Acceptance is Not Resignation

I've been thinking a lot about acceptance and what this means for people with BPD. Acceptance is a very important DBT skill, but it is also an important part of the therapy process generally. If you can't accept where you are, it is difficult to work on getting somewhere else.

I think acceptance is also one of the hardest skills for people to understand. Perhaps this is because acceptance is sometimes confused with resignation. To me, accepting something does not mean that we resign ourselves to the fact that the thing we are accepting will never change. Acceptance is more about accepting the thing for what it is in the moment. It may change, and it may be something that we have some control over to change. But until we accept it for what it is today, we can never really face it.