Imagine: you notice that your relationship is going less well than you had hoped. You have certain expectations of your partner that he or she doesn’t live up to. This causes stress and anxiety and you start to think: “does he/ she even care and think about me?” Or “what if the relationship eventually ends?”. If you accept that the relationship is indeed in a bad state, you can gain more insight into the solutions. Think about what can be done to strengthen your relationship. As soon as you acknowledge and accept that something is not going as you had hoped/ expected, there is more room to make new choices and to sort things out.

What is acceptance?

Acceptance means that you accept the reality. This is often necessary when we can no longer control a situation that we would like to see differently. Acceptance of the situation is often the only option and ultimately offers you peace the most. You consciously choose to accept a situation: it is an active process.

We have no influence on the behaviour of others and this can be very stressful. For that reason we often have to find the solution in ourselves. This is possible through acceptance and often provides us peace and quiet. This does not mean that you have to accept everything that did not go as planned or did not go as you had hoped. Sometimes things can still be done before you start the acceptance process. If that is not the case: learn to accept.

5 tips for accepting what you cannot change

1. Recognise your feelings: acknowledge feelings that you have and do not try to suppress it if you find it difficult to accept something. Consider the emotions, give yourself space and then try to pick up the thread again.
2. Prepare for the worst: when you have the worst scenario in mind, it can often be better than expected. Accept the worst case scenario and let go!
3. Seek support from your friends or family: when you share with your environment why you feel restless you can better accept the situation. Our social environment has a huge influence on our state of mind. For that reason, it is important to share what you encounter with your inner circle.
4. Do activities, find distractions and structure your life: the moment you get restless, the best remedy is to distract yourself with (fun) activities. For example, by working out, listening to nice music or by meeting someone, you distance yourself from the situation and you can then look at it with a clear mind. By applying a clear structure to your day or week, you are engaged in other activities that are important. This creates tranquility and as a result worrying thoughts will decrease.
5. Consider your thoughts: which thoughts give you the most stress? Try to challenge your thoughts with the help of a G-scheme. Become aware of your own thoughts and investigate if they are correct. In this way you structure your own thought process and you will challenge your thinking.

What is the effect of accepting what you cannot change?

• You start to feel more relaxed: you adjust your expectations, so there is less room for disappointment.
• Learning to accept also creates self-confidence. And self-confidence provides a more positive self-image: in the end things will work out and if it doesn’t that is also fine. At least you have gained some experience. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right?
• Make a list of your goals and start working on them.

Love

Love is a universal theme. A lot of books, movies and musicals have been written about love. Unfortunately, a lot of these stories are about romantic love and almost never about self-love. People spend a lot of time fantasising about finding ‘true love’ and long to find someone they can call their soulmate. What if you turn it around and make it all about self-love instead of finding ‘true love’. How about being ‘the one’ for yourself instead of searching for the one?

Self-acceptance

Research shows that self-acceptance is an important part of self-love. This means that you accept yourself completely; the good things about you and all your flaws. Imagine how you perceive your best friend and try to accept and perceive yourself the same way. By doing this you can develop a more positive self image and this is a essential part of a healthy and happy (romantic) relationship. Researchers found out that the people who show more self-acceptance are more likely to engage in healthy relationships. These people show less jealous behaviour, they are less likely to seek confirmation through others and are more caring towards others.

Achieving self-acceptance: how?

Love is a verb meaning that you’ll have to actively work on it and this is important to remind yourself daily. Here are a couple of ways how you can achieve more self-acceptance:

• Be proud of yourself. Try to keep up a diary in which you write daily about something you’re proud of. Try to do this daily and hopefully this can help you to feel more proud of the things you achieve. For instance you can write down “I cooked a delicious meal for myself”. It’s all about the small and simple things you do for you.
• Try to be more compassionate. You have to deal 24/7 with yourself and the more kindness you show to yourself, the more you will like yourself.
• Surround yourself with friends and family that are close to you. This will help you to accept yourself more. A social safety net helps us to cope with all the struggles in life and makes us feel connected in this life.
• Take yourself out on a date. Go see a movie by yourself, treat yourself a nice cup of coffee or make a trip just by yourself. Going on dates with yourself can help you become more comfortable with being alone and make you realise “I am enough”.

Last but not least: be patient with yourself. It takes time to achieve more self-acceptance and it’s a process you go through.

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Try to keep a diary for a week about the the things you’re proud of.

Mindfulness is a state of mind that is characterized by the awareness of someone’s physical experiences, feelings and thoughts, without having an automatic reaction and having an opinion right away. To work towards mindfulness you can do training, meditation and other attention exercises. Mindfulness is getting more popular, but how did it actually come into being? You can read more about the history of mindfulness in this article!

Buddhistic origin
Mindfulness is a term that originates from Anglo-Saxon language, whose origins lie in Buddhism. Buddha (560 yr BC) has dedicated his life to investigating the causes of suffering in the world, and especially why suffering persists. He has devised ways to reduce suffering and free people from it. According to him, suffering is caused by ourselves, we are inclined to attach ourselves to pleasant experiences and to turn ourselves against unpleasant experiences. An attitude of friendly attention and attention is the way to suffer no longe and to have peace with ourselves and the situation, even when the situation is uncomfortable.

The founding father Jon
The American Jon Kabat-Zinn was the first to get the concept of mindfulness out of his Buddhist context and developed an eight-week training course, namely mindfulness based stress reduction (MBSR) training. In Dutch this is also called the attention training. As the name says, the development or improvement of attention is central. Jon worked at the University of Massachusetts academic hospital. It struck him that people who could not be treated anymore because of their terminal illness, had to face an agony. People with a terminal illness were often told that they had to ‘deal’ with their illness, but nobody could tell them how.

Jon Kabat-Zinn is a molecular biologist and he also has a lot of experience with meditation and yoga. With the knowledge of both areas he developed a training with the aim to provide patients with means to improve their quality of life.

Jon takes over
In 1979 Jon Kabat-Zinn opened the ‘Stress Reduction Clinic’ at the hospital of his university, which was later called ‘the Center for Mindfulness’. The training sessions proved to be successful: many patients appeared to benefit from the training and the effectiveness was confirmed by scientific research.

More and more therapists came to Massachusetts for an education. Thousands of people have now followed the training. To this day, Jon is giving seminars, workshops and lectures about mindfulness worldwide.

Sometimes, when I look in the mirror, I worry about myself. I look pale and have dark circles underneath my eyes. I look tired. When I look into my eyes, I miss the shimmer. I laugh, but it is only my mouth that smiles, not my eyes. And when I look at myself for a long time, I tear up. I get ashamed and look away. I cannot handle the confrontation.

Bottle up
I have been in therapy for over two and a half years now. The moment I started with therapy, there was so much pain and sorrow bottled up in my body. Yet I could not get into it. With my current psychologist, it took more than a month before I started talking about what happened to me. I will never forget the session, I cried for the first time. I sat on a chair and I thought: just let is all out. That was the beginning of many cry sessions. Crying makes me feel better since it helps to process and the tears take away a bit of tension. At those moments I do not want to be comforted, but I do want to have someone in the same room as me.

Something completely different is the feeling that I have during and before I start crying. I call it my inner pain. I feel pain in my chest and tension that I want to release. It makes me nervous. I wobble with my legs and bite on the nail of my thumb to reduce the tension. I feel this pain when I do not speak out my feelings. When I eventually speak out the tears  start to flow. During the crying, the inner pain first intensifies, but after a while it weakens. Knowing that it will weaken makes it easier to let myself cry Yet it remains a big obstacle every time to let those tears go. This pain scares me.

Acceptance is key
The result of not allowing inner pain and tears is the feeling of emptiness. Feeling empty is even worse than feeling sad. The moment I feel empty, I know that I am not doing well. It means that it is time to take a step back so that I can get in balance again. The text below describes exactly how I feel when I have blocked my emotions for too long (appeared on @gelukkigdepri).

My skeleton embraces the void in my body. It is black and can not pass through. Sometimes, when the black wants to come out, it hurts. It presses my chest and my stomach. I want to fight against it, but the black does not allow it. It makes me gloomy, influences my thoughts and makes me feel less worthy. Sometimes the black even tells me that it would be better if I did not exist anymore. It scares me. It makes me lose control over myself. Will the black ever disappear? Will I ever find myself back again?

I have to accept that it is not bad to cry and to feel pain. To heal, you have to go through this phase. I am getting better and better in feeling emotions and to actually feel the pain.

It are the first steps towards freedom!

Quote with this story: Feel the thing you do not want to feel. Feel it and be free.

Love, Ghyta

February 14, Valentine’s Day. A day in which loved ones give each other extra attention with gifts, flowers cards and love. In addition to loving someone, it is even more important to love yourself. However, many people seem to forget this. For that reason we will discuss what self-love is, how to love yourself and what loving yourself can do for you.

What is self-love?
Self-love is simply accepting and appreciating yourself for who you are, what you do and what you stand for. Looking at both the positive aspects that contain your physical, mental and psychological growth, as well as the negative aspects such as our shortcomings and the mistakes we make. Because even by giving the negative aspects in life a place, your grow as an individual. Three key aspects of self-love are:

• Self-kindness: be kind to yourself instead of judgmental and negative. ”Treat yourself as you would treat a good friend or loved one”.
• Common humanity: this means to accept the fact that you are a real human being. People are not perfect and will make mistakes, together with you, there are 7 billion others who do this. Making mistakes might be not quite as bad as you make yourself believe sometimes.
• Mindfulness: takean open, non-judgmental look at yourself, your thoughts and your feelings and accept this as how they are.

With these aspects in mind, you can  start working on loving yourself. This can be done in many different ways. This are a few examples:

1. Stop with criticizing yourself: this is an example related to the aspect of common humanity.  We are not perfect. Let thoughts as ”I am ugly or I am stupid be for what they are.
2. Give positive reinforcement to yourself: examples are ” I do not have to be afraid, I accept how I am” or “I have unconditional love for myself”.
3. Be your own friend: Experiencing negative feelings? Place yourself into the role of a good friend or loved one. How would you react if a good friend or loved one was experiencing negative emotions? You would probably show that person love and compassion to make them feel better. Why would you not do the same for yourself?
4. Nothing wrong with failing: Again, you are human so it is OK  to fail. It is an experience that you learn from and it helps you grow as an individual.