School starts again in about a week here in O’Fallon. The back-to-school shopping is in full swing, the stores are packed with stressed out kids and parents, and teachers and school administrators are working hard to get ready. As a therapist, this time always causes me to reflect on how difficult transitions can be for people.
Worries flood the minds of both students and parents. Will I like my teachers? Will I have friends to sit with at lunch? How will PE go this year? Will my child succeed? Will we have to fight him to do his homework? What’s this year going to be like? Our minds often want us to resolve this uncertainty by planning for every possible eventuality. We feel safer when we know what to expect, and planning ahead can be a very useful skill in life. However, sometimes we just can’t control what happens. Worrying distracts from the present moment and steals away the joy that we can find in appreciating what is, not what could be.
Radical acceptance is a core skill of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, an evidence-based treatment for managing intense emotions. Radical acceptance means fully accepting and acknowledging what is true right now in the current moment. It means confronting the fact that there is so much in this life that we cannot control: other people’s actions, thoughts, and feelings, what happened in the past, what might happen in the future.
What we can control is quite narrow, but also hugely powerful: what we do with the present moment. Radical acceptance does not mean approving of what is happening, excusing injustice or dysfunction, or sticking our head in the sand about important issues. In fact, radical acceptance means the opposite: it allows us to move past avoidance and frees up the space in our mind that would normally be crowded with worries so that we can take the most appropriate action right here, right now.
For back-to-school worries, employing radical acceptance might look like accepting that we just can’t know how the next year will go. We won’t be able to control teachers, other students, or how difficult the material might be. We can’t go back into the past and redo how the last school year went. So what can we do, right here, right now? Make a plan to get enough sleep this school year. Sign up for tutoring and clubs. Spend quality time with our friends and family members. Go swimming. Go for a run. Read a book for pleasure. Take a yoga class. Take a deep breath. What will be, will be. The most freeing option is acceptance.