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When you're resigned, you feel like a victim; when you accept there is a sense of peace.

The keys to acceptance are taking action and changing the story by looking for the positive.

Moving from a should-driven life to a value-driven one puts you in charge and helps you do your best.

Maybe it’s about your relationship, which essentially died long ago but still barely lives on life support from habit and familiarity. Or maybe you’re recently retired, and your sense of purpose and passion has evaporated. Or maybe it’s about a dead-end job that’s like a prison, or a serious medical diagnosis that is now consuming your life and your sense of the future. Do you resign yourself to what your life is giving you in that moment, or do you accept it?

Resignation versus acceptance

Resignation, an old French word for giving up—résignatio—is essentially about feeling like a victim. It carries with it a why-bother, it’s-never-going-to-change attitude. Retirement is an endless landscape of nothingness; the relationship is a desert of emotion and connection; the job feels like being at the bottom of a well with no way out; the diagnosis is a series of things to be done to you by white-coated professionals. Life has decided to screw you over. There’s an understandable passivity, a powerlessness.

Acceptance, in contrast, replaces this one-down, can’t-do position with a leaning-in. It’s the end of a process of making sense of what has unfolded. What has happened........

© Psychology Today