Radical Acceptance and Compassionate Understanding

Radical acceptance is taking responsibility for everything you experience and do while being as fully present as possible. This is easy for fun stuff. “It’s a sunny day, I feel good, and I have radical acceptance of me and world at this moment!” It’s harder with the painful stuff. “My car just got rear ended in the parking lot and whoever did it didn’t leave a note.” Our initial response is distress and grief – denial, bargaining, anger, depression, and eventually acceptance. Radical acceptance minimizes denial, bargaining, depression, and anger, and maximizes embracing the new challenge of getting my car fixed. Positive or negative, pleasurable or painful, our job is to fully accept what is and deal with it. Radical acceptance.

Compassionate understanding is looking for what’s valid in everyone’s position and continually trying to serve the highest good. Even the effort to do this is generally soothing to the people involved. We relax encountering a compassionate expression, tone, action, or belief. We like someone trying to be caring and fair.

Radical acceptance and compassionate understanding are at the heart of all spiritual practices and psychotherapies. For instance, nonattachment in the Buddhist sense is radical acceptance of all that is, while loving kindness arises from compassionate understanding.

Add a commitment to living your values, and you have an encapsulation of Stoic philosophy. The qualities of compassionate understanding, radical acceptance, and living your values are at the center of what it means to live a virtuous life.

Integration of defenses line of development.

All humans have psychological defenses that are cued by perceived threats. We automatically respond to threats with different versions of amplified or numbed emotions, distorted perspectives, destructive impulses to fight/flee/freeze, and diminished capacities for empathy and self-reflection. All the classic defenses – denial, rationalization, projection, projective identification, scapegoating, etc – involve these processes. How effectively we notice defensive states arising and regulate them to healthy responses to the present moment determines our altitude on the Integration-of-defenses line of development.

The central capacities at the core of the Integration-of-defenses line of development are productive self-awareness and radical acceptance.

• Productive self-awareness is observing yourself acting, thinking, and feeling, noticing the outcomes, and making necessary corrections.
• Radical acceptance is commitment to being completely responsible for everything we experience or do, continually adjusting to the present moment.

People have different capacities for productive self-awareness and radical acceptance, which determines their altitude on the Integration-of-defenses line. We tend to progress on the Integration-of-defenses line through five levels:

1. Basic Capacity:
   Some awareness and acceptance – the ability to have some capacity for productive self-awareness and radical acceptance.
   
   
2. Under Stress: 
   having productive self-awareness and radical acceptance while irritated, anxious, or otherwise distracted. There will be higher or lower thresholds of painful experiences where you lose yourself in defensive states, but you can occasionally notice those states and make attempts to regulate them.
   
   
3. In distress:
   having productive self-awareness and radical acceptance with increasing levels of distress – everyone has thresholds of arousal beyond which they lose control in defensive states, but we can raise those thresholds with compassionate understanding and productive self-awareness. The higher your thresholds, the higher you are on the integration-of-defenses-line of development.
   
   
4. Transmutation:
   increasing abilities to recognize and regulate defensive states into states of healthy response to the present moment via productive self-awareness, radical acceptance, and compassionate understanding.
   
   
5. Surrender to Wise Self:
   surrendered to Wise Self, fully committed to always regulate defensive states into states of healthy response to the present moment.