Welcome back to become a calm mama. I'm your host. I'm Darlene

Childress. I am a life and parenting coach. And for the last

few weeks on the podcast, we've been in a series that I'm calling how to

heal. And, really, what I've done is walked you through

a hierarchy of healing. And what I mean by hierarchy is

that it's like a pyramid where you have a foundation, and

then once you have that part of the pyramid built, you add

to the next part going up and up and up. So at the

foundation of this hierarchy, I've titled that bit

radical self love. And, really, everything that we do

when we are on a healing journey needs to be anchored in

this feeling of self love. From that place

of radical self love, we move up towards

radical self trust. And if we love ourselves and we

trust ourselves, then we're more willing to take this journey into

healing. From that place of love and trust where we

feel really safe with ourselves, then we take that next

step, which is being really honest with ourselves,

radical honesty, taking a look at what's true and what's

not true. And in that relationship with ourselves, we're

also doing that fourth part, which is radical listening.

So you're building this beautiful relationship with yourself where you

can kind of handle anything, Anything that comes up in your

life, any pain, any discomfort, anything that's going

on. If you have these foundational principles of love,

trust, honesty, and listening within yourself,

you will be able to move through this healing journey and

on this healing process with a lot more ease.

The last part of this series is gonna talk about radical action.

And what I think a lot of times we do is we go to taking

steps forward, like, okay. I don't wanna live this way. I don't wanna

drink like this. I don't wanna shop like this. I don't wanna eat like this.

I don't wanna act this way with my kids. And so we just make kind

of an action step item list or whatever, a checklist or a

list of rules. And we don't end up making as much

progress as we wanted to. And that's a lot of times because

the actions are rooted in shame, in

guilt, in buffering, trying to avoid pain, not being

honest with ourselves. And then we end up discouraged and we give up

and we don't see the result. And we're like, well, I must not be good

at this. I must not be good at healing or taking control of my life.

Really, that failure of your actions

is my theory is that you're not

rooted deep enough into that feeling of loving yourself,

trusting yourself, being honest with yourself, listening

to yourself. And then today talking about accepting

then taking action. So all of these different

principles build upon each other, and the stronger your foundation

of self love, the easier it is to trust yourself, the easier than it is

to be honest with yourself, the easier it is to listen to yourself, to

take action, to accept what's going on and then to take

action. This hierarchy of healing, this is a really my

attempt at trying to make a process of what it looks

like to heal. And when you practice self love

and self trust and listen to yourself and be honest with

yourself and try to accept the circumstances, the actions are gonna

be really easy. You're gonna have a lot of clarity about what to

do to change your life. Even if you are struggling with the series

and you're getting a little bit in the weeds and you're confused, just go back

to love. Just go back to, like, listening to yourself, being honest with

yourself, and loving yourself through whatever you

discover. Whatever pain you find, give yourself a lot of

love and soothing, tell yourself you can handle it, whatever

discomfort you find. Just keep going back to

those principles and you will make progress. So today, I

wanna talk about part five, which is this concept

of radical acceptance. And when we

are in a place of that love and that

trust, and we've listened to ourselves, and we've been honest with

ourselves, we are able to then look at maybe some truths

that are happening in our life. Taking a look at some facts,

taking look a look at some pain. Acceptance

is this idea that you are

okay with what's happening in the present

moment without losing yourself in judgments

of whether this moment is good or bad. This behavior is good or

bad. I am good or bad. This traffic is good or bad. This

messy house is good or bad. A lot of times, we are

making judgments and we decide we can accept something if it's

good. If we decide it's bad, then we resist it and we try

to change it, fix it, change it, stop it, solve it in our lives, and

we don't make the progress with that action that I

wanna teach you next week. We're not taking aligned

intentional action because we're not in

true acceptance. Acceptance really is

being okay, being present in right now, in

this moment, and saying this is the way things

are right now and that's okay. The faster

you accept what is currently true, the easier

it will be for your nervous system to calm down and to problem solve.

It will be easier for you to show compassion to yourself

or to someone else if you can take a pause and

acknowledge what is happening. Either what's happening in

your circumstances, what's happening in your feelings,

what other people are doing, or things about yourself, how

you're behaving. So I'm gonna break it down a little bit more and I'm

gonna give you at the end of the episode some steps that you can

take to practice radical acceptance. I

love this quote from the princess bride

where the dread priort Roberts, who's actually Wesley, if you've

not seen the movie, you can go see it. But anyway, I've probably seen it,

like, 50 times. He says in the movie, life is pain,

highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something. And I've

thought about this many, many times in my life when

something is difficult in my life, when I'm experiencing

pain or hardship or going through something or remembering

something from the past or whatever it is that I'm

kind of struggling with, I will remember

that life is pain. That I talked about this

in the three unavoidable aspects of parenting, that podcast

episode, where really pain and uncertainty and

constant work are the things that are unavoidable aspects

of life. So pain is inevitable, but like the

Buddhist saying, pain is inevitable. Suffering is

optional. The faster we get to

going, okay, this is painful or oh, this is hard or this

is uncomfortable or this is happening and I don't like it or

this is happening and I wish it wasn't or whatever we need to say.

Sure. You can wish it wasn't happening, but it is happening.

Let me give you an ex a very simple example of traffic.

Right now, I live in Los Angeles, and the Pacific Coast Highway

is closed indefinitely because of the terrible fires. And

that means that a lot of people who took that route

now take a different route, and it's called the one zero one.

So at this point in Los Angeles to cross from my part of

town towards the West Side of town, you have to go along

the 101 and everybody is on that road. And it is

really different than it used to be. Traffic is much worse. It's almost like

it was before the pandemic. Like, it's just really, really

challenging. And people are frustrated

and overwhelmed by it, but resisting it, being

angry for that hour drive is suffering. So

the pain is just that slog. Right? It's uncomfortable. We

don't wanna be in the car that long. We don't wanna give that much

time of our lives to travel. We don't want any

of it. Right? But when we are really in our

feelings about it and fighting it, that's resistance, that's

suffering. We're adding more pain to the

moment. Or you can just accept it. Like, okay. Now

I know that this is the situation in Los Angeles. I need to plan for

it and take different actions. And this is just what it is.

That thing that you see in other people that seem to be okay when

things are chaotic, who seem to have peace, who seem to

just go with the flow. The reason why they're able

to do that is because they're literally going with the flow. If this is the

way it is, I'm going to accept it and move forward in

this pattern in this reality. That thing that

people talk about about being present, it really means

accepting reality exactly as it is in this moment.

So that could be your circumstances, traffic, like I

said. Your kids getting sick. I remember feeling so

upset if I had plans for the day and, you know, or meetings

or something like that, and then my kids were sick. Or I had to take

them to the doctor or, you know, even dumb stuff like they're making you late

because you're about to go in the car and they poop. Right? Well, that's just

what's happening. You're already in that next moment. Reality is

reality. Your kid is sick. Your kid has made you late. There is traffic.

Your kids are doing jack in the box tonight. Right? Their bedtime's going late.

There are facts and then there's our

editorializing of the fact. Right? The way the thing that

what we make that fact mean. A lot of times we

make that mean something that hurts us, that causes us more pain,

more discomfort, more emotional frustration, and is entirely

unnecessary. I think about plans changing

and how for so many years, I had a lot of trouble

when plans changed because I felt out of

control. I felt all my work was take you know, gonna be for

nothing, like, whatever I had planned to do. I didn't believe in myself

that I could handle if I didn't anticipate what was going on.

I would then get defensive. I would blame. I would, get

frustrated. I might be short with my kids or short with the

person, like, rude to the person who told me, like, the store is

closed or whatever the thing is. I would find myself really

overwhelmed in these moments and it's because I did not

have enough self trust. And I didn't believe that I

could handle all of the hard things. I didn't know in

my own ability to pivot. My feelings

would overwhelm me to such a high degree that I wouldn't be

able to reset my nervous system

and think and pivot and make a new plan. But the

more I have practiced this radical self love and

radical self trust and listening to myself and soothing

myself, I'm much better at accepting anything

that comes my way. I don't like the thing that comes my way,

but I'm able to accept it, not fight it. And then I take that

radical action. So we have our

circumstances that come up and those are things

that we can practice accepting. There's also

in that circumstances other people's behavior. You

think about your husband or your partner committing

to doing something, you know, for the family, like I've got dinner tonight or

I'll pick up while you're at the market or whatever they say.

And then you get back and they haven't done it. And, you know, that's their

behavior. Or maybe your partner is going through

some sort of mental health issue or they're struggling or your in

laws treat you a certain way or you're,

relationally. Right? We can accept

that people are doing the behaviors that they're doing. They're

acting the way that they're acting. So your children are behaving the way

that they behave. You can just accept that. It doesn't

mean that you're not gonna take action. But the faster that

you go to the point of saying, this kid

is having a big feeling cycle. Okay. So this is my new

reality. I thought we were going to bed, but now we're in the middle of

the hallway and someone is kicking and screaming on the ground. You can

go to that place where you accept this is what's happening right

now. Then you give yourself some compassion if

you need to. Gosh, this is hard. I really didn't like this. I don't didn't

anticipate this happening. You can give a little bit of soothing and

then switch out to that. Okay. Well, what's next? What's the

next right thing? Moving from acceptance to action. Mel

Robbins has been talking a lot about this let them theory.

And let them theory is really about radical acceptance. It's

really about being able to look at somebody else's

behavior and accepting it exactly as it is as

a truth, as a reality, like, that's how they're behaving,

you can let them behave that way. You can accept it.

Now with parenting, it gets tricky. Right? Because our responsibility to

our kids is also to teach them better ways to

behave, better ways to act, better ways to manage their feelings,

better ways to get their needs met and demonstrate their emotions. And so

we do have to take action. Right? Little kids, let them. Don't let

them not ever brush their teeth. Like, that's complicated.

But in the moment, when you practice acceptance, like, wow,

this kid is really resisting their teeth getting

brushed. Okay. So it's just

this mental exercise of looking at the

situation, narrating it as true and as

factual, and accepting it. Then from

that acceptance, you can figure out whether you need to take action or not. So

we have all of these circumstances we're learning to accept. We have other

people's behavior that we're learning to accept. We

also have ourself that we are learning to

accept. Like I've been saying for the last maybe eighteen months,

almost like a flippant joke, but it's it's like a practice

for me of I get to be me. I'll say to my husband when he's,

like, rolling his eyes about something like, oh, I really wanted to wear my

beanie. So I'm gonna stop. I'm gonna go get my beanie and I'm gonna come

downstairs and then we'll walk. And he's like, right? I am like, well, I get

to be me. That's what I say. It's not just about like what I'm wearing.

It's just anything where I wanna say I get to be

me. I get to love and accept myself

exactly as I am right now. When I accept

my idiosyncrasies, my neuroses, my behavior,

my desires, my wants, my frustrations, when

I embrace all the different parts of me and I become

a friend of those parts and I accept those parts unconditionally,

I'm so much more likely to make shifts

with love and compassion, with generosity, with

grace, if I'm in that place of acceptance of myself.

There are going to be difficult aspects of your personality

or behavior that you're doing that you want to change. That's

okay. But at your core, you want to accept

yourself and accept the truth about where you're

at right now and who you're showing up as.

So when I talk in my programs, like they have this concept called mad

mom syndrome. And it's like, yeah, okay. I'm a mad mom

right now. That's okay. I can change that, but

this is where I'm at. We need to be really honest. That's why radical

honesty and radical listening is really important to find out who we are

right now. What are we struggling with and accepting

ourselves? How this is showing up for me right now is in my weight.

Right? Because I've aged a bit and I have had

a struggle with eating disorders in the past. And I'm trying

to figure out how do I accept my current body

and my current shape and my current weight

while also still taking radical action that's not from

a place of pain and self loathing and

shame and meanness. I don't wanna hurt myself

anymore. That's a commitment. I can trust myself. I love

myself. I don't wanna hurt myself. But I can also see

if I start to count macros or

make rules, like you have to go to the gym every day or you have

to like, if I start to create action plans and

they're not coming from a place of love and acceptance,

I'm hurting myself. So it can be quite nuanced when

you take those actions. We need to always look back and go, well,

where's this coming from? Why am I doing this behavior?

Why now? Why in this way? But it starts

with our acceptance. So accepting your

body, accepting your mental health, accepting your

personality. If you're a quiet person who likes to spend a

lot of time alone, great. Accept that

about yourself. Love that part of yourself. Take really good care of

her. If you're a person who really likes having a lot of

friends and you like being on the go, then that's also

great. You don't need to look at others and compare yourself to

them and decide, well, that's the right way to be a mom. That's the right

way to be a woman. That's the right way to be a friend. That's the

right way to be a daughter. Like, all of these areas of our lives that

we don't feel comfortable within ourselves, And then we look to the

world or we look to our social groups and we go, okay, how do I

How am I supposed to act? How am I supposed to be? Well, let's just

accept you as you are right now and then you can take

action if you want. But again, coming from this place of

true love, true trust, true acceptance. The other

area I see we struggle with accepting ourselves

or accepting things. So we have, like, our circumstances, we have others

behaviors, we have ourselves. And a big thing is our own emotions.

There's this clever phrase of what we feel we can heal.

And it really is true that when we are able to

accept a circumstance as it is and we allow

ourselves, we're really honest with ourselves about how we think

and feel about that thing, then we are

more open to accepting our emotions. Like, you

are going to feel angry. You are going to feel jealous.

You're to feel greed. You're gonna feel impatient. You're gonna feel

disappointment. You're gonna heal feel hurt. You're going to feel

loss and grief. These are inevitable. Life is pain,

highness. Right? Anybody who says differently is selling you

something. You are going to have all sorts of

different emotions. I love this quote from loving kindness

by Sharon Salzberg. I've referred to this book many times in

this series, but she says pain is not a sign of

things gone wrong. Our lives are actually a

constant succession of pleasure and pain, getting what

we want and then losing it. We experience pleasure

and pain, gain and loss, praise and blame,

fame and disrepute, constantly changing out of

our control. This is what the world is naturally

providing, and still we can be at peace.

The more you accept that there are

going to be difficult circumstances in your life, there's

going to be things that are going to create

emotion in you. The more that you are aware and you

don't resist that pain, but you kind of allow it to flow through

you, then the feelings pass. They're like the

weather. They're like clouds. Right? There's a cloudy

cloudy sky and then beyond that is a

blue sky. And the clouds move over the

sky and they're like weather and they keep

moving. Spring is always coming. This episode comes out on

spring, the first day of spring. And it's like the winter

ends and spring comes. Seasons in our life that are

painful will end and new wonderful moments

will come. That is the nature of this

experience of being human on the earth. So the more you accept

your feelings and you allow them to flow through you

and you acknowledge those feelings and you let them let them

breathe, what every feeling wants is to be felt. Right?

What does one do with sadness? You just invite it in and you invite it

for a cup of tea. You say, hi, sadness. Where have you

been? How you doing? And then you let it pass.

When we resist our feelings, when we resist

ourselves, when we resist our experience, we

create suffering. We that struggle is about when

we believe that something should not be the way it is,

when we're fighting reality. And we have these

behaviors that we do that help us avoid

reality. Right? We detach, we

deny, we blame. Now this resistance,

it comes from a natural desire to be safe. We want to

feel like we have control. We want to feel safe. We want to feel

agency. We want to be able to

influence our world. And we don't wanna feel pain. Like,

just straight up, we don't like it. It's awful. And so we

do stuff, we buffer, we create distance from ourselves and

the pain through either avoiding reality. In Com Mama

Confessions, I talk about how I use drugs and alcohol and

sex to avoid my pain as a young woman. And that

eventually the pain caught up to me and I had to stop doing those things.

I had to to create a period of abstinence so

that I could no longer have those avenues

yeah, it was really, really hard. And eventually that season

passed and it wasn't as hard. And so

buffering can be this thing that we do to

create distance. Now some buffering is fine. Some distraction, if

you try to embrace every painful moment or like I remember

when my sister died, like the grief is kind of

a relentless series of waves that just keeps coming and keeps coming

and keeps coming. And there are definite times where if

you kept doing that, you would drown. Right? You would not be able to be

strong enough. And so, yeah, having a distraction,

watching a funny movie or, you know, whatever it is

you do. Like, there's ways that we can buffer with health and

wellness, like going on to take a bath or going for a walk in

nature, having a nice conversation with a friend, or some people have a drink

or buy something. Right? I don't wanna judge your strategies.

That's what radical acceptance is about is like, well, this is where you're at.

You're buffering. Great. No problem. Whatever you're

doing, we just wanna be honest about it. And with full

love and full trust that you can switch your behavior whenever

you need to. We've talked about buffering on the podcast. Another way that

I see that we resist the moment where

we aren't in radical acceptance is through people

pleasing. And I wanted to talk about this for a few minutes

because I think sometimes we do

things for others so that we can feel better,

safe, or more loved or to feel yeah. Like, we're,

like, hyper control. Like, I'm gonna do this laundry, and then I'll get an

attaboy, and then I'll feel better, and I'll feel loved, and I'll feel safe.

And in some ways, people pleasing behaviors are a form of

buffering. It's a form of distancing myself from my

pain, doing an action so that I can get

relief from the pain. So just be on to yourself. If

you find yourself doing a lot of things for others, that

might be your avoidant tactic to avoid looking

at your own pain. Another way that

we resist is procrastination. Just putting our head in the sand, numbing

out, not paying attention, not taking any action. Right? We can

sometimes become hyper aroused and like hyperaction and then

other times hypoarouse, hypoaction. We don't do anything.

We get stuck. We get stuck in a rut. We feel really hopeless.

Again, acceptance is our pathway out. Another reason

why I think it can be challenging for someone to

practice radical acceptance is this fear

that if I accept what's happening, then

I am giving up. I'm being I've been defeated.

I'm implying that I don't care,

that I am powerless, that it's like a fatalistic

viewpoint. Like, well, if you can't beat them, join them. And it's

like, that is a strategy that people

use to avoid discomfort. And I'm not talking about

acceptance as a way of excusing yourself

from responsibility or giving up or giving in or

being a victim or losing agency or implying defeat

in any way. Acceptance is actually being

really radically honest with yourself about what is true

and then saying, okay, this is how it is right now,

then I can take action if I'm from that clear headed

space. But if we are, you know, giving

up and giving in as a way to release

ourselves from pain and discomfort, that's not acceptance.

Acceptance is being willing to be honest and look at the

circumstance and how we think and feel about it and being

just radically honest about it. Alright. So here are

kind of some steps. I like to break things down. I like to make steps.

I like to create processes. It helps my brain. Like, what am I

supposed to be doing to accept something? Right? So the first

thing is the mantra for this week is this is the way things are right

now and that's okay. So just, you know, if that's your only

takeaway from this episode, that's great. This is the way things are right

now and that's okay. So just listen to that mantra.

Now I've broken down radical acceptance into four steps

or four parts. And the first is acknowledge the

facts. So acknowledge, the next is accept the facts.

The third is attune to your feelings, and four

is action. So acknowledge, accept,

attune, act. I tried to make them all start with

letter a so that we could remember them. So first is acknowledging the facts.

There is traffic. That's a fact. Right? My flight is delayed.

My kid is sick. I got fired. My mom

died. There's a flood in my house.

Whatever is happening, what are the facts? The more clear you can

be about the facts and not your thoughts about the facts or your

feelings about the facts, the easier it will be for you to accept the

facts. You're trying to figure out what's actually

happening without your judgment of it, without all your thoughts and

feelings about it. Like, what's the circumstance? Like, when I was

able to be really honest, like, I was sexually abused as a child.

My dad abandoned my family. My mom was untreated

had untreated depression for most of my childhood. Like,

being able to say the thing that happened to me as

a fact is very helpful because then I

can figure out how I want to think and feel about that fact.

So the circumstance is something that we wanna acknowledge,

and it helps you get some clarity on what is true and

what are you making the thing mean, giving you some

distance. So acknowledge the facts. Accept the

facts. So acknowledge what is happening and then accept

it. This is happening. This thing happened.

Makes when you do that, like I said, it makes space

for new thoughts and feelings because you're taking out your editorializing.

You're taking out your the meaning that you're assigning it.

Like, my kid didn't get, invited to the birthday party.

K? That's the fact. Now the thing you make that mean, oh, my kid is

a big problem. They don't kids don't like my kid. My kid's gonna be a

loser. There's something wrong with my kid. Those are all your

thoughts. And then those create feelings,

you know, insecurity. And then the from that insecure place, then you're

taking action. Maybe you hyper you you check your kid out. You're like,

well, we're, you know, forget these kids and you don't keep trying or you

over try or whatever. I don't want you to come from a place of insecurity.

I want you to make decisions and take action from a place of confidence

and radical self trust. So we acknowledge the

facts. We accept the facts, and this helps us get

some clarity, some perspective. And then attune.

So what do I mean by that? Healing

begins when you have an open,

compassionate acknowledgement of the unpleasant

aspects of your life. So there like I

said, there are things, there are facts that are true.

Here are the facts. This is what's happening. And I feel

badly about it. So we need to have some attunement. Does that

mean soothing yourself? Does that mean processing that negative

emotion, allowing for it, giving doing that radical honesty,

radical listening, radical love.

In the acceptance process, you're gonna go back and use all

those other tools of self love, self

trust, honesty and listening. And you're gonna give

room to your thoughts and feelings and to the reality that

you're you're experiencing and attune to

yourself. I've talked about attunement on this podcast. You can go back

to Google, you know, just search attunement and you'll see those

episodes. And we talk about attuning with our kids, catching

their feelings. Now this is you attuning to yourself.

And then action, taking positive intentional action, which

I'm gonna talk about next week. But what you're doing in that action is you're

tapping into your internal wisdom, your creativity.

Instead of taking action from fear and anger and insecurity

and resistance, we're taking action from a

deep place of acceptance and love and trust.

How to make this process easier of acknowledge, accept,

attune, and act is by practicing

self love. Never never giving away

that piece, that foundational piece of this hierarchy of healing.

We always need to be practicing self love,

going back to ourself and saying, girl, you you're okay. I love you.

You're you're worthy. You're good. You're amazing.

You know, you've got it. You've overcome so many things, and that is

coupled with self trust. So if I deeply

believe that I can handle anything because I've

handled a lot in the past, And I look at my track record.

I look at all the things that I've overcome, and you can too.

Look at all the things that you've overcome. All the things that you used to

not know how to do that you know how to do now. You used to

not know how to be a mom and now you are one. Maybe you don't

always feel like you know how to be one, but you do. You do it.

You're probably pretty good at it. So you learned lots

of things. You've overcome lots of pain. You've overcome heartbreak.

You've overcome loss. You've overcome change. There have

been circumstances in your life that have been painful. I know that's true

because it's inevitable. It's for it's true for everybody. And you're

still standing. You're still listening to podcast. You're still here. So I also

know that you know how to overcome stuff. And so you

can trust yourself. So we're always going

back to that self love and that self trust. So some journal

prompts for you are what are the facts?

And then what are my thoughts about these facts?

So if you really do that radical honesty, radical listening is really

kind of breaking it down. Here are the facts, but what am I making the

situation mean? What are my feelings about it?

How do I behave when I'm thinking and feeling this way?

Like when I'm thinking like my kid, called me a

name. So my kid said, you know, I hate you.

Right? That's a fact. They said that. Now I can make that mean

they don't love me. I'm a bad mom. I've done something wrong. There's

something wrong with my kid. You know, people think I'm a bad mom.

Like, you can have all these thoughts. And then you have all these feelings.

You know, discouragement, hopelessness, resentment,

anger, frustration, overwhelm,

disempowerment. So then from those feelings, how do you

act? How do you treat yourself? How do you treat your kid? How do you

treat future you? How do you treat past you? When

you're in these thoughts and feelings, if they're

not serving you, you can decide to get rid of them. So

then we have to ask, does this way of thinking, feeling and

acting serve me or not? And taking a

look at does it or does it not? Now

don't take don't think you have to do every single thing I just said, like

all at once. All I want you to do is really just start to think

about the truth that there are hard things in life and that

the faster you accept those things as true,

as reality, the less you resist those things, the

faster you will be able to take that next right

step, to take that next right action, which is

what I'm gonna talk about in next week's episode all

about radical action and that will wrap up this series

on the how to heal series.

Okay. So I wanna leave you with this mantra.

This is the way things are right now and that's

okay. Whatever is hard in your life, whatever is

going on, whatever is scaring you, whatever is

making you angry, whatever is, you know, worrying you or

overwhelming you, think about what are the facts

and then accept this is the way things are right now and

that's okay. And if you need a little extra self

love, you need a little self soothing, give it to yourself.

Take excellent care of yourself, mama, and I will talk to you

next week.