Acceptance: a lesson taught by a dog
In my work with many clients, we deal with the concept of acceptance. I’ve never been a big fan of that word. It sounds weak, passive, tentative. There are all kinds of things I don’t want to accept. I don’t want to accept that, say, Haiti will always be a nation marked by tragedy. I don’t want to accept that half the marriages end in divorce. I don’t want to accept that gay couples (and gay singles) will have to live as second-class citizens just because a small percentage of the population hasn’t figured out how to be open and affirming.
But acceptance is often useful, and sometimes essential. If I lost my leg in an accident, I would have to go through the difficult process of acceptance to make sense of my loss and move forward with my life. If I got dumped or suffered some other kind of painful relationship loss, I would have to accept what happened so that I wouldn’t be imprisoned by my own resentment and anger.
To illustrate this, I will use a silly example. (Why? Oh, I don’t know, maybe because it’s Friday, and I haven’t blogged about my dogs in a while.) Our younger dog, Hoku’ala, turned nine months old this week. In three months, he’ll be a yearling who presents far fewer behavioral challenges. In about fifteen months, he’ll truly be a full-grown adult dog. But right now, he’s a chew-chew train. He ripped holes in three pieces of our living room furniture, which have now been moved to a back bedroom. We’re sitting on IKEA furniture that looks like it belongs in a college dorm room, and hoping that by summer we’ll be able to return our living room to its normal condition.
When I first noticed the damage, I had to do some self-soothing (to use a Therapyland term). It won’t be cheap to fix this! Of course we didn’t punish Hoku, because it wasn’t his fault. He’s a dog. He behaves according to his nature. It was our fault for leaving him unsupervised with our furniture. But I felt frustrated. And I worried: my partner isn’t any more of a fan of expensive furniture damage than I am. I imagined that there would be a lot more anger and difficulty when he got home.
But I was wrong. “It’ll be fine,” my partner said. As we moved the furniture out of harm’s way, we talked about how we’ll eventually take it in for repairs, and when we might be able to put the main floor back together again. I was surprised: I thought I would be the calm one!
Like I said, this is a silly example. But it’s a good illustration of the power of acceptance. If you’re upset or frustrated about the consequences of a decision you made, or the outcome of a relationship you cultivated in your life, it helps to take a deep breath and remember that you made a lot of choices in your life that carried some amount of risk, and sometimes things don’t go as planned. Sometimes the furniture gets chewed up, or your feelings get hurt, or a painful lesson is learned. It doesn’t mean you made the wrong choice. (Honest, I love Hoku and don’t regret his membership in our family for one minute!) It just means that life is messy, and sometimes painful, and doing the work of acceptance is just a part of the adventure.
Stella (left) and the Chew-Chew Train.
