Acceptance vs. wallowing

[cjsmith]

Sometimes I'm very unhappy about something and I know there's not a darn thing I can do about it except come to some kind of acceptance. (People who have never had a problem outside your power to solve, stop reading now; save your innocence.)

I don't know how to accept something I loathe except to face it over and over and over. Otherwise, I go into denial, not useful long-term. So I keep repeating the unpleasant truth to myself until it doesn't hurt any more. I analyze. I try to find loopholes. I want to know just where the boundaries are. I want to know how bad it is, and I want to face that.

I wallow in it. If I don't, I keep getting unpleasantly surprised when it slaps me in the face.

So far there are not many things in my life that are bad enough that this technique doesn't work. But there are a couple... and it isn't working... and it's been years.

I am quite tired of being unhappy about this crap. If wallowing isn't going to work I can sure be happier day-to-day if I ditch it. Any other techniques??

Comments

[sunnydale47.livejournal.com]

Augh! It's not a misspelling, it's an editing error! I had originally begun the last paragraph, "So I think you're dealing with it exactly right." But I changed it. And it's almost 2 AM. But I wanted to finish it, and I wanted to get the nuance right. I always want to get the nuances exactly right. So I recast the sentence ... but I forgot to change the spelling. Fooey on LJ for not letting us edit comments.