How to Practice Radical Acceptance as a Parent

Whether your child is a newborn or just graduated from college, you’re going to deal with situations that, as a parent, you simply cannot change. From questionable personal style and daily annoyances to mental and physical health issues, disappointments, divorce, death, random disastrous acts of nature, and even global pandemics!

So it’s natural that you’ll sometimes find yourself stuck in a spiral of thoughts like “How could this be happening?!” and “Why do such unfair things happen to me?!” One way to pull yourself out of the anxious agitation that clouds your ability to cope is to draw upon the practice of radical acceptance to reduce your feelings of discomfort.

A therapeutic tool taught in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), radical acceptance can help you tolerate life’s distressing moments. When we wish or expect that things will be different than what they are, suffering and distress result. Denying, fighting against, or trying to avoid reality won’t change it, but not accepting that reality will transform what would otherwise be ordinary pain into suffering.

This isn’t about approving of what’s happening, ignoring what you really need, or giving in and giving up. This is about an intentional choice you make not to waste energy railing against the reality of what is. It means letting go of what you’d have preferred or what you want and acknowledging that things are what they are.

Put your energy toward what you can do rather than who and what you can’t control.

Parents can use radical acceptance in three ways:

Accept the reality of who you are

Parents who’ve grown up in Western hyper-individualistic upbringing and culture have gotten direct and indirect messages about the ways they're not measuring up to a harder working, more successful, more ideal standard. To be acceptable, you have to somehow be different than who you naturally are. Humans have universal biological, emotional, and spiritual needs, but when self-reliance and independence are prioritized in your culture, being aware of your own needs can cause self-criticism and anxiety about being weak. It can feel easier to focus on what you consider faults than to see your gifts and your worth as a person.

Instead of giving yourself a hard time, being defensive, or in denial about qualities in yourself you wish were different, accept yourself totally and without judgment—the good and the bad alike—exactly as you are. Your desires to change for the better can exist right alongside your acceptance of who and where you are right now. You don’t make yourself do better by making yourself feel worse. And the more practice you have at accepting yourself completely, moment by moment...

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