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How 12-Step Recovery Taught Me to Let Go and Become Accepting
One of the most important things that 12-step recovery taught me was acceptance: how to accept things I previously considered unacceptable.
I didn’t really understand just how important the lack of acceptance was in my life. I was filled with resentments and wanted many things to be different than they were: traffic, my boss, politics, the educational system, the cap of my toothpaste tube.
I’d heard a bunch of things about acceptance before:
“Emotional pain often comes from non-acceptance.”
“Acceptance decreases suffering.”
“Acceptance is a choice; it means we stop fighting against what IS.”
But my question was — how do you do it?! HOW do I learn to accept things that I see as unacceptable!?
Here’s my story to illustrate how I got to the point where I’m (mostly) accepting of things that used to feel unacceptable. It started with my first epiphany in recovery which happened while I was in a traffic jam. I’d just pumped the brakes for the third time while crawling along and this thought popped into my head, “I need to leave more space between cars…”
I was like, “Wait! Whoa! *I* need to leave more space between cars! It’s not that there’s traffic that’s the problem…
