Learning to Accept: Building Tolerance for Hard Emotions

There is a well-known quote attributed to Carl Jung: “What you resist persists.” 

What Jung wanted people to know was that the more you try to push away, deny, or fight a problem, feeling, or thought, the more it intensifies. 

When it comes to emotions, this is certainly true.  When we experience difficult or uncomfortable emotions like fear, dread, regret, and even grief, it’s tempting to resist feeling these emotions by pushing them away, ignoring them, or drowning them in something else, like work or alcohol.

This resistance to discomfort and pain is a natural response. Afterall, who likes to experience discomfort and pain?  

While resisting these difficulties might seem like a good idea in the moment, the route of resistance comes with a price.

The more we resist life’s difficulties, the smaller our window of tolerance becomes. 

A window of tolerance is a person’s optimal zone of functioning, or the range within which a person can function before their internal “I can’t do this” alarms start going off. The more we resist things that are distressing, uncomfortable, or painful, the smaller the window becomes. 

When we’re above our window of tolerance, we are overactivated and likely anxious, irritable, restless, or overwhelmed.

 When we are beneath the window, we are underactivated and likely feeling numb, dissociated, or shut down.  The smaller our window of tolerance becomes, the more easily we can get pushed outside of it altogether. 

When life’s difficulties come, we have another option. We can choose the route of acceptance.

Acceptance is not easy; it comes with discomfort and uncertainty.  But the result of accepting that distress and allowing ourselves to walk through it is that our window of tolerance expands.  The bigger our window of tolerance, the less our “I can’t do this” alarm will go off.

We become resilient. 

Becoming more accepting isn’t easy.

It can feel overwhelming and scary to allow the discomfort we so desperately want to avoid.

To get started, here are a few practical ways to become more accepting:

1.  Begin noticing resistance.

What are your go-to ways of resisting what you’re experiencing? When you’re sad, do you minimize your feelings and keep busy?  When you feel disappointed, do you beat yourself up for everything you should have done differently?

A good first step toward greater acceptance is increasing your awareness of how you tend to resist discomfort.

2. Use a coping statement. 

 For example, “I am feeling betrayed. This is the truth of the present moment.” Or, “I feel disappointed and angry that I was passed over for the promotion, what is, is.” 

 The goal is to find a “go-to” coping statement that allows you to radically accept the uncontrollable truth of the present moment without judgment. 

3.  Practice focusing on physical sensations.

When painful or unpleasant feelings arise, part of acknowledging them can be practicing feeling what they feel like in your body.  You can even locate the feeling in your body and give it a shape and color.  Sometimes feelings seem overwhelming and vague.

 It can be helpful to describe them as specific physical sensations occurring at specific moments in your body.  Then, you can even notice how these sensations change and shift as time goes on. 

Acceptance is a skill that takes practice.

Before acceptance becomes habitual and more natural, it must be chosen again and again. As you practice becoming more accepting, be patient and gentle with yourself. 

Little by little, your window of tolerance will expand, and your “I can’t do this” alarm will become quieter and less frequent. 

Jillian Meher, MA, LPC

Helping individuals and teens who feel stuck in survival mode learn to thrive. Jillian is available by telehealth.