very simple suggestion that if dogs scare her so badly, maybe she should walk on the other side of the road. It seemed like a reasonable course of action to me but the woman was irate that I suggested such a thing.

“I shouldn’t have to adjust my walking path to accommodate my neighbor’s dog! This is my neighborhood! I should be able to walk wherever I want!”

Of course she was right. But being right doesn’t always protect you from negative consequences. The woman was failing to acknowledge reality. The reality is that she knows the dog will bark at her when she walks past . She knows there is nothing I can do about that. Yet she persists in repeatedly taking the same course of action even though she knows that she will be scared by the dog again and again. That isn’t a smart way to live your life. To illustrate my point, I asked the woman another question.

“Do you lock the doors on your house?”

She replied: “Of course!”

“Well, you shouldn’t HAVE to lock your doors. It’s your house and no one should try to steal from you. You have every right to leave your doors unlocked, yet in this case you acknowledge reality and take basic precautions because the world is not the way you want it to be. The world is the way it is. You may not like it, but you have to deal with it. Walking on the other side of the road to avoid a barking dog is the same thing as locking your doors when you leave the house. It’s accepting the reality of the situation."

Of course, my words had no effect on her. I was right and so was she but while she was unwilling to accept reality. I wasn’t going to be a victim to her nasty stubbornness and feel agitated every time our paths crossed. So I did the logical thing and tweaked the route of walking my dogs.

The first gift I received from “accepting” is to stop being in victim-mode.

There are many things in life that we shouldn’t have to do but we do them anyway. Like we shouldn’t have to lock the car doors when parked in one’s own driveway or we shouldn’t have to lock our travel bags on a trip or no one has the right to hit back when we yell obscenities at them. The point is that we fail to acknowledge the reality of the situation. We may be right, but if we fail to acknowledge reality, we will still lose. The world is not how it should be. You don’t have to like that. You can work to change it. But if you ignorantly refuse to acknowledge reality, you are taking the first step on the path to ensuring that your name will occupy the “victim” box.

The second gift I received from “accepting” is to reduce my expectations from others.

Wanting things to be different than they are is sometimes agitating, because you can neither change the past nor can you predict the future. But there is another way: accepting things as they are. It doesn’t mean you resign to life of unhappiness, just putting up with things. On the contrary it is a full-hearted, all encompassing, enthusiastic and curious “yes” to things as they are.

Let’s take another common issue: you feel someone has wronged you and you are waiting for an apology. Now you can live forever waiting for the apology to happen. You have decided that the only way you can let go of it is for the other person to take a step towards reconciliation. But that is something you can’t control. So instead of being caught in a web of bitterness and repeating the same story over and over in your head, you can shift your attention. Which means you accept that the other person has not apologized and no one knows if he or she will in the future, but for now, the apology is not happening. With this honest awareness, you can now move from living a fictional version of what could be to a reality version of what is.

There is a saying, “It takes much more energy to resist than it does to persist.” Whenever we try to swim against the current, we have to exert far more energy than going with the flow and it becomes very tiring. For many of us, learning how to be mindful of this would make life a whole lot easier. This does not mean giving up, losing hope or compromising. It simply means being willing to see things as they are rather than fight and rail against reality.

The third gift I received from “accepting” is to be more understanding and compassionate towards myself.

Say, for instance, that your partner has a temperament that can be terrifying. She loses her cool easily and often, and you frequently end up being the target of her rage. Whenever you speak to her about it, she always seems to justify her behavior, saying, “Its your fault. I have been the same person.” You know that what’s happening doesn’t feel right, but you keep convincing yourself to stick it out, hoping that things will change. So you continue to be at the receiving end of her angry and abusive outbursts that eventually erode your mental and emotional well-being. You resist by fighting back or deny the pain by blaming yourself or suffer deeply by hoping that your partner will change. And the same cycle is repeated every time this undesirable quality in your partner rears its ugly head. In other words, you are stuck between hurt, sadness and maybe some self-blame. But you can change that by accepting that the person you are in a committed relationship with has a side to her that causes harm to you doesn’t mean that you are okay with it or want it to keep happening. Which means that you are facing reality as it is being presented to you so you can make a decision about how to proceed. It’s the only logical thing to do.

The fourth gift I received from “accepting” is to become solution-oriented.

My father always says “Que Sera Sera” i.e. whatever will be will be. Another interpretation is "it is what it is". At first, I thought it was just a cute cliche. Then, the more I applied it to elements of my life the more I began to realize that there were many things in my world that I would rather block, minimize, obsess about or try to undo…all symptoms of this nasty need to control the uncontrollable. This difficulty in accepting what is can apply to anything…having to accept that you are depressed or growing old, coming to terms with the fact that your son has ADD, needing to take medication, having a mother who cannot love you the way you want to be loved, facing an addiction or dealing with some harsh life event that you were not prepared for and did not ask for. As one of Dr. Lillian Essess's, a psychotherapist, client in such a bind said, “When you accept it, you get a foothold and can climb out. You really know what the problem is that you are facing and you can address it”. How true, for if you are unwilling to name and identify the problem, how can you begin to find solutions?”

Your willingness to accept the unchangeable has great bearing on your mental and emotional well-being. You can stop the suffering, gain clarity and be at peace. Whether it’s a financial crisis, a health diagnosis, and loss of an important relationship or any other unanticipated or unpleasant event, fighting it wont make it not so. When we battle with reality, we cripple our capacity to cope with the situation and manage all the emotions we experience in response to it.

In essence, acceptance is the opposite of avoidance or denial.

It is taking an honest look at things as they are right now.

It is letting go of judgment or interpreting.

Learning acceptance is a lifelong process, and we’re guaranteed to be given plenty of opportunities to practice. With clarity about what it means to accept and what effect it has on our well-being, we can approach our experiences differently, perhaps experiencing different results. What becomes possible when you release your ideas about what should be and embrace what is instead? Like Denice Fournier, a psychotherapist, I invite you to explore what new and unexpected things happen when you start accepting reality on reality’s terms.