January 2023 – Acceptance Comes Before Understanding

Happy 2023, and I hope the first few weeks of the year are starting off well for you. If not so much, then I wish for you to have enough support and inspiration to work with whatever is arising, especially the awareness that, “Even this will pass.”

In this article, I’m addressing what we often are confused on, the belief that understanding has to come before acceptance. The counterintuitive thing is that actually the two are decoupled, and acceptance requires no understanding, just acknowledgement of the reality of something, and letting that reality be true within ourselves. Which, although it is not easy (we have defenses against foreign stuff), works a lot better in the long run.

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Your Intolerables Choose For You

In this article, is a short piece about the paradox of hard, fixed stances in one’s life, and the way that we think they give us more control, when actually they are the ones limiting our choices. As usual, much of healing and growth, particularly in relation to depression, is about acceptance.

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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. 

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Depression: From Futility to Acceptance

Following on the article in August’s newsletter (here), describing depression in its basic components as a mechanism (the depressive symptoms), and a switch (how we have learned or are vulnerable to having that mechanism turned on), in this month’s article I’m looking at the “switch” of futility, or rather the “switches” of different types of futlity.

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