Therapy ABC – Acceptance

Prologue

Therapy ABC is a series of blogs that I put together to help shed some light on the vocabulary of therapy. Each blog will focus on one key phrase that you may have heard in therapy. Let’s find out what these phrases do not mean and what they really mean by your therapist!

Today’s vocabulary is Acceptance.

You might have noticed that on my page, as often appeared on other pages about therapy, I mentioned that therapy is about offering a “safe, accepting and supportive space”.

So what does acceptance really mean? And why is it so valued in therapy? What counts as true acceptance?

I find the following paragraphs from the book Soul without Shame (1999) by Byron Brown illuminating in response to these questions about acceptance and non-judgemental approach.

I made slight edits for the purpose of clarity.

Acceptance and Rejection

Acceptance is generally considered to be the opposite of rejection. If a university accepts your application rather than rejecting it, then the university has approved of your qualifications and welcomes you as someone it wants to teach.

In usual terms:

• To reject means to push away, deny, or negate;
• To accept means to move toward, approve of, or affirm.
• If you are acceptable, then you have made the grade, you are OK.

The problem with this definition of acceptance is that it still operates within the world of judgment, assessment, and evaluation. Acceptance means something positive, rejection something negative.

You need acceptance to offset rejection, and if you are acceptable, it is always possible you will later be found unacceptable. Acceptance on these terms is conditional on some criterion.

So the familiar usage of acceptance is, in fact, closer to approval, the opposite of rejection, than to true acceptance.

True acceptance means stepping out of the world of assessment altogether. It is exactly the experience of neither rejecting nor approving. Where rejecting and approving are actions of moving away from or toward one’s experience, accepting is not an action at all.

It is nonaction: a state of Being without attitude, simply allowing experience to be as it is.

Acceptance does not mean you approve of your experience, think it’s OK, like it, or are happy with it as it is. Acceptance is not an expression of any kind of evaluation or interpretation. It simply means you can allow your experience to be exactly as it is. There need be no justification or effort to defend, deny, protect, or promote what is there.

Acceptance means you get out of the way and stop taking a position. You don’t approve, you don’t reject; you don’t push away your experience, you don’t try to hold on to it. If you like it, that’s accepted; if you dislike it, that’s accepted. Whatever it is, your soul is simply there with the experience.

I hope that is helpful. Till next time.