Now that you have learned about taking a nonjudgmental stance, it’s important to spend some time on the concept of acceptance—that is, accepting reality as it is and doing so without judgment. In DBT this is called radical acceptance. Acceptance is one pole of the accep-tance vs. change dialectic of DBT (Linehan 1993). For some people,
The Practice of Mindfulness
83 accepting themselves and their lives as they are can be one of the hardest skills to master, and sometimes you have to accept things that are seemingly unjust or unfair, such as being hurt or treated badly.
You may ask, “Why would I want to accept my life if I am unhappy with it?” This is an excellent question. When you can accept reality as it is, without judging it or fighting it, you can begin to look at how this reality developed, and perhaps what role you played in it or how you can change your response to it or your experience of it. Accepting things as they are doesn’t mean agreeing with your reality or liking it;
it means acknowledging that it is simply what it is. Accepting reality can profoundly influence your behavior, particularly when you are in distress. When you move into an accepting position, you begin to look at the situation from a different perspective. Remember that with acceptance can come pain and other intense emotions (nonaccep-tance can often help us avoid those feelings). There are skills that are very effective for managing intense emotions, but there are not many skills that help when you are in a state of nonacceptance. The chal-lenge with practicing acceptance is that you may have to accept some-thing over and over again, because you can easily slip back into a nonaccepting stance.
Consider this story about Jenna and how accepting reality non-judgmentally could have helped her cope with her distress and main-tain her self- respect.
Jenna had been dating her boyfriend for about a year. She was very much in love with him, but their relationship had been riddled with arguments and they had broken up a number of times. Jenna returned home one evening to find a note from her boyfriend that said he could no longer be with her. Jenna experienced this as a complete surprise. She began yelling and crying, sending more than twenty text messages and voice mails, alternating between angry and threatening and sad, replete with begging to get back together. Jenna felt desperate as she again heard that she was “too much to manage,” so she became quite depressed and couldn’t get out of bed. This
situation was all too familiar to Jenna, and yet it always felt unjust and as if it came out of nowhere each time.
Where could acceptance have helped Jenna? Being able to step back and accept the situation in front of her could have helped Jenna to slow down, and while it would have been painful, she could have used some skills to prevent herself from sacrificing her self- respect by making so many calls and sending so many texts— which likely only added to the idea that she was “too much to manage” and made her feel even worse. Moreover, Jenna could have worked on accepting this pattern of relationships so that she could have begun to look at how she had contributed to her relationships ending this way, and she could have learned to pay attention to avoid repeating certain behaviors in her next relationship. Finally, as Jenna practiced acceptance, she could have begun to examine what she did have control over and could change, and what her boyfriend brought to the relationship that she couldn’t change. In this situation, Jenna was challenged to practice acceptance (nonjudgmentally) of the situation, her boyfriend, and herself.
You may find practicing acceptance of yourself even more chal-lenging. Many people with BPD who have difficulty managing emo-tions judge themselves quite harshly. They experience themselves as bad, ruined, toxic, unlovable, and undeserving. You will notice that those are all negative judgments, because people with BPD often struggle to make positive judgments about themselves. As we dis-cussed, those negative judgments and nonacceptance lead to a lot of suffering. Developing self- compassion and acceptance is also a mind-fulness practice. Sharon Salzberg (2008) has made popular an ancient form of meditation called metta, or loving- kindness meditation. Loving- kindness meditation teaches you to focus on seeing the goodness or positive attributes in others, rather than focusing on the negative or what makes those people challenging to be around. Salzberg believes that our suffering is connected to negative judgments. This doesn’t mean that you ignore what may be challenging about others, but that
The Practice of Mindfulness
85 you open your mind to compassion and focus on the positive. When you focus on others’ negative aspects or your negative judgments about others, you suffer with feelings of anger, disappointment, dis-satisfaction, bitterness, and hatred. This practice can further develop your skill of nonjudgment toward yourself and others.
You practice metta by sitting comfortably for at least three minutes, repeating a short phrase to yourself over and over again, and repeating similar phrases that “give” loving- kindness to others in your life to whom you want to send compassion or about whom you have negative judgments. There are many examples of phrases that you can repeat. Once you have practiced, you can use this as an informal prac-tice when you find yourself suffering from negative judgments or emotions about yourself or others in your daily life. One example (ibid.) of a series of phrases you can use is:
May I be filled with loving- kindness.
May I be safe and free.
May I be peaceful and at ease.
May I be happy.
We encourage you to try this practice and observe how you feel when you are finished. You can replace “I” with the name of a person whom you are struggling with, or the name of someone you care about and want to send compassion to.
Here’s one way to practice: when you notice a judgmental thought about yourself or someone in your daily life, say to yourself, May you be free from suffering. This interrupts the cycle of negative judgments and emotions that often follows a judgmental thought. We will return to this practice in later chapters.