Welcome to Life Unedited,
The Power of Radical Acceptance.
28 Theories of Living in Reality.
This is a series of theories through the lens of reality to help turn obstacles into opportunities.
I'm Tiffany and this is Theory 7,
Reality Always Wins.
I'm a reality therapist.
For over 20 years I have offered outpatient counseling grounded in the principles of reality therapy.
Most people may assume that all therapy focuses on reality,
But here's the raw truth.
We made it all up.
Much of therapy and life is steeped in stories we've made up.
The difference is that I offer a radical,
Realistic approach to life,
One that rests on this foundational mantra,
Radical acceptance of life at face value,
Without judgment,
To the best of our ability.
That is my mantra and mission statement.
The foundation of my reality counseling is simple.
I am.
You are.
Period.
Anything that follows either one of those statements is a judgment,
An adjective,
Or an observation,
And technically unnecessary.
The basic premise is to accept that right here,
Right now,
Is all we have.
It's our starting point.
Everything that happens in this very instant immediately becomes part of the past.
The simple reality of the past is this.
It was.
And the past is an integral part of counseling because it is what helps shape who we are.
It is often part of both the problem and the solution.
That's because clients might seek counseling for a current concern and,
With further exploration,
Learn that it is rooted in unaccepted realities from our past.
We struggle with the fact that we cannot change it.
In therapy,
We make the connections,
Untangle the feelings tied to those realities,
Radically accept what happened,
And determine the lessons we learned.
We do all of this without judgment,
To the best of our ability.
We neither like nor dislike what happened,
And we do not have to forgive what happened.
Acceptance is not approval.
It's acknowledgement.
Letting it go is an overused pipe dream.
At least,
I thought it was until I sat with it longer.
My initial thoughts were that we cannot let our past go because it is part of us.
However,
If we let go of our attachment to the past that plagues us and accept what happened,
Period,
That makes sense.
Our attachment to the past includes all the stories we tell about the traumas we experienced,
All the expectations that were not met,
And all of the ways things should have been.
If only things had been different.
None of these attachments are based in reality,
No matter what.
None of these thoughts change what actually happened.
Reality always wins.
Let me share a client's personal example.
Her parents drank and beat she and her sister every day until she left home at age 15 to live with a friend's family.
Did she like it?
Of course not.
And now,
Sitting here today,
Did it still happen?
Yes.
And she accepts that it did,
So she can explore how that shaped her.
There is endless information in that memory to dissect and discuss.
As a reality therapist,
A goal for each client is to come to a place of where they can accept memories at their core and work from there.
The issues that bring people into therapy are often connected to the inability to radically accept life as it happened.
They argue that it shouldn't have happened the way it did.
They have resentments,
Whole grudges,
Or blame.
They also go to other extremes of avoiding,
Ignoring,
Or pretending to have forgotten.
They spend all sorts of time and energy rejecting what happened.
Why is it necessary to delude ourselves with what might have been?
Agreeing that something did happen does not mean that we agree with what happened.
How do denial strategies help?
They don't.
It may feel like they protect us in some fashion,
But they actually restrict us.
They suck vital energy and take up space within us that could be replaced by peace.
Non-acceptance keeps us tied to the negativity of what happened,
And that negativity is adversely affecting our present.
Again,
I stress that I am in no way suggesting that in radical acceptance of our past,
We are forgiving it or minimizing any of it.
We are simply taking our power back.
Acknowledging what happened allows us to learn from it and take steps forward instead of argue with it and take steps back.
We argue with reality every day,
And we lose that argument just as often.
Would have,
Should have,
And could have statements are three red flags of this argument.
Why do we use these statements?
They do not change what happened.
In fact,
They only create chaos by reminding us that something did not go the way we wanted it to and often end up causing unnecessary stress.
Here is another example.
A friend is telling us about a promotion opportunity at her job that she was vying for and did not get.
She says,
I should have been chosen for the promotion.
She is obviously upset and that is understandable.
She is grieving the loss of the opportunity.
The should have statement,
However,
Adds to her upset by putting her at odds with what really happened.
She did not get the promotion.
That is the reality.
If she were supposed to have been promoted,
Then the reality would be different.
It isn't.
By accepting reality,
We can still choose to be upset and we can also begin to reclaim our power.
To do that,
We must wrap our heads around the feelings we have attached to what happened and create space between the feelings and the past.
We could also accept that our past is not always a hundred percent true.
It is a combination of truth and stories we have created to fill in the forgotten or assumed pieces of information.
We can utilize what we learn to make different choices for present and future events.
If we look at life closely,
We will see that we are constantly in situations from which we can learn.
The best thing to do with our past is learn from it.
If we choose not to learn,
Then the lesson will repeat in a future situation to give us another opportunity.
If we sit back and review our life up to this point,
We can see patterns that make up our soul lessons.
A girl grew up in a home where she witnessed her mother being physically,
Emotionally,
And verbally abused by her father.
As the girl grew up and began dating,
Her partners treated her much in the same way as her father treated her mother.
Later in life,
Her spouse abused her.
This girl found herself in this pattern because it was what she knew.
It was her perception of normal.
It is also an example of a lesson on her soul plan to learn from and get to the other side of what she experienced.
Abuse is not normal.
When it becomes a pattern,
There are lessons to learn.
We might not learn the first time,
The second,
Or even the third.
We learn when we have gathered enough information and knowledge from our life experiences to make the choice to get to the other side and break the pattern.
And what about when we question death?
An example might be,
They were so young and had so much life to live.
This is tough and reality may sound harsh or unsympathetic.
The raw reality is that people die when they are done living.
It is our attempt to rationalize death by arguing with its reality.
This is not about the reason for the death.
This is strictly about the simplest truth,
The end of life.
Of course,
There will be heartbreak.
That is human.
A person we care about died.
Arguing about how the death should or should not have happened goes against the fact that it did and only adds stress by creating cognitive chaos.
One thought process knows the death occurred and the arguing thought process challenges that reality by saying it should not have.
This cognitive dissonance creates suffering.
There is no point in arguing with reality.
Why create more suffering?
Reality is real.
It is like I am or you are.
That is reality in its simplest form.
We can challenge it in every way that we can come up with and we will never win that challenge.
Reality always wins.
But when we stop fighting it,
So do we.
