TIFT #124: Psychotherapy's Amazing Superpower

Recently, I was working with clients searching for the antidotes to their troublesome inner truths. We were struggling to find the flaw in those truths. Each one boiled down to the fear that something really bad could happen. The problem was that, while those bad things from the past were not likely to be repeated, it was not impossible. For these anxious people, present fears might be more intense due to genetics, but they were also fueled by real experiences from childhood. These were the kind of experiences that shatter a child’s basic confidence that everything will be OK.

Finding a new truth or experience to contradict the client’s deepest fear can be challenging. Fear that something bad could happen is especially difficult. It’s easier when we’re dealing with a truth from early life that is no longer accurate. For example a client adopted the truth of a hurtful parent’s negative opinion of herself. She came to support that truth by acting and feeling like an inferior being. Asking what it would be like to treat herself better brings uneasiness and fear. She knows inside that acting worthy would certainly lead to being painfully criticized and ultimately rejected. When she says it out loud, it is obviously wrong. Simply verbalizing the inner truth puts it in the same frame with the real truth. Being berated and unjustly criticized by a person she needs absolutely is simply not possible today. Reality supplies the antidote to her inner truth.

But some bad things that once happened can happen again. When we point out how unlikely that is, the client’s inner mind argues back, that it is, in fact, possible, and that can’t be denied. Furthermore re-experiencing such a calamity, even if unlikely, would be far too painful to risk. It feels wiser to sacrifice day-to-day happiness and remain vigilant just in case.

The answer

The universal antidote turns out to be acceptance. Accepting the possibility that the dreaded events could take place removes the need always to be prepared for them. I’m not the first to see this. Stephen Hayes, originator of ACT, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy suffered from panic disorder and realized that trying to eliminate distressing thoughts only made them worse. That brought him to the idea of accepting that fear and pain are part of life and that accepting them could free him. He built his third wave cognitive-behavioral therapy on the idea of accepting reality and “committing” to behaviors that embody that acceptance by defying the dread. In my writing I call it “civil disobedience,” acting in ways contrary to the demands of inner dictators rather than trying to appease them.

 Acceptance is a learned skill. In its earliest manifestation, it is learning to “lose battles gracefully.” I see it going back to age two, when the toddler first realizes they can have differences of opinion with the people they most depend on. That crisis, if handled well, leads to acceptance that, even if you have to capitulate and are exceedingly angry, you can still be consoled and loved by the very person who said, “No.” The evidence to back this up is that narcissistic people lack the capacity for this kind of acceptance. Those who were indulged in their twos and allowed to win every battle can not learn the art of acceptance. As adults, faced with failure, they have little choice but to blame someone else and see themselves as victims. In other cases, being consistently rejected and always losing power struggles in early life can also lead to an imperative need to prove the opposite. 

Learning from experiences of acceptance with its accompanying feelings of peace and closure takes the dread out of situations of uncertainty and risk. Even a painful possible outcome is no longer the threat it might have been. "Whatever happens, we’ll find a way to cope." Once acceptance becomes available as a way to deal with bad things that might happen, they no longer represent the same level of threat. Acceptance is truly a superpower when it replaces alternative strategies of denying reality, going through contortions to prove it wrong, or living with constant fear that something bad could happen.

Acceptance isn’t free

While acceptance can liberate us from worry and put us in harmony with the uncertainties of life, it still exacts a cost. Even having developed confidence in the process, coming to acceptance still requires going through the pain and anger that are natural accompaniments of losses, bad experiences, and injustices. It is the anticipation of being able to outlive and overcome those feelings that gives acceptance its superpower to overcome the dread of what might happen.

Pseudo-acceptance

I can think of instances where acceptance seems too easy. Some adults seem to have accepted but have not processed the inevitable feelings of anger and loss. That’s abandoning the goal without going through the grieving. Invariably, they are harboring a hope of avoiding true acceptance. Pseudo-acceptance can work in several ways. The strategy can involve false hope that somehow justice or retribution will even the score. It can also be based on harboring a plan someday to right the wrongs or undo the losses, so as to avoid having to feel the pain. With those hopes it won’t be necessary to acknowledge losing the battle or to face the grief of coming up short. The price of pseudo-acceptance, though, is never achieving peace with reality.

When children don’t accept

We aren’t born with the power of acceptance. Perhaps for good evolutionary reasons, children work hard not to accept loses or deprivation. As listed in the previous TIFT, many of the strategies behind EMPs are ways to hold onto some form of hope in order not to have to accept. When it comes to needs like the one for primal love, the child’s inner mind treats it as a life-and-death requirement. Children simply can’t accept being deprived of needs that their survival-oriented mind deems necessary for growth, development, and survival. Instead they adopt strategies for avoiding acceptance. They may come to believe they are unworthy, or that the deprivation is their fault. They can counterbalance losses with things that feel like a win. They can hold onto hopes that wrongs will be righted through justice or by acknowledgement of wrongdoing on the part of the responsible party. These strategies are held outside of consciousness and frozen in time, preventing acceptance even in adulthood.

Putting these observations together, the key to what losses must not be accepted seems to be survival. Healthy children learn to accept losses of freedom and choice that are not experienced as existential. That is one of the ways they internalize healthy values. For example, the two-year-old when first told to “thank the nice lady” may resist. When it becomes clear that doing so is the only way to be sure of mother’s approval, the child reluctantly complies. Soon, they internalize the value of politeness and begin to experience it as a source of pleasure. Total selfishness turns into a taste for giving. That’s how healthy values are internalized. On the other hand, when the needs are matters of life or death, EMPs are invented in the inner mind that serve to block acceptance at any cost. 

A cultural note

Children’s resistance to acceptance brings up some thoughts about history and culture. Before about 2000 years ago, making peace with adverse reality rested mostly on evening the score. An eye for an eye was the rule. Retribution was the way to settle accounts. Sacrifices to the Gods were made on the same basis. Giving something of value was a way of making gods feel properly recognized so they would be positively disposed towards humans. Failure to do so would make them seek to cause pain. Survival was transactional.

Then something happened. Humanity came to the idea of writing off debts, forgiving wrongs, altruism, and, in general, emotionally letting go without the accounts being equal. It seems to me that this was a new discovery for humanity, a superpower to overcome things as terrible as premature death and ultimate unfairness without having to spend our lives seeking ways to make the accounts balance.

Therapy’s superpower

We therapists are in the amazing position of knowing how to give our clients a superpower with which to combat their most entrenched maladaptive patterns. In most cases, by the time they are adults they have encountered multiple situations where they have learned to use acceptance rather than fighting reality. In the course of dealing with lesser losses, they have come to experience acceptance in a positive light. For example, the great majority of adults accept many things that don’t make sense. We accept pointless school assignments, being told what to do at work, and what to wear for certain occasions. We don’t think twice about accepting acts of nature and may even be able to accept unfairness by those in authority. By the time we come to adulthood, we have considerable familiarity with letting go of battles we know we won’t win.

To help our clients use acceptance to make peace with reality, all we have to do is help them bring a skill they already possess to battles they have yet to settle. By doing that, we are helping them acquire superpowers for solving their most painful arguments with reality, including the troubling worries that keep them on edge about events that might possibly, but probably won't ever happen.

It’s not so easy

Acquiring these superpowers is not always so easy. First we need to help our client understand and acknowledge their deep refusal to accept something that feels like it is a life-and-death need. Then we can invite them to consider that the battle has already been lost. For example, this might be admitting that bad things indeed might happen. The person who has spent a lifetime braced in anticipation of a terrible loss, will need to accept that such a loss could occur. Bringing these dreaded possibilities into consciousness can be daunting. Doing so initiates a process of grieving in advance for the possibility of a loss. Processing feelings of loss and anger is often the emotional work that was deferred from long ago. When that work is finally done, it becomes possible to face the uncertainty of life with a degree of equanimity.

Our clients become all-powerful  when they are ready to accept the pain that goes with painful events. They need to accept that going through pain is something they already know how to do and that doing so is less costly than their old formulas for avoidance. Acceptance is far better than wasting one’s life being ready for the worst. Accepting in advance that pain happens and that we adults are equipped to cope with it makes anything survivable, even death.