The power of acceptance

A simple idea that has saved millions of lives from psychological torment

In February of this year, Alicia, a 35-year-old Swiss software engineer, took a low one-gram dose of psilocybin. She had taken psychedelics perhaps 20 times before, she has a decent level of psychological maturity, and no history of mental illness. She was in a somewhat stressful phase of her life - her boyfriend was away and the relationship was struggling. She took a mushroom chocolate on her own, in her home, with the intention to ‘feel more peace around the relationship’.

She had a very bad trip, in which she felt herself beset by violent imagery. She was bewildered - were these scenes something that happened to her as a child? She tried to resolve the mystery during the trip but that didn’t work. There was no resolution. She phoned her sister during the trip, which helped her to calm down, but she still came back to reality with a lot of unresolved anxiety.

The next day, the anxiety was still so bad that she went to see a GP, who gave her some Benzos. But the anxiety persisted, and insomnia made it a lot worse. Alicia asked her sister to come and stay with her in London, which she did, travelling from Morocco to be with her. But after a few days, her sister left, and Alicia’s defences broke down.

‘The anxiety was something I had never experienced before’, she tells me. Unable to sleep, Alicia took time off work and went back to Switzerland to be with her family. She sought help from a psychiatrist, who prescribed her SSRIs which made her feel suicidal. Then she saw a therapist, who wasn’t familiar with psychedelics and treated her as if she was suffering from drug addiction.

The one thing that helped was a book called Hope and Help For Your Nerves, written by an Australian doctor called Claire Weekes in 1962. Weekes was a GP in the 1950s, and experienced persisting and severe anxiety after a serious health scare. She desperately searched for the cure, struggling to hold it together and get through the day, until she reached breaking point. And then she found something that worked: acceptance.

Weekes wrote that fighting and resisting anxiety only makes the anxious person feel worse:

Fighting is his natural defense, the only weapon he knows, so he fights even harder. But the harder he fights, the worse he becomes. Naturally—fighting means more tension, more adrenalin and further stimulation of the adrenalin-releasing nerves, and so the continuation of symptoms.

Resistance makes anxiety worse, while acceptance helps it to pass. We need to relax, slow down and ease our wound-up nervous system and racing thoughts, and the way to do that is through acceptance.

Weeks introduced the acronym FAFL -

• Facing

• Accepting

• Floating

• Letting time pass

Facing means stopping running away from your symptoms, Accepting them, Floating (going with whatever is occurring) and Letting time pass - not trying to rush the process. She wrote ‘True acceptance is the keystone to recovery’.

True acceptance means letting your stomach churn, letting your hands sweat and tremble, letting your heart thump without being too disconcerted by them. It may be impossible to be calm at this stage. And you may find that one minute you can accept, the next you can’t. Don’t be upset by this—it is normal in the circumstances. All I ask for as acceptance at this stage is that you are prepared to try to live and work with your symptoms while they are present, without paying them too much respect. Don’t be bluffed by physical feelings!

I’m excited to say that on Wednesday 28th of January at 12 EST, Steven C. Hayes will be giving a free talk for CPEP on ACT and psychedelic therapy. He will discuss how psychedelics helped him develop the principles of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), then he’ll explain the basics of ACT and how it can be applied in both psychedelic therapy and therapy for post-psychedelic difficulties. Tickets below at the bottom of the article.

Basic psycho-spiritual wisdom

Now, I know this is very basic, but honestly this is the heart of so much psychotherapy and spiritual wisdom that it’s worth repeating over and over.

I had severe PTSD and social anxiety for the first half of my 20s, after a bad LSD trip when I was 18. Finally, I heard about Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and joined a CBT support group in London. We all followed a CBT course called Overcoming Social Anxiety Step by Step, by Dr Thomas Richards.

Two of the most helpful pieces of advice in that course were, firstly, That which you resist, persists; and secondly, Acceptance is an active experience. I would literally repeat these mantras to myself over and over, several times a day, for weeks, until they became part of my inner self-talk.

When I reacted with aversion and resistance to panic and anxiety, they got a lot worse. When I accepted them, they gradually lost their hold over me.

It was a spiritual paradox - surrender / acceptance led to victory over the dark forces that threatened to overwhelm me. Like Aslan surrendering to the White Witch, or Luke refusing to fight Darth Vader. Or Jesus surrendering to the Cross, the Buddha sitting calmly in the face of Mara, or the Stoic accepting the limit of their control.

Others who have recovered from post-psychedelic difficulties discovered the same basic psycho-spiritual truth.

We recently did an analysis of 30 first-person testimonies of people who had recovered from derealization and depersonalization, either drug-induced or trauma-induced. The key psychological ingredient that they all said helped them recover was acceptance. When they struggled against derealization and panicked about the symptoms, the symptoms got worse. When they accepted them, gradually, they dissipated and losed their power to cause them suffering.

Last month, clinical psychiatrist Dr Iain Jordan came to speak to our peer support group for people experiencing post-psychedelic difficulties (you can watch the video of his brief talk here). Iain said that unwanted symptoms often persist through three mechanisms:

1) Paying anxious attention to symptoms makes them persist

2) Ascribing very negative or catastrophic meaning to symptoms (such as ‘I’ll never get better, I’m permanently broken) makes them more likely to persist and cause suffering

3) Changing your behaviour in response to the symptoms (for example withdrawing from life) makes it more likely the symptoms will get worse.

The antidotes for these mind-traps?

1) Try to accept the symptom, letting it arise and pass

2) Change your attitude to the symptom, avoiding catastrophising

3) Don’t adjust your behaviour if the symptom arises but keep doing the things that bring you meaning and joy.

Acceptance in psychotherapy

The basic idea that ‘acceptance is an active experience’ can be found in any good psychotherapy or spiritual philosophy.

Here’s Carl Rogers, one of the founders of Humanistic Psychology:

‘The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.’

Here’s Carl Jung:

‘We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses’.

Here’s Steven C. Hayes, the founder of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy:

‘There are only a few skills in life as important as the skill of acceptance…acceptance is the ability to feel the full range of your thoughts and emotions without needless avoidance or clinging in the service of what matters the most to you.’

In other words, to recover from things like anxiety, don’t wait until the anxiety disappears before you get on with your life. On the contrary, you get on with life ‘in service of what matters most to you’ and accept the anxiety or discomfort, thereby weakening its hold on you.

Here’s Rumi, the great Sufi poet and mystic:

Learn the alchemy true human beings know.
The moment you accept what troubles have been given you, the door opens. Welcome difficulty, as a familiar comrade. Joke with torment, sent by the Friend.

Many of our greatest myths and wisdom stories teach the power of acceptance. For me, when I was recovering in my early 20s, I discovered healing wisdom in the late tragedies of Sophocles, especially his last two plays - Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus.

Both plays focus on heroes who experience divine punishment (through no real fault of their own) and are cast out of their societies. They become pariahs, scapegoats - which is pretty much how I felt in my early 20s. But they transform their cursed situation through the power of acceptance and endurance. Through acceptance, they find healing, grace, and eventually sainthood - in fact, both these classical plays are really proto-Christian, I would argue, in that the heroes transcend earthly tragedy through acceptance, much as Hamlet does two millennia later.

Reading Sophocles’ last two plays helped me to endure what I was going through - the feelings of shame and bewilderment at the universe’s sudden hostility. I told myself that, in the darkness and dissolution, I needed to accept and endure. And this wasn’t passively putting up with a cosmic beating, rather this was the magical alchemy that Rumi spoke of - active acceptance of this awful situation developed my inner strength and wisdom and transformed my inner state.

It’s strange to say but enduring that cosmic beating is the thing I am most proud of in my life.

I know some of you are enduring awful, terrible times at the moment, some of them involving post-psychedelic problems, others nothing to do with psychedelics. I wish you strength, wisdom, patience, self-compassion, persistence, and above all, acceptance. These are the allies who help us through the difficult moments of life.

On Wednesday 28th of January at 12 EST, Steven C. Hayes will be giving a free talk for CPEP on ACT and psychedelic therapy. He will discuss how psychedelics helped him develop the principles of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), then he’ll explain the basics of ACT and how it can be applied in both psychedelic therapy and therapy for post-psychedelic difficulties. Tickets here.

But before that, we have Dr Daniel Villiger, Joseph Holcomb Adams and myself discussing Guruism in Psychedelic Organisations and Training Programmes on Wednesday January 14th at 11am Eastern / 4pm UK time. This event is also free and online, and you sign up and learn more here.