The Four Stages of Acceptance

In this month’s article, I’m going to focus on a little mini-map of the path of acceptance. Acceptance itself is often misunderstood in what it is and what it isn’t (e.g., confusing it with resignation or passivity), but it’s also often a conflation of what are actually different phases or depths of the experience. 

So: Acceptance has four stages (plus a prelude):

Prelude: Denial: “There is no problem. There is no difficulty. I’m not doing anything wrong. All good.” Except that there is a problem, because when a third party looks into this person’s life, there is, objectively, a describable problem. This is the not-accepting in the form of simply being asleep at the wheel.

Stage 1: Recognition: “I see that I’m depressed, but I refuse to accept it. I’m going to keep fighting.” The mind cognizes the issue, but refuses to surrender to it. “I recognize that I’m depressed, but I refuse to accept it,” and therefore instead of dealing with the depression as it is, there is a heroic, if Pyrrhic, struggle.

Stage 2: Resignation: “I see that I’m depressed, and I see that I can’t beat it, so I guess there’s just nothing I can do.” Resignation is closer to a full holding of the truth, but while a resigned person accepts the limits of their situation, they then interpret those limitations too broadly: “I’m helpless.” This is the stage where part of the experience is accepted, but the different possibilities of response, another aspect of the truth, is not seen fully and therefore there’s a collapse.

Stage 3: Acceptance: “I see I’m depressed, and I can’t beat it by struggle. Ok, so that’s how it is now. So what can I do?” This is where the “problem” is understood for what it is and also that there are multiple possibilities for responding. You accept that you’ve hit your golf ball into the rough, but you see that you can use whatever club you want to get it out (and also that some clubs work better than others…). There’s not an emotional reaction to the “problem,” but rather a neutral acknowledgement and openness to what comes next, knowing that it’s not strictly defined.

Stage 4: Embrace: “I see I’m depressed, and I accept it, will work with it openly, and am so curious about what this experience is coming along to teach me.” With embrace, there is not only an acceptance, but an actual draw into the experience, as if to a loved one. You don’t resent, you don’t deny, you don’t even see it as simply a neutral phenomenon. With embrace, you see that the experience in itself, even if difficult or painful, has inherent value, is not trying to hurt you, and even moreso, has a diamond hiding out int the muck. This is not a Pollyanna stance, either, where, with gritted teach and white knuckles, you tell yourself, “Everything is OK!!!” Rather, the Embrace stage is where you really see the value of an experience and, therefore, move towards it.

This mini-map is offered in order to give some granularity to the often-bandied word “acceptance,” so that it (as Wikipedia puts it) the concept is disambiguated. There really are these discrete stages, and knowing this can help both spot where you are in relation to a certain “problem,” and what work needs to be done to deepen in “acceptance.”