The Four A’s of Acceptance
I find it useful to think of acceptance in terms of the four A's acknowledge, allow, accommodate, and appreciate. These four A's take you deeper into the experience of acceptance. So here's a useful metaphor to get your head around this. One day a distant relative, harmless but unpleasant, you don't particularly like this person for one reason or another. Turns up on you front door step. The-- The first thing is you acknowledge they're there.
You look out of the window, you acknowledge there's a relative actually there outside your front door. The next step is you allow them into your house. You open the door, you say, oh, hello. I wasn't expecting you and you allow them in. So you've gone from acknowledging they're there to actually allowing them entry. Now the third step is you accommodate them. You offer them a couch, you make them a cup of tea, you give them a cookie.
So you've gone from acknowledging to allowing to accommodating. And then the fourth step is you appreciate them. You spend a bit of time chatting to this person and even though they've got these annoying habits or mannerisms or whatever it was that you didn't like about them, you start to find out there's some qualities about them that you do like. They've got a good sense of humor or they played an important role in your childhood that you'd completely forgotten. That's kind of the final stage. Acknowledge, allow, accommodate, appreciate.
And this is what we want to do with our own painful emotions, cognitions, memories, sensations, physiological reactions. So what we'll typically find is throughout therapy in early sessions we're going to be hovering at the shallow end of acceptance. Lots of acknowledging and allowing and then progressively we go more into accommodating all of those classic acceptance exercises, breathing into and making room, physicalizing our emotions, and then going further than that into this, looking at the purpose and the benefits of painful emotions. And I focused on emotions here, but you'll see the same thing going on with cognitions and memories and physical sensations.