Emotional acceptance helps people endure the pain of division and discrimination.

Perspective-taking reveals the barriers that divide communities.

Perspective-taking isn't automatic. It takes practice, humility, and willingness to feel.

A few months ago, I got a message from a therapist in Vancouver. She’d been following my work for years. She’d read the books on ACT, done the online courses, and built her entire practice around psychological flexibility and a process-based approach. But she’d never been to a live training with me.

“I just can’t cross the border right now,” she wrote. “It doesn’t feel safe.”

I sat with that for a while.

This therapist—dedicated, trained, exactly the kind of clinician I’d want working with my family—had been cut off from a community she belonged to, not by anything she’d done, but by a shift in the weather between two countries.

The border hadn’t moved. She had.

Reading those words hurt. I felt sad. My whole life has been about building community around how to alleviate human suffering and to promote human well-being, and here we are living in a world that increasingly divides us–even communities of helping professionals.

My mind went to an unexpected place.

Acceptance as a source of strength

There was a recent study in the journal Emotion (Gatchpazian et al, 2026) that found that the well-being of Black people who have been subjected to racial discrimination is profoundly protected by acceptance.

It’s not the kind of acceptance that the common-sense meaning of the word gives you. It’s the kind of acceptance that is deep inside the mindfulness traditions, or ACT, and psychological flexibility. Acceptance in that context means an active process of being open to feeling what you feel, deeply engaging with it, and learning from it.

Acceptance........

© Psychology Today