How Combining “Radical Acceptance” and “Eternal Perspective” Might Save Your Sanity
I gritted my teeth as I paced the floors with a crying baby on my hip. My mind began to spin like an old record player at high speed. I’m tired, I’m sore, my back hurts. I just want this baby to stop crying. Why is he crying so much? Why can’t he give me a break? I can’t handle this much longer. Why doesn’t he ever just let me sit? My arms ache. My back is killing me. I’m an unfit mother. How will I be able to keep doing this? This is too overstimulating for me. I—
These kinds of spiraling thoughts invade my mind in trying situations. I rarely look at difficulties simply for what they are. I often go straight to unkind judgments on myself. I even go as far as making assumptions of those around me and what they’re thinking about me. I get so entangled in these false narratives that I further depress myself and boil up unnecessary anxieties.
“As believers, we can use radical acceptance paired with our hope in Christ to help us through our suffering. ”
I doubt I’m the only one who does this. Do you ever find yourself fighting to accept reality for what it is? Rather than dealing with the grief of the situation, instead you project unnecessary judgments about yourself, your situation, or others? In doing this it may appear as if we’re facing our suffering, but we’re actually avoiding it. To help us better cope with our suffering, therapists have created a coping skill known as radical acceptance. As believers, we can use radical acceptance paired with our hope in Christ to help us through our suffering.
Radical Acceptance as a Tool for the Christian
I took a deep breath and paused. And another deep breath. Stop the story, Lara. I told myself. Just accept what’s happening. No judgments, no projecting. Your baby is crying. Your body hurts. It will end eventually. I took another deep breath and continued pacing between the kitchen and living room. The record player was silenced and my jaw loosened slightly, though my baby kept crying.
This is radical acceptance. Rather than stewing in how unhappy you are, how unfair life has turned out, harshly judging yourself and/or those around you, you simply accept the facts of your situation and move forward. “Radical acceptance is about accepting life on life’s terms and not resisting what you cannot or choose not to change. Radical acceptance is about saying yes to life, just as it is.”[1]
Radical acceptance isn’t a grin-and-bear-it type of coping, rather it’s accepting our suffering and all that comes with it. This type of acceptance doesn’t avoid the despair—it recognizes lament as a part of the grieving process without heaping on further grief beyond what’s necessary. “Acceptance means that you can turn your resistant ruminating into accepting thoughts like, ‘I’m in this situation. I don’t approve of it. I don’t think it’s OK, but it is what it is, and I can’t change that it happened.’ . . . When you practice acceptance, you are still disappointed, sad, and perhaps fearful in such situations, but you don’t add the pain of non-acceptance to those emotions and make things worse.”[2]
Though the term “radical acceptance” most likely didn’t exist in Matthew Henry’s lifetime (1662–1714), I believe he wrote about something similar in his commentary on Lamentations 3:
When we are sedate and quiet under our afflictions, when we sit alone and keep silence, do not run to and fro into all companies with our complaints, aggravating our calamities, and quarreling with the disposals of Providence concerning us, but retire into privacy, that we may in a day of adversity consider, sit alone, that we may converse with God and commune with our own hearts, silencing all discontented distrustful thoughts, and laying our hand upon our mouth . . . When those who are afflicted in their youth accommodate themselves to their afflictions, fit their necks to the yoke and study to answer God’s end in afflicting them, then they will find it good for them to bear it, for it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who are thus exercised thereby.[3]
Radical acceptance is a tool any of us can implement. Whether it’s as simple as acknowledging the rainy day that spoiled your outing or accepting that you didn’t get the job you wanted, you can use radical acceptance to cope with life.
“Harnessing both radical acceptance and eternal perspectives allows us to grieve the realities of the fallen world we live in while still trusting God’s sovereign hand in it.”
As Christians though, we can take a step beyond radical acceptance because we have a greater hope. This is where the gospel can intersect the common grace of therapy and press us to turn our eyes off ourselves and turn them further unto Christ himself. Harnessing both radical acceptance and eternal perspectives allows us to grieve the realities of the fallen world we live in while still trusting God’s sovereign hand in it.
Radical Acceptance and Eternal Perspectives
After a summer walk, I sat by the ocean shore to cool off. The sky was gray. With the water at low tide, the wharf was exposed with dying sea life clinging to its rotting, blackened beams. The rocks were dry and hot, covered in dead seaweed that was crumbling from the sun. Empty and broken shells littered the ground. Shards of glass glittered with forgotten memories. I heard the last of the water crackling and gasping out between the gravel. It looked like a sea tomb.
But I know that’s not the whole story. While that description is true of the shore at low tide, I know that with the rise of the water will come schools of minnows darting below the sparkling, clear waters, cool waves lapping over my ankles, and the peaceful sounds of the ocean washing the shore clean of death.
Even in my deepest suffering, I can choose to radically accept my reality. Rather than denying it I can acknowledge the hurt, tracing it back to our fall into sin and the curse. I can refuse to make assumptions and turn the world against me in my mind. I can just observe and accept it for what it is: grievous, difficult, and painful. Yet—even while knowing this reality is true and hard, I can turn my eyes up towards the greater hope to come. I can proclaim with the apostle Peter,
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls. (1 Pet. 1:1–9)
This is radical acceptance and eternal perspective. I can accept the grief of my situation without turning inward. I can turn to Christ and the hope he has for me. I can refuse my anxiety-devised narrative and instead choose to listen closely to the words of truth. I can lament my situation and find peace in the joy and rest to come. Like Jeremiah, I can call to mind God’s faithfulness and steadfast love while lamenting life’s greatest tragedies (Lam. 3:21–23). Like the Psalmist, I can remember God and his works even when my soul is downcast (Ps. 42:6).
As children of God, we often live in this paradox of joy and grief. It’s okay to cry and have faith in these truths. We can radically accept our reality, grieve what it is without making it more than it is, and comfort ourselves with the story of Scripture rather than our own narrative.
Radical acceptance is a helpful tool, especially for those of us who often go beyond the difficult and grievous facts of our situations and project despairing narratives for ourselves. But when we pair it with our hope in Christ, we have a powerful instrument to sing the story of redemption to ourselves even while afflicted—no matter how small or great our suffering.
Lara d’Entremont is a wife and mom to three from Nova Scotia, Canada. Lara is a writer and learner at heart—always trying to find time to scribble down some words or read a book. Her desire in writing is to help women develop solid theology they can put into practice—in the mundane, the rugged terrain, and joyful moments. You can find more of her writing at laradentremont.com.
[1] Karyn Hall, Ph.D, “Radical Acceptance: Sometimes Problems Can’t Be Solved,” Psychology Today Canada, July 8, 2012, accessed September 6, 2021, (https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/pieces-mind/201207/radical-acceptance).
[2] Ibid.
[3] Matthew Henry, Zondervan NIV Matthew Henry Commentary, ed. Leslie F. Church, Dr. and Gerald W. Peterman, 2nd ed., Premier Reference Series (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1992), 1061 (emphasis original).