This is a post that I wrote for the Inspirational Corner of the ProHealth website.
One of the qualities I’ve found most helpful to cultivate with regard to ME/CFS has been acceptance. Many people struggle with the idea of acceptance associating it with a sense of giving up. However I believe it’s possible to be both accepting and hopeful. Acceptance without the belief that you can make a difference to your future isn’t helpful, but to me that’s resignation not acceptance.
Acceptance is helpful when it involves an acknowledgement of exactly how things are in the here and now and that you can’t change what has happened before this moment. It involves choosing not to dwell on what happened to lead to this moment or how things were better before. Helpful acceptance recognises that life needs to be lived differently for a while and that we need to adapt to our new circumstances. Acceptance coexists with hope when we recognise that the way we respond to our circumstances can impact future outcomes. Our choices and actions can result in better illness management and better emotional wellbeing. By accepting that the future is unknown, we can aim to influence it in positive ways. Our wellbeing isn’t dependant on our circumstances; it has more to do with how we choose to see them and respond to them.
Acceptance is useful both on the macro level of accepting the illness as a whole and on the micro level of accepting our moment-to-moment circumstances. Before I accepted that I had this condition I fought it and pushed against it, only to find myself getting worse and worse. To reach an acceptance of this illness I first had to acknowledge the losses involved and allow myself to grieve the things I had to let go of. By accepting my feelings as an understandable reaction to my circumstances my grief was able to flow to its natural conclusion. Accepting that life had to be lived differently for a while allowed me to focus on how I could live it in a way that optimises my health given my new circumstances. I then found that by learning to recognise and accept my daily energy limit, accepting how this changed from day to day, I was better able to manage my health. Accepting the inevitability of bad days and not beating myself up for having them helps me to keep my spirits up. A compassionate acceptance that my spirits will dip from time to time prevents the vicious cycle of negative thinking which could easily lead to depression.
Acceptance is also the natural antidote to resistance. Resistance is very wasteful of our energy. When we resist our limits we push too hard and crash. When we resist our feelings we expend energy keeping them at bay. Resistance builds tension and stress, which doesn’t do us any good. Similarly if we struggle to accept certain aspects of our personality or our behaviour, we will also carry an extra weight of stress and tension. We can let go of this tension if we accept ourselves as human and imperfect. We can’t change the fact that we made mistakes in the past, but we can accept ourselves as fallible, learn from them, choose to put them right where we can and do things differently in the future. By letting go of resistance and embracing acceptance our energy becomes more freely available to us to spend on the things we choose.
There are so many different ways that acceptance can benefit our well-being, it’s well worth paying it some attention. What do you resist? What areas of your life could benefit from a little more acceptance?
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Hello Julie
Just to say that I have only discovered your website a few weeks ago. But I have already found it very helpful and buoying. I think your perspectives are very wise and thoughtful.
I have had M.E. at a significantly life-changing level for nearly eleven years now and it has been a lonely process trying to understand what’s happened to me and my life and trying to work out how to cope. I’ve already learned a great deal reading your blogs/articles and am discovering new strategies that ring true. This is in marked contrast to the largely insulting and falsely premised nonsense that was peddled to me by the M.E. Specialist Services I attended when I was first diagnosed all those years ago. So thank you very much for all your good and generous works and for sharing your many worthwhile insights.
With much appreciation and good wishes,