One of my biggest complaints about doing a lot of therapy and other healing practices is that they don’t allow me to “graduate” from facing difficult things. When I was growing up, it was an underlying assumption in my family that if bad things happened to you, you deserved them – in fact, you had probably “made” them happen to you. On the flip side of this is the attitude that you’re the victim of everything and everyone – that the universe is out to get you, because somehow you were “fated” to fail. Leaning too far into either of these views is a recipe for immense struggle and suffering.
Dialectics as the synthesis of acceptance and change
About a decade ago, I was lucky to get access to a Dialectical Behavior Therapy group. Attending it for a year changed my life, and my views on why bad things happen. Dialectical Behavior Therapy, or DBT, is a therapeutic approach developed by Dr. Marsha Linehan, a researcher at the University of Washington. In her memoir, which I highly recommend, she describes her journey through grave, life-threatening depression, self-harm, uncontrollable emotions, and suicidal thoughts, which motivated her to create this paradigm specifically for people that couldn’t be helped by any other therapeutic means. Her early patients were people with severe suicidal tendencies, Borderline Personality Disorder, addictions, and other serious issues – and she showed that there was a way to help them build lives worth living.
DBT is built around the principle of dialectics: the idea that the process of shifting back and forth between two things can catalyze growth and change. For Linehan, these two poles are acceptance and change: “the balance of opposites and the coming to a synthesis of two opposites…pursuing change strategies balanced by acceptance strategies.” (Building a Life Worth Living, 167)
Radical acceptance: a life-changing skill
Radical acceptance, which is one of the main skills taught in DBT, is the ability to truly accept things for what they are. It’s an idea with roots in Buddhist practice, made well-known by Tara Brach in her book of the same name. Instead of resisting something that is unpleasant or painful, radical acceptance teaches us to embrace it. Radical acceptance can be practiced on many different levels, from bodily pain, to everyday irritations, and big, difficult topics like grief. It’s an approach that doesn’t always come naturally, so I encourage you to try it and practice. You’ll probably be surprised at how many things in your day-to-day life you resist accepting – even if the resistance is just in the form of the thought, “it’s not fair!”
Radical acceptance is not the same as approval, passivity, or compassion. It doesn’t mean that you are agreeing that the situation is a good one, or agreeing to not try to change it. According to the DBT skills manual, it simply means that you “stop fighting reality, stop throwing tantrums because reality is not the way you want it, and let go of bitterness.” (342)
Here’s how to practice radical acceptance (from the DBT skills manual, 344):
- Observe that you are questioning or fighting reality.
- Remind yourself that the unpleasant reality is just as it is and cannot be changed, and remind yourself that there are causes for reality as it is.
- Practice accepting with your whole self (mind, body, and spirit).
- Attend to your body sensations as you think about what you need to accept.
- Allow disappointment, sadness or grief to arise within you.
- Acknowledge that life can be worth living even when there is pain.
I can safely say that this is one of the most life-changing skills I’ve ever learned. Though at first I resisted fully accepting truly unpleasant things, once I did, I realized I was much more effective at dealing with them. Radical acceptance helps us move past the spiral of negative reactions and get to a place where we can figure out how to cope. That’s where the second part of dialectics comes in.
Working on change
Once we’ve accepted reality, we can work on other skills, such as changing our emotional responses to things, solving problems, becoming more interpersonally effective, setting boundaries, working towards a goal, or building our sense of self-assurance. Linehan’s DBT skills manual is full of these change techniques, and she describes many of them in her memoir, too.
Astrology can be a great tool to use dialectically. It’s especially great for helping us accept situations, because it gives us a set of symbols that break down the situation and let us see if from new angles. But it can show us paths toward change, too, as we start to see the strengths and opportunities that appear in our charts and transits.
Dialectics for inner work
Linehan is not the only person to use the concept of dialectics in her work. Arguably the most famous person to use this term was the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), who used it to describe the process of historical change. Drawing on the work of Hegel, the Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue speaks of dialectics to help describe our inner, soul-level contradictions. I think this is another really interesting and important take on acceptance and change. We can talk about radically accepting the reality of “what’s happening out there,” but O’Donohue urges us to also accept what’s happening within ourselves.
In his audiobook The Inner Landscape, he talks about how we often feel forced to choose between one or the other side of our contradictory natures. We humans are full of conflicting feelings and thoughts, and it’s very normal for those all to live side by side. For instance, I might want to have a successful podcast and I may enjoy producing it, but I may also be afraid of sharing it with others! Instead of choosing just one or the other thought or feeling, and forcing ourselves to identify with it, O’Donohue urges us to dive into the heart of the contradiction itself:
“If you want to find a point of departure for your new journey of soul…look inwards and discover a point of contradiction within yourself, and stay faithful to the aura and presence of that contradiction, and hold its two sides gently in your embrace, and ask it what it wants to teach you.”
In essence, he’s talking about radically accepting our own complexity. Once I truly accept that I both love making my podcast and am nervous about sharing it with others, I can begin to chart a path forward. Maybe I hire someone else to promote it for me, take a class on how to share my podcast, or work on building my confidence around sharing it. The complexity of my feelings may always be there, but I’ll be able to live a fuller life once I acknowledge and deepen my relationship with them.
Astrology as a tool for acceptance and change
External change is inevitable. The truth is, while we can definitely make better and worse choices in life, a lot of unpleasant and painful things do just happen to us. That doesn’t mean we’ve messed up or that we’re bad people, or even that we’re fated to suffer forever. What it does mean is that we need to accept what’s happening and then find a way to cope effectively.
The idea that we’re “fated” to suffer is one that can often pop up in astrological readings. Most of us have at least a placement or two that are traditionally interpreted as “bad.” And while I would never want to brightside anyone’s suffering, I want to push back on the idea that any of us can truly avoid pain and have a life that is completely “happy.” That idea in itself is, in my opinion, the true “malefic.” Instead, we should allow astrology to point us toward the difficulties we need to accept, and also let is help us find new solutions to problems. Practicing radical acceptance and working on skills that help us deal with things effectively are, for me, the cornerstones for pursuing a fulfilling and meaningful life – a life, as Marsha Linehan would put it, that is experienced as “worth living.”
