Quotes About Acceptance

It doesn't matter what people thinks of you as long as you know that your heart and head are in the right place.

Augie: Does everybody else know? T.C.: About my epitaph? Augie: About me being gay, you gink-head hoser-face! T.C. Not everybody. There's a night watchman at a Dunkin Donuts just outside of Detroit. He doesn't know yet.

For a while, Mirabelle believes there will be a moment when he will cave in and let himself love her, but eventually she lets the idea go. She hits bottom. She dwells in the muck for several months, not depressed exactly, but involved in a mourning that at first she thinks is for Ray but soon realizes is for the loss of her old self.

So, I can hurt now, or hurt later.

she is nearing forty and not so easily forgiven as when her skin bloomed like roses.

She has simply never quite learned to walk or hold herself comfortably

The woman speaks, stops, then after what must have been a long speech by the person on the other end of the line, says, ... just remember, darling, it is pain that changes our lives. Mirabelle cannot fathom the meaning of this sentence, as she has been in pain her whole life, and yet it remains unchanged.

You're nuts, but you're welcome here.

as much as I had resisted the outside, as much as I had constricted my life, as much as I had closed and narrowed the channels into me, there were still many takers for the quiet heart.

I guessed that one day the restrictions I imposed on myself would end. But first, it seemed that my range of possible activities would have to iris down to zero before I could turn myself around. Then, when I was static and immobile, I could weigh and measure every exterior force and, slowly and incrementally, once again allow the outside in. And that would be my life.

people who believed the old theory thought the new theory was just as ridiculous then as you think the old theory is now.

I believe in me. I'm a little screwed up but I'm beautiful.

If we are afraid of being rejected by others, we see signs of imminent rejection everywhere. We know that buying into that fear will not liberate us, but the possibility of rejection is so fear-inducing that it seems like a violation of basic logic not to focus on it.

You cannot be a good ACT therapist if you take words to be right, correct, and true rather than asking "How effectual are they?

The problem with problem solving is that it is a mode of mind that does not know when to stop.

The constructive alternative to fusion is defusion, and the preferred alternative to experiential avoidance is acceptance.

These skills involve consciously experiencing feelings as feelings, thoughts as thoughts, memories as memories, and so on.

To what extent does the client live in a world of "musts" and "shoulds" and "can'ts"? To what extent does the client live in a world of well-rehearsed excuses for why things are as they are—a world in which change is either impossible or for a time other than right now?

It is based on a pragmatic philosophy of science called functional contextualism

Compassion and acceptance; stigma and defusion. As described thus far, acceptance and defusion seem, superficially, to be intrapsychic issues, but self-as-context expands their nature. Because perspective taking is social, it is not possible to take a loving, open, accepting, and active perspective on yourself without doing likewise for others.

Psychological flexibility can be defined as contacting the present moment as a conscious human being, fully and without needless defense—as it is and not as what it says it is—and persisting with or changing a behavior in the service of chosen values.

When we've adopted behavior because we think it helps us avoid emotional pain, whether we're aware of that thinking or not, change is challenging.

Psychological flexibility is the ability to feel and think with openness, to attend voluntarily to your experience of the present moment, and to move your life in directions that are important to you, building habits that allow you to live life in accordance with your values and aspirations.

Psychological rigidity is at its core an attempt to avoid negative thoughts and feelings caused by difficult experiences, both when they occur and in our memory of them.