What’s the difference between acceptance and resignation?
They look very similar, but the distinction is important
One of the biggest cultural products of 12-step support groups is the Serenity Prayer, which goes something like this:
God,
Grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change
The courage to change the things I can
And the wisdom to know the difference
Regardless of where you’ve landed with respect to religion and spirituality, this seems to me like very good advice. The merit of the prayer, mind you, comes when considering it as a whole - a lot of people stop at ‘serenity’ and forget that the other two virtues are in there too, interpreting the prayer as a kind of mantra for doormats. Either say yes to every single thing in your life or go meditate to death on top of a mountain.
What seems wise to me is to find that ever-elusive middle ground where we perfectly apply our powers, changing what we can and accepting what we can’t, feeling both fulfilled in our power and at peace with our limitations. Simple in theory and complex in implementation, something we’re all forever condemned to over- and under-shoot, burning ourselves out or stewing in misery and probably bouncing back and forth forever from one extreme to another.
Accepting the things we cannot change doesn’t just mean sheer passivity - acceptance isn’t a lack of action, but an attitude. Acceptance is an orientation toward something that makes peaceful, emotionally-neutral reactions towards that thing possible.
There are several alternatives to acceptance - at the top of the list is denial, where some part of you is aware of the thing but the rest of you rejects this thing so hard that you pretend the thing doesn’t exist. Next up is resignation, where you acknowledge the thing but acknowledging it makes you feel terrible and you really, really wish it were a different way.
Resignation is the tricker of the two since it can look like acceptance, in that both involve not taking any action to change a given thing. The difference is in whether or not you have a ton of emotional energy bound up in resisting the given thing, in experiencing resentment and frustration towards the thing. With acceptance you’ve accepted the thing as a part of the background, you can treat it as objectively as you can and maybe even move on.
For an example of acceptance, consider the fact that “grass is green”. Unless there’s something severely unusual with your past or your psychological constitution, it probably didn’t feel super emotionally charged to say that. Now consider something like “my drinking has hurt a lot of people, especially me”. That second thing is not something that is easy to accept! A lot of drunks live their lives in denial of this fact, and it’s a sad truth that drinking makes it easier for someone to deny the damage of their drinking (if only to themselves). When a lot of people get sober, including me, they get sober with a certain resignation to the fact that they have an unhealthy relationship with alcohol. The damage your drinking has done is painful to behold and painful to carry around, mentally speaking. You wish you could turn back the clock and stop all of it from ever happening, you live your life wishing more than anything that you were actually somebody else.
Acceptance, in sobriety, involves doing the work to make “my drinking has hurt a lot of people, especially me” and “grass is green” have the same emotional charge, namely very little at all. It happens by repetition, by talking about it every day - through being with people who are ready to accept you as you are, even if you don’t accept yourself - and through doing a lot of hard and scary work to live life differently and fix what you broke to the best of your ability.
So, strangely, I only became able to do something about my alcoholism once I stopped resisting it, through denial or through resignation. It’s an objective fact about me, like my eye color and height - but unlike those other traits it’s something I have worked to accept, doing a work that has called for (you guessed it) the courage to change things and the wisdom to know what I can change and what I can not. Accepting my alcoholism has given me the power to accept all sorts of other things, and with that acceptance has come the kind of power and change that I wouldn’t have been able to find anywhere else.
The drinking part of being a drunk sucked - the recovery part, the peace and power that has come with it, is something I wish everyone could find for themselves.