Improving Relationship Quality Instead of the People in Them
Radical Acceptance of Self and Others
The capacity for infinite self improvement was the bane of my human existence for my first fifty years.
So called self improvement is thought to open up an infinite variety of opportunities for we humans. But often the never ending quest for self improvement leads to failure, disappointment, and unmanageable amounts of paralyzing anxiety.
The fear and threat of being inferior does not plague everyone, but it plagues a whole lot of us and drives many debilitating mental health issues.
So what can we do?
Number one source of help for me has been sifting out inaccurate information about the mechanics of my brain and body and doing research to find accurate information.
For example, until the age of fifty I was led to believe and in fact did believe each human was a kind of shape shifting entity that existed in different sorts of states like enlightened vs. unenlightened, good vs, bad, holy vs. evil, responsible vs. irresponsible, nice vs. mean, competent achiever vs. incompetent screw-up, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. I turned myself inside out and upside down for fifty years to land on the right side of these human equations but ALWAYS came up lacking. I could never find myself squarely on only the good side of any equation, always finding too much evidence to the contrary, and always feeling less than.
Well, the idea I could morph from being a lower quality kind of person into a higher quality kind of person like an unenlightened irritant into an enlightened light walker evaporated when I researched how the brain actually works. Turns out the brain has basically one and only one overall way to evaluate the information it takes in. A state of enlightenment is not something the brain has the capacity to morph into.
Enlightenment is a made up concept used like a carrot on a stick by wanna-be gurus to manipulate our thoughts and behaviors, especially our behavior of reaching into our wallet to pay them for wise counsel. If I could have every dollar and minute back I gave to those kinds of manipulative folks I would be so much better for it. Anything pertaining to so called human enlightenment is false advertising and keeps us in a constant state of inferiority because something like .000000001% of the human population allegedly even attains enlightenment. To be in that rarified air one must spend thousands or more to experience deprivations in foreign countries or places in our own country with scantily or dramatically clad leaders telling you what to do and when to do it. But enlightenment is false advertising because the brain doesn’t suddenly work differently than it ever did before after one has spent enough time and money undergoing self deprivation with a manipulative guru.
Here is what the brain can do. The brain assimilates the abundant and never ending stream of information it receives both internally and externally simultaneously and comes up with a prediction for what to do next. A prediction can also be called a decision. The human is basically a predictive decision making machine. We can’t transcend into a higher plane of existence with our brain, but we can make ever better decisions due to our life experiences and knowledge attainment.
Once I had accurate information about how my brain processes all of the information it receives in order to come up with a predictive decision for what to do next, I realized I simply had to focus on making better decisions every moment of every day, not on morphing myself into a better quality person. Mediation during yoga, praying on my knees at church, or talking to a therapist about my inferiority complex were not going to magically spit me out into a more enlightened version of myself.
The only concrete, real, tangible thing I could do every day to improve the quality of my life was to make better decisions all day every day. Meditation and the like were things I could do to calm my nervous system, but these kinds of activities will never morph me into a higher quality person if I do them often enough and perfectly enough.
Making the best possible decisions at all times is the real ticket to my happiness and success in life.
This small idea has simplified my life unbelievably and has improved the quality of my life in every measure.
First and foremost the idea of striving to make better decisions every day instead of turning myself into a higher quality version of myself has led me to radical and global acceptance of myself and others. When I stopped trying to become a better version of myself, I stopped expecting my children, spouse, siblings, parents, and close relatives and friends to become better versions of themselves.
This small shift in my thinking has changed everything about how I relate to myself and to others and has led to a 100% improvement in the quality of my relationships. Radical acceptance of other people has changed the way I look at them, talk to them, respond to them. I stopped being constantly disappointed with the intimate people in my life and this has caused them to feel comfortable being with me and to trust me. Radical acceptance of myself has erased the awful feelings of being inferior and less than.
I can’t express how much ease and pleasure has invaded my life now that I completely accept myself and the people important to me. Instead of striving to be worthy of my life, I just live it. Instead of waiting for my intimates to become worthy of being in a relationship with me, I accept them exactly as they are and love the heck out of them.
The photo above is my daughter with Trisomy 21. Enormous cognitive dissonance happened the moment I found out she had Down syndrome during the middle of the night about 8 hours after she was born. Immediately I knew I would be thrilled with anything she would become. I wasn’t thinking in terms of her potential and what she would bring to the world and to me. I was thinking in terms of how excited I was to experience her as she moved through her developmental stages.
Why did I perceive my older three children so differently than this one?
Why was I so concerned about how my older three would ‘turn out’ as soon as they were born? Why did I obsess over their so called ‘potential?’
Turns out that middle of the night revelation in March of 2001 would take ten years of research and thinking to blossom into a whole new way to understand my own personal brain, my own personal life, and the people I love and this new thing I call radical acceptance.
Radical acceptance of people means I view exiting the birth canal as the moment of self actualization. Radical acceptance means I no longer am living a dark and dreary life-long prison sentence of incessant self improvement. Radical acceptance means I no longer view other people through the lens of how they need to improve. My appreciation for and enjoyment of myself and other people is so much greater than I ever knew possible with this notion of radical acceptance.
Our trend toward simplification and minimalism these days has focused on shedding material objects. I have found it is equally important to shed concepts that that hold us back, keep us anxious, uncomfortable, lonely, isolated, and stuck in feelings of being less than.
Radical acceptance of self and others costs nothing and requires no guru or ideology. If you want to try it, all you have to do is focus on making the best decisions you can make all day everyday and realize nobody is capable of making perfect decisions all day everyday. When you or someone you love makes an imperfect decision, you see it for what it is, a less than perfect decision and you stop believing anytime a person makes a less than perfect decision it means they did so because they are a lower quality of person than they should be.
My daughter with Trisomy 21 not only kicked off this beautiful life changing idea to radically accept not only her, but myself and others, she also happens to naturally do it herself. She is beloved by all who know her because she does not judge people for who they are. It doesn’t even occur to her. These days, it doesn’t even occur to me either.
To reiterate, striving for decision making improvement instead of self improvement and practicing radical acceptance of self and others has improved the quality of my life by every measure. If this resonates and you give it a try, I would love to hear about it. It took me a full year of practice before it became natural for me. It requires some major re-learning, but the results are so fantastic the learning process is exhilarating!
