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Fighting a reality you can't change often works as avoidance—it just looks like courage.

Acceptance and giving up are opposites: Giving up walks out of the moment, acceptance finally walks in.

Acceptance is for the unchangeable. If you can move the thing, seeing clearly is the floor, not the ceiling.

There's a specific kind of 3 a.m. where you're not asleep and you're not awake. You're litigating.

I've languished in mental courtrooms during the wee hours of the morning many times. I’ve built a body of emotional case law against something that had already happened, or rehearsed the argument I'd win, if only reality would show up to court (hopefully with unprepared counsel). It never does. Reality doesn't take meetings. It doesn't read your brief. And there I was anyway: a psychologist who knows the research, filing motion after motion against a verdict that was already final.

There I go with legal analogies (my semester in law school clearly needed some airtime).

We call that fighting the “good fight.” We're proud of it, even. Don't give up, we tell each other. Keep fighting. But watch what the fight is actually doing at 3 a.m. It isn't changing the outcome; it's keeping me busy enough not to feel it.

Fighting a reality you cannot change is often the most respectable way we've invented to run from it. It looks like courage, but it functions like a flinch, a sophisticated one, dressed in the language of grit. In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), this is the engine of........

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