We’re gonna go a little off script today. Welcome to the podcast. Normally we’re talking about Christian concepts, or we’re talking about OCD treatment, like an inference based cognitive behavioral therapy, or IC bt. Today I wanna borrow something from the playbook of DBT or Dialectical Behavioral Therapy.
This concept is called radical acceptance, and it really is the key for you to stop fighting reality. So I want to talk about that today.
Hello and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bach. I’m a Christ follower, wife and mother licensed professional counselor who helps Christians struggling with OCD get to a deeper level of healing. When I couldn’t find resources for my clients with OCD, God called me to bring this podcast to you with practical tools for developing [00:01:00] greater peace.
We’re here to bust through the shame and stigma surrounding struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories of healing and helping you replace uncertainty with faith. I’m here to help you let go of the past and future to walk in the present abundant life God has for you. So let’s dive right into today’s episode.
We can spend so much time and energy, even as Christians running from suffering. And there’s a difference between suffering that we cause ourselves because of sin. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m just talking about life suffering that happens in the world. We get sick, a loved one gets sick, people die.
We experience something tragic. We lose a job. All of these things that are just different life sufferings that we experience at one time or another. We run from that and the emotions connected to it, but we forget that God wants to meet us in the midst of that [00:02:00] suffering. Not only does he wanna meet us in the midst of that, but he wants to grow us and develop perseverance and character and hope.
If you look at James chapter one or Romans five. These are chapters that talk about God using our suffering for good, and that we should actually rejoice in our sufferings, glory in our sufferings. Those are big words and oftentimes things that we don’t embrace. I guess who wants to suffer? It doesn’t feel good at the time, but we know that God is using it to produce fruit, and that is why we can endure, even if we don’t fully understand it right now, we can accept hard things that happen to us as Christians because we know that God has a bigger and greater plan for our lives and for other people’s lives.
Romans 8 28. We know that all things work together for good, for those who love God and who are called according to his [00:03:00] purpose. I wanna be clear about what radical acceptance is not. Radical acceptance is not laying down and saying, oh, well, this is awful. I’m a victim. Things aren’t ever going to get better, and I just have to accept it.
No, absolutely not What we’re saying, we’re saying that life happens and hard things happen. But when we acknowledge that, it actually empowers us in a way to do something positive. I think that this is so crucial because we can get stuck in a negative thought loop and it could be a negative thought loop.
That’s absolutely true. I’d like to give you an example of where I saw this recently. I was talking with a client and she was just telling me about how wrong this person had treated her and how that wasn’t good, and this is why. And I was just like, I agree with you wholeheartedly. I think you’re right. I don’t think that person should have treated you that way.
However they did [00:04:00] and like because they did. We have to sit with that reality. There was so much energy going into trying to change the other person. Well, maybe if I do this, maybe if I just explain it a different way, maybe if I cry, maybe if I tell them how I really feel, then they will change their mind.
The short story is that it just wasn’t working. What it was doing was continuing to keep that person stuck. In a high level of anger, in a high level of emotional distress, and often on ongoing conflict that they didn’t want to be in with another person, all because they were essentially fighting what was and what was actually in their control versus what was completely outside of their control.
How to know if you’re fighting reality and needing radical acceptance. Well, what that looks like basically is that you’re stuck. You’re stuck in emotions, you’re [00:05:00] stuck thinking the same things over and over again. You’re stuck, really hurt, really angry, really depressed, can’t move forward, can’t seem to make a change, even positive change that you feel like you know that you need to make.
Essentially what radical acceptance tells us is that whether we like it or not, everything kind of has led up to this point that this is actually what’s going on right now. And so we need to be able to deal with the reality of what’s happening, even when we don’t like it, even when we feel like it should be different and it shouldn’t be this way.
I can tell you so many different examples from my own life of it shouldn’t be this way. I shouldn’t have lost my mother at the age of 40, but I did. I can either choose to live in that denial and say, this is not fair. It’s not right. I hate cancer. Why God, A, allow this to happen? I can’t [00:06:00] believe this. This is so ridiculous.
I’m mad at that doctor because he did this. I’m mad at this person because they didn’t intervene here. I could just really, really get wrapped up in all of those different things and. Be really stuck in a bad bed place. And there were some things that happened in the course of my mom being in the hospital, and doctors and I got into an argument with one of the doctors because some things just weren’t right in the way that they were treating her.
But that’s the reality that I had to live with and try to figure out how to navigate at that moment. And I’m still figuring out the reality of what it’s like to have life without my mom here on this earth. There’s a level of denial that can keep us out of emotional pain, but it never helps us in terms of being able to tolerate the distress of the moment.
When I was going through grief and loss about 10 years ago, I was reading this book and it was talking about the importance of really saying [00:07:00] to yourself and sitting with the fact that. Your loved one has died, or sometimes loss is not always that somebody has died. Sometimes loss is just loss of a job opportunity.
Hey, I wasn’t selected for my dream job and now I have to really sit with that. And it’s hard, but it’s okay to feel sad and it’s okay to cry the tears, and it’s okay to be angry at times. We have to learn that all of those emotions are God-given emotions. We have to learn how to cope with in a healthy way.
But if we’re stuck in an emotion, then we’re not able to move through it. And sometimes really sitting with this radical acceptance of saying, okay, this is where I’m at right now, and that really stinks and that’s really hard and I don’t like it. Now, what do I do to take care of myself? What is the next best choice that I can [00:08:00] make?
So if this person has hurt me and has wronged me, then I need to acknowledge that I need to break through that. I need to be able to get to a place of forgiveness. Peace on the other side as I’m recording this, I think this is as much for me as it is for everyone else because I’m dealing with a situation right now that is completely outside of my control, and that’s super hard because a lot of things in my world are in my control.
I work for myself. I decide who I’m gonna work with. I have so much freedom. And then when I rub up against things where I don’t have the freedom, or I’m having to wait for other people, or I’m having to trust other people that are gonna do the things that they say that they’re going to do, it can be super hard and frustrating when they don’t follow through and when they don’t do the things that they say that they’re going to do.
That can be really irritating to me. So I’m [00:09:00] working through this on my own as well. Just saying, okay, well I can’t go back and change the past. I think that’s another one that radical acceptance is helpful for. I can’t go back and change anything, so maybe I would’ve made different decisions. Knowing what I know now, but I didn’t know that back then.
And so I need to open up the door to self-compassion and say, you know what, yeah, if I could do this all over again, or if I was telling somebody else in a similar situation, I tell them to do A instead of B, which is what I did, but none of us have the opportunity to go back and fix anything or change anything.
We are where we are right now. Even if it means, Hey, I messed something up and I made a bad choice. Okay, what’s the next right choice? Then? What can you do? Can you go apologize to somebody? Is there something that you can do to make it right? Maybe there’s not, sometimes there’s just not anything that we can do to fix something other than to say sorry, [00:10:00] and to agree that we’re gonna work hard next time, not to make that same mistake.
Also, knowing that we are human. We have talked about mindfulness on the show, but acceptance is a part of mindfulness. There’s awareness. And then there’s acceptance. Sometimes we’re super aware of what’s going on, but we’re not accepting it. We say, I don’t like that. I don’t want that. Even in a sense of dealing with your intrusive thoughts, it’s like, ah, I just wish all of this would just go away and I could wave a magic wand.
Well, unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. And then things maybe are less stressful in your life and OCD starts to get a little bit better and you’re like, oh yeah, maybe this is going away. And then bam, something stressful hits and you’re back to it. Or your theme completely shifts. You’re like, okay, I was working through this theme.
I am feeling better. I’m not as bothered by that anymore. And then something completely new hits, and you’re thrown off guard and it feels like you’ve lost all your skills that you may have learned. That’s not true. They’re still in [00:11:00] there. You could still apply them to this new theme, but it’s just really hard ’cause now it’s something different that you’re having to deal with.
Even just being able to accept the mental health diagnosis of OCD, the fact that it’s a chronic condition, the fact that it waxes and wanes under stress. These are some radical acceptance pieces that you need to be able to come to and sit with as you’re navigating this diagnosis. Some of that can be really hard and you may have to grieve some of it.
Some of it you may just have to sit there for a moment and cry and say, I wish I didn’t have to deal with this. It’s okay to acknowledge that, but then also to say, okay, but I am dealing with this. This is hard. I don’t want it. I didn’t ask for it, but I can make a choice to put one foot in front of the other to embrace recovery today.
To say, what does that look like for me? What is my next step on my journey? And one of the reasons that [00:12:00] mindfulness helps us with distress tolerance is that we learn to take a pause and to sit with some of these things instead of what we normally do to deal with our emotions. Whether that’s distract yourself, scrolling on your phone, putting a podcast on or TV on, or just anything else to drown out the noise of the emotion of the sensation.
Of the thought process and distraction still sometimes can be very helpful. That may be a first step if the emotion is just too huge or too overwhelming for you. But then as you move forward, there needs to be some time where you’re able to say, you know what? I can sit with this. I can feel this and I can allow that emotion to kind of come like a wave and know that it’s gonna go up and then come down, and then I will be able to get to a place where I can take care of myself and feel better.
That might look like developing in some exercise coping skills, or breathing [00:13:00] exercises, or journaling or talking to a friend. When you’re having a hard day, there’s so many different things that you can do to care for your emotional experience. But if we aren’t acknowledging where we’re at, that has to be the first step to be able to move forward.
One of the things that really stood out to me about the I-O-C-D-F conference was how much discussions surrounded this tendency to avoid emotions were to have difficulty dealing with the distress of them, how that interplays with OCD quite a bit. While also recognizing that sometimes these DBT skills, like radical acceptance, self-soothing skills, distress tolerance skills, interpersonal skills, how all of these things can be incorporated into OCD treatment.
Not to necessarily attack the OCD directly, but to help you work through the process in a [00:14:00] way that’s really healthy as like. Looking at it from a whole person lens in terms of what you might need in your day-to-day life to cope with the things that come up for all of us. Relationship challenges, job challenges, conflicts hurt, pain, anger, sadness.
You may not have grown up in a family system where these things were allowed to be openly expressed or explored, and if they weren’t allowed to be expressed, then you certainly weren’t taught how to cope with them when they come up. So when those emotional experiences come up, they can feel really big and it just makes you wanna shut everything down.
Or it gets channeled into another emotional state. So if anger wasn’t something that you were ever comfortable with, holding that in can either turn that into depression or anxiety. For some people, suppressed sadness may also look similar. It may turn into anxiety or depression, or that suppressed [00:15:00] sadness may actually come out as anger towards others when you really don’t want it to.
I want to really encourage you to evaluate, based on today’s podcast, is there some area of my life where I feel stuck emotionally? Am I trying to change someone else’s behavior or am I becoming really frustrated that someone else isn’t changing? Is there a situation outside of my control that I’ve been unwilling to accept?
Have I become a prisoner of my own emotional experience because I’m fighting what’s actually happening in the present or what has already occurred in the past to get me to this present moment? Are there things. I need to release over to God and trust him with instead of trying to control them myself.
I hope that this episode has blessed you and if it has, please consider [00:16:00] sharing it with someone else who might need to hear this encouragement as well. If you’d like some weekly encouragement once a week when these episodes come out, you can subscribe to our email list@carriebach.com. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.
Christian faith in OCD is a production of by the Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.
