How Radical Acceptance Promotes Healing During Divorce, Marital Separation, and Holidays

Hey brother! In this video I share some thoughts about the importance of acceptance In the process of healing. 

Share any experiences you’ve had with acceptance, resistance, or letting go that might help others in the comments. 

I recorded this video on my Insta360 Go2 pocket camera, which has been outta commission for about a year and a half now.

When I went on my East Coast rv tour last year across the south and up the East Coast and over to Minnesota and down to Texas, I ruined the charging case for the camera at Myrtle Beach.

I was trying to capture some ocean tide video clips, and I didn't realize I had the case in my shorts pocket. The waves came crashing in and I got the whole thing wet. The case is not waterproof, even though the camera is. I got a lot of salt water in the case and destroying it’s operation.

I was able to get the video clips off the camera because the camera has wireless transfer, but once the battery ran out on the camera, there was no way to charge it. No way to use it and that was disappointing cause, I had spent a few hundred dollars on it. 

But I just kept moving forward. It would have cost another couple of hundred dollars to replace the case and I didn’t want to do that. So I just kept moving, put my energy someplace else, and moved on with my trip.

Then recently I found that I could buy the charging case for less than a hundred dollars on eBay and since Dennis Collins and I are hosting Mexico retreats the first two weekends of January, I decided to revive the pocket camera as a useful tool for creating videos and having conversations like this one.

So, today I'm out here walking the dog to say that, sometimes that's what happens to our best laid life plans. The thing that we've invested our time and energy into doesn’t turn out the way we thought it would.

Something unexpected happens. It happens in a way that, well, we don't expect. And, and then we have to decide how we're going to handle it. Are we gonna overreact? Are we gonna react negatively? Is there gonna be wailing and gnashing of teeth? Are we going to resist what's happening? Are we going to wish that it hadn't happened? Are we going to beat ourselves up and say, “If I only I had done something differently”? 

Or are we just gonna see that it happened and say, “hmm, okay I guess that was supposed to happen”?

Sometimes people get hung up on that phrase, “supposed to happen”. Like there's something going on that we don't have control over, that we don't have control over our lives. 

It's this argument between being free and things being pre-ordained that trips people up. Some people want to know the answer to the question so they can either feel they have full control over their lives or so they can let go of all responsibility entirely because,  “nothing really matters anyway”.

I believe, just by being able to ask that question and wonder if there's an answer, it proves that we do have free will. That we do have an opportunity to make choices. That we do have a responsibility to show up in our lives, and that life itself is not against us.

I've come to believe that life is a patient, loving, generous teacher that allows us to experience what we need to experience as many times as we need to experience it so that we can learn the things that we need to learn. Life, God, the universe, a higher power, whatever is actually working for us.

When we say, “I guess that was supposed to happen”, it's just that we are not resisting what is. We are acknowledging whatever it is and saying, “oh, okay, I guess that was supposed to happen because, well, it did happen”.

When we resist something that is, we have a very hard time processing it mentally, working through it, and moving beyond it. 

If you look at the five stages of grief, the first stage is denial. Then comes anger bargaining, sadness / depression, and then finally we get to acceptance.

Acceptance is that place where we can actually start dealing with and moving past whatever it is that has occurred.

Acceptance doesn't mean we like whatever it is. It doesn't mean that we condone it. It doesn't even mean that we want it. It's just means that we acknowledge that something is. We acknowledge its existence, and by acknowledging it’s is-ness, we are then able to deal with it and process it.

That's what I did when this camera case was ruined. I said, “Well, that's disappointing but I guess that was supposed to happen”. I put the camera away and I just kept moving.

It wasn't that the camera was never gonna be useful again. It wasn’t that I was never gonna make another video. It's not even that that moment ruined my trip, or even the rest of the day. It was just in that moment something happened and I got the opportunity to decide what I thought about it, and I chose to accept it and move on.

So, this is Christmas Eve, when things might not be going the way we thought they would or want them too, my question to you is this, “what is it that you need to accept in this moment and say, ‘okay I guess this was supposed to happen’ because it is in fact happening?” Can you decide for yourself what you think about that, how you want to respond versus react and how you wanna move forward?

Because we do get a choice and this is just one 24 hour period out of a whole year's worth of days, and even though we may not like it, we may not want it, we may not condone it, we can certainly make it through 24 hours.

It's okay to care for yourself in these moments, to go slow, to breathe deeply, and to remind yourself that you are okay, that you're gonna continue to be okay, and that you have been okay this whole time.

It’s just that our thoughts and the meaning that we assign to things drives our feeling, and our feelings are something we can recognize, own, and master. 

So that's what I wanted to share with you today.

Merry Christmas brother. Happy holidays!

Be sure to reach out to any of the men in the community if you have anything that you wanna discuss or just need someone to talk to. There's always somebody in the community who can talk with another brother.

And if you want to learn how to master your thoughts, feelings, and actions, join me and other initiated men in the Renewed Masculine Man course.

Much love brother,

Charlie McKeever
Happy Man Coach & Freedom Fighter
HappyManCoaching.com