Your Refusal To Accept Is Costing You

Acceptance isn’t easy. If it were, you would have done it a long time ago. And the fact that you haven’t accepted this doesn't mean that you’re broken or doing it wrong.

There are reasons your brain tries to stop you from accepting your family and keeps you locked in a perpetual state of hoping things can and will be different.

In this article, you will learn:

• How the desire for fairness keeps you stuck
• Why hope can be dangerous
• Why avoiding grief is actually bringing you more pain

Naturally, We Want Things To Be Fair

Most people want to believe that the world is “fair.” This means that good people will be treated well and that bad behavior will be met with consequences. So when you’re asked to accept harm you did not deserve, it can feel like you’re being asked to accept that the world is an unfair, unjust place, where we have no control over who receives what type of consequence or treatment. That can be terrifying.

When faced with this dilemma, the reasonable part of you asks: Why should I be the one to accept this? I didn’t do anything wrong.

This is a very common question among survivors of childhood trauma or people born into highly dysfunctional families. There is nothing you could have done to deserve being born into the situation you were born into. And if you were a child who was treated unfairly or even abused and neglected, being asked to accept that feels wildly unfair.

Your refusal to accept is a response to a genuine injustice. But acceptance isn’t about deciding that the harm was fair. It is about recognizing what is outside your control so you can move forward and live your life.

Hope Keeps Us Hooked

Underneath anger, there is almost always a fantasy. One day, they will finally see me. One day, they will apologize. One day, they will become the parent I need.

That hope keeps you on high alert, scanning every interaction for a sign that this time will be different, and protesting or negotiating every time it isn’t. Letting it go can feel like giving up on the relationship entirely. But that kind of hope isn’t keeping the relationship alive. It is keeping you waiting. Accepting reality means grieving that fantasy.

Acceptance requires grief, and most people are actually not trying to avoid acceptance; they are trying to avoid grief. To accept who your family actually is, you have to feel the loss of who you needed them to be. That means feeling sadness, disappointment, and mourning something you cannot get back. So of course, you avoid it. Avoiding acceptance is how you avoid the grief. But the grief doesn’t go anywhere while you wait. It’s still there under the surface, and the longer you avoid acceptance, the harder it is to face it when you finally get there.

You keep avoiding that acceptance and the grief behind it by staying stuck in the “if only” spiral (if only I’d said it differently, if only they would admit it, if only I try one more time). And this feels productive. You think that if you just ruminate about it hard enough, you will finally crack the code.

I have to give you some tough love: You probably won’t. If this person wants to change, they will have to do it themselves. They may respond to your changes or the differences in your communication, but you cannot actually create the change for them. You can inspire them, model it, and wait for them to meet you in this place, but you cannot do the work for them.

This does not mean that you say that people cannot change. Everyone can change to some degree. You know this because you have changed, and you are always a work in progress. But the hardest thing to accept is that some people do not want to change. Some people do not see any reason to change. Some people don’t think that there is anything to change. Some people do not think it’s worth the effort.

What The Fight Is Costing You

Fighting a reality you cannot change doesn’t just fail to fix it; it also makes it worse. It costs you in a real way.

When we suppress our emotions, our bodies pay the price. Researchers who study emotion have found that trying to push down or fight a feeling increases your physical stress response and drains your mental energy, leaving you with less focus and memory for the rest of your day (Gross and Levenson, 1997; Richards and Gross, 2000). The fight is not free. You are spending real energy every single day. And the worst part is, you pay that price, and it doesn’t even buy you the thing you want. You can pay that tax for years, and your family still may not change.

You pay for it with your sleep, focus, mood, body, and patience. I want you to consider how you feel after another argument (you know the argument you’ve been having for years). How do you feel after fighting with them in your head while you shower for the 1000th time this week? How do you feel when you’re lying awake at night, staring at the ceiling, asking yourself what you could do differently to change this dynamic?

I know it can sound cruel to say that someone cannot change or is doomed to keep repeating these patterns. And that’s not what we need to accept. Radical acceptance is about accepting what is happening right now and then deciding what you want to do about it. This might mean you continue spending time with this person and just accept how they are. This might mean that you limit your interactions or change how you interact with them. You might need to temporarily step back from the relationship to work on yourself so you can return to it. You may need to end the relationship completely while you work on acceptance and return to it later, or you may never do so. You can hold hope for the future and just work with what is right now.

Naming what you are losing by refusing to accept it can help push you forward. And if you have been doing this for a long time without success, maybe you should try something different?

Sources

Gross, J. J., and Levenson, R. W. (1997). Hiding feelings: The acute effects of inhibiting negative and positive emotion. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 106(1), 95-103.

Richards, J. M., and Gross, J. J. (2000). Emotion regulation and memory: The cognitive costs of keeping one’s cool. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(3), 410-424.