A is for acceptance

21 Apr 2011 1 Comment

by Roger Smith in Thinking / Knowledge Tags: Eliminating Bipolar Diagnosis

How true is it that all recovery starts with acceptance?

As researchers on Rethink’s Recovery Narratives project, we were expecting acceptance to be a theme of many of the stories of recovery from mental illness that we were going to be hearing. Sure enough, as we listened, ideas of acceptance came up again and again. These people who had each been in-recovery and now wanted share what worked and did not work for them were telling us that acceptance was important.

Nine of us worked as a team to interpret the transcripts from these long stories we had recorded. As we did so, it became clear that acceptance is more than a theme in recovery. The idea of acceptance was coming up too often and it was linked to most or perhaps all the themes we had been able name.

There were two other recovery ideas that also seemed to weave themselves through people’s stories; ‘Locus of power and control’ and ‘Dependence/ independence/ interdependence’. Initially we saw these as ‘drivers’ for recovery, yet ‘drivers’ did not fit the way these ideas seemed to be working. We chose to call these ‘mediators’ for recovery in that they were enabling the themes (methods of recovery) to be effective. This is the diagram we produced to summarise our findings:

From Rethink's 'Getting Back into the World' Report

See: full 48 page report and shorter 25 page report

If for you, the acceptance that you have a problem to solve is always the first step in solving that problem, then is ‘acceptance first’ all too obvious?

For small problems acceptance is easy. We know something is not right and get on with putting it right. The bigger the problem the more likely we are to choose the exact opposite of acceptance and that is denial. Warning signs of mood problems are often too big for us to easily accept. Sometimes the mood we are in makes it difficult to accept we have a problem.

Can you think of some examples of mood related problems that may be difficult to accept?

Should the next post here be:

Accepting and recovering from one thing at a time.