Acceptance is a funny word. It can be difficult to pin down. It is a word that is often said without much consideration as to what it actually means, and it is used in various contexts with various intentions. We accept gifts during the holidays, we accept people in our lives, we accept that some things are out of our control. But even in these simple examples, we move from a literal materialistic understanding (gifts) to a more nuanced, context-driven, individual perspective (things are out of my control).
But Ben, isn’t this true with most language? Yes, yes, but that isn’t the point. Anyway . . .
Within our work as therapists, acceptance is often something that needs to be considered and understood within the context of the work. We often speak of “accepting your feelings!” just to realize it is difficult to explain exactly how to do that when the client asks, “OK . . . how?”
The truth is that the process of accepting one’s thoughts, feelings, emotions, and experiences will likely be somewhat individualized, but I recently had an interesting experience that allowed me to notice the process of acceptance in real time.
Sometimes after work, I’ll go to the gym close to the office in an effort to avoid sitting in traffic to get back home. This was the case this past Tuesday. I parked in the gym parking lot as it began raining pretty hard. I sat in my car and listened to a podcast as I waited to see if the rain would die down. It did after a few minutes and I got into the gym just before it began pouring down again.
I change, work out, go back to the locker room, shower and change again, and just as I am getting all of my belongings into my gym bag to leave, a staff member comes into the locker room and shouts, “If you are parked in the parking lot you need to move your car now! The parking lot is flooding!” I’ll admit, I did not take this too seriously at first. Having never been in the middle of a flash flood, I was unprepared for the drastic difference I was about to witness.
As I got outside, the entire parking lot was covered in thick brown water, and multiple cars were already mostly underwater with significant damage, and the water was continuing to rise. I wade through the water to get to my vehicle, a mid-size Subaru, and immediately felt a bit lucky that the water had not gotten high enough to get into the interior or exhaust. The relief was quickly diminished, however, when I put my car in reverse just to look behind me and see a traffic jam of vehicles all trying to leave at the same time. We were stuck between the water being too high to get out of one entrance, and cars stacked behind each other trying to get out of the other exit. And the water was still rising.
After some brief investigation, discussion with some of my parking lot neighbors, and the water rising enough to block both exits, it became clear that there was nothing I could do. Well, that is not completely true, for one of these neighbors decided to back his car up onto one of the curbs in hopes it would keep his exhaust out of the water. Feeling this was a good idea, I did the same. After that, the shallowest part of Parking Lot Lake was right where my car was already parked. Retrospectively, this was quite lucky.
As I sat in my downward-angled car, I watched the water continue to rise, and directly ahead of me, about 30 yards away, was another mid-size Subaru covered in water up to the roof rack. I thought “Damn, that’s about to happen to me.”
In the end, everything was fine. The water never got high enough around my car to cause any damage, the rain stopped, and within about an hour it was noticeable that the water was receding. My wonderful wife came to my rescue, and after some more wading (this time with my computer bag above my head) I made it to her car and went home and had dinner. I came back later that night and the water was low enough to drive my car right out.
In that moment of “Damn . . .” I was suddenly faced with a moment of non-acceptance. My brain was searching for ways out of the parking lot, at one point debating going through the deep water or off-roading it through the trees. My emotions ranged from being overwhelmed and anxious to frustrated, then to intently focused on my plan for escape. This all despite the fact that I knew, as much as I can know, that there was nothing else to be done.
In this moment I had to accept my situation: I had no way of knowing this would happen, it is possible it will get worse, and there is no way to fully prevent the thing I really want to prevent.
But I also had to accept my feelings: frustration, anxiety, tension, urgency, and some light existential sadness (no big deal).
Further, I had to accept my thoughts, most of them self-critical toward me or some imaginary “they” that could have prevented this. Sitting there watching the water rise, I suddenly became aware of all the moments leading up to this one that had hinted at this outcome: the severe storm alert on my phone before leaving the office, the sudden rain, the gym staff were outside looking at the runoff pond when I walked in, and so on. It was as if my brain was saying, “See! You idiot! You should have seen the signs and predicted this could happen!”
At one point I even noticed myself imagining older family members scolding me for my lack of preparedness and inability to avoid this moment. Nothing like my imaginary version of my dead grandfather reminding me how incompetent I am to really help me out at this moment.
But, in some ways, my brain was doing exactly what brains have evolved to do (though I’ll leave a little room here for the unique cruelty mine tends to favor). It was searching for mistakes, replaying decisions, assigning blame, and desperately trying to solve a problem that, at least for that moment, had no solution. If there had been an escape route hidden somewhere in that parking lot, my brain wanted to look for it.
The problem was the temptation to believe that if I just thought hard enough, worried long enough, or replayed the afternoon one more time, I might somehow change what was happening in front of me. I fall victim to this particular thinking trap regularly.
But the water didn't care what I was thinking.
Acceptance arrived in a somewhat disappointing and ordinary way: it wasn't some wave of calm, it wasn't deciding that flooding parking lots were somehow wonderful opportunities for personal growth, and it certainly wasn't pretending I wasn't anxious. It was simply a moment when I stopped negotiating: the situation belonged to the weather, not to me.
Ironically, that was the moment I had more freedom—not because the situation had changed, but because I had stopped spending energy fighting something that wasn't responding to my efforts anyway. My brain even began changing the story a bit: “Well, that’s why you have insurance, buddy.”
This is one of the biggest misconceptions about acceptance. Acceptance is often confused with approval, resignation, or giving up. It is none of those things. I hated this moment, but acceptance is acknowledging reality as it currently exists, even when you don't like it.
If there had been another safe way out of that parking lot, accepting the situation would have included taking it. Acceptance doesn't ask us to be passive. It asks us to stop pretending reality is something other than what it is, even when our brain’s automatic thoughts, feelings, and internal behaviors resist it.
This is why acceptance is so difficult when it comes to our internal experiences. We spend enormous amounts of energy trying to get rid of anxiety before living our lives, sadness before reconnecting with people, uncertainty before making decisions, or painful memories before moving forward.
Sometimes those efforts work for a little while, but often they don't.
And when they don't, we find ourselves stuck. Not because of the emotion itself, but because we've become consumed with trying to make the emotion disappear before we allow ourselves to live.
Acceptance offers a different path. It begins with a deceptively simple question: "Given that this is where I am, what matters now?" Notice that the question isn't, "How do I like this?" or "How do I make this go away?" It's simply asking what reality makes possible from here.
That Tuesday evening, the answer was fairly unremarkable. Wait. Call my wife. Keep my laptop dry. Hope my Subaru survives. Most of life isn't lived during flash floods. But almost all of us spend time sitting in our own version of a flooded parking lot—waiting for uncertainty to pass, wishing reality were different, replaying what we should have done, or trying to outthink something that cannot be thought away. Acceptance doesn't lower the water. It simply frees your hands to deal with whatever comes next.
