“The path to inner peace begins with acceptance.” Eye roll. Yada yada yada…

As a teenager, I heard a therapist make the case for acceptance, and I’ve heard the same message from sermons, other therapists, and myriad other sources of wisdom.

Every 12-Stepper knows the “Serenity Prayer” by heart:

“Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change….”

Got it!

Well, I thought I had it.

For much of my life, I thought acceptance was a sort of superpower for me. I remember my mother telling one of my teachers how “adaptable and accepting” I had been through her divorce and remarriage.

An emotional crisis in my late 50s revealed how deluded I was when it came to acceptance.

The event that seemed to evoke this crisis was a relationship breakup. As I unpacked my feelings with a therapist, it became apparent that my emotions were about much more than the recent relationship.

It felt as though I opened Pandora’s box. Out came resentment, bitterness, and rage.

When the storm subsided, I realized I had been fooling myself about my ‘superpower’ of acceptance. Turns out I was only skilled at faking acceptance.

My therapist helped me recognize that authentic acceptance truly yields inner peace. The absence of peace clearly indicates the absence of acceptance.

That realization led through some dark spaces: shame, resignation, and hopelessness.

It took months before I sensed light at the end of that dark tunnel.

Recently, I realized that my year in therapy was a grief process. 

You’ve likely heard of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief. I thought I knew them, too, until I noticed something that stopped me cold: acceptance comes last.

Yes, she makes the point that people don’t always follow these stages in sequence, but often acceptance is the caboose after the predictable stages of denial, anger, bargaining, and depression.