Radical Acceptance

 

I love when the universe provides exactly the message I need on any given day. Or perhaps it is simply my love of words and how they are so beautifully combined to create a song, a poem, a book, or any other way words magically soothe my soul.

Radical acceptance is how I have dealt with moving forward when I have exhausted solutions or there is an unexpected turn of events. 

The situations that come immediately to mind are when my dad was diagnosed with cancer and given 6 months to live in 1989. He made it about eight days before succumbing to the rapidly spreading lung cancer. Again, in 2016 when the doctors told us that mom's breast cancer had spread to her brain and other organs. She lasted about eleven days. 

In early August of 2019 my younger sister, Jeni, called to tell me she had breast cancer. Her body would not be able to manage any treatments and we thought she had two to three months. She died on September 22, 2019.

Not that it takes a major event like death for radical acceptance to become necessary. Or even an event like the end of my first marriage after nineteen years. 

Sometimes it can be as simple as getting information at what feels like the last minute that would have helped me to move forward earlier. One of those, “Why am I the last to know?” times where someone I love decides I did not need to know news that impacts my life because they are worried that I will be upset. It is not the news that upsets me. It is the withholding of the information that shatters my heart into a million pieces. How can they love me if they keep me out of the loop?

Then I process my emotions, pick up the pieces, discover my love for the person is bigger than the hurt and start to deal with the fall out. Nothing I feel will resolve the issue. Instead, I move on, composing emails, making new plans, recognizing the world is not about me (as usual) and deal with what is.

So, thank you friend Ruth for posting the Radical acceptance meme on Facebook today. It was just what I needed to see to process the last of my sadness and to keep moving forward.