[POST] Radical Acceptance of Trump 2.0

This is how you handle the uncertainty

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As part of my spouse’s lifetime education of myself, she wanted to expose me more fully to the “radical acceptance” notion.

The citation du jour:

HOPEWAY: Andrew Harris, “Radical Acceptance in a Time of Uncertainty,” 19 December 2024

Harris is therapist and clinical director.

The basic explanation:

DBT and Radical Acceptance

In times of uncertainty, it is both understandable and valid to feel anxious. Navigating unfamiliar situations and the overwhelming amount of information in today's world can be challenging, to say the least. While these experiences may feel daunting, there is a skill from Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) that can help us manage these emotions and get through difficult times.

What is Radical Acceptance?

Radical acceptance is a distress tolerance skill that is designed to keep pain from turning into suffering.

While pain is part of life, radical acceptance allows us to keep that pain from becoming suffering. By accepting the facts of reality without responding by throwing a tantrum or with willful negligence. In other words, it is what it is.

Really, quite Buddhist when you think of it.

Me? They had me at dialectical behavior!

Being a Hegelian myself, I love the whole thesis/antithesis/synthesis journey of contradiction leading to resolution. I actually consider it very manly in the sense that men instinctively want to get to the solution as fast as possible.

Fuck listening! Just point out who I need to punch in the face! Problem solved!

This method, then, gets your head in the right place to make that trek by recognizing and accepting what you can and cannot control.

I also love that phrase “distress tolerance.” Tell me that’s not the key to a happy life. Dealing with comfort is easy; dealing with distress is hard.

The terms reminds me of the resilience concept, often cited by the military, regarding “graceful degradation”: you go into a fight, and it will degrade you — inevitably. That’s not failure. Failure is not handling that degradation well.

Is this not the key to aging? Every year takes a little bit of your capacity away. You fight the trend as best you can and yet you must adjust, because, if you can’t, you will screw things up — also very manly, like falling off the roof in your sixties.

To me, radical acceptance is staying sharp regarding your relationship with the surrounding environment, avoiding the ass-kickings that pop up on a regular basis by admitting that you need to sort of drive your day more defensively. So yeah, I speed along the bike trail at about 20 mph every day, but I also now hold the railing when I come down my bedroom stairs because, as I get older, I get more careless in my multitasking, like yawning while I’m coming down the stairs in the dark and extending one foot just a hair too forward, then collapsing when my heel can’t handle my entire body weight and … ouch! You don’t break anything until you do, and then you feel like an idiot, as in, accept who you are right now and what you’re capable of.

Degrade gracefully.

Coping with uncertainty seems to be the challenge of the day under Trump 2.0. I expected this fabulous mid-century house of ours, with its unparalleled backyard, to sell in a heartbeat, and things were looking great right up until Trump 2.0 started announcing things and whacking things and freezing things and rounding people up on the street. With each day’s new WTF news bit, you could just feel the housing market chill. Showings stopped dead in their tracks. Mortgages seem that much harder to obtain all of a sudden. Everybody is hunkering down and not risking any big moves. We’re all stockpiling cash.

Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, my family’s big plans for this year are put on hold, and it really is all due to Trump. He decided he was going to go wild on everything he could get his presidential hands on and voila! We’re now tumbling toward a recession of uncertain magnitude and length because it’s so weirdly self-inflicted and ruled over by billionaires who have no idea what it’s like to actually depend on paychecks or what happens to your small business when suddenly it isn’t getting paid on time (the surest sign of a recession, in my experience).

The risk shift here is profound for the vast majority of us: life plans derailed.

For the super-rich? No problem. It’s just smaller numbers on a page.

So, you seek to deal with it the best you can. You imagine yourself the calm husband and father in the movie who does so well at tough moments like this, when inside, you’re roiling and mentally spend your days feeling hunted by unseen forces determined to take your family down.

So, you learn to accept the situation and try to work within it. You may have had a thesis, but it was confronted by an anti-thesis, and now you need to actively forge some sort of synthesis.

The only way out is through — Robert Frost (attributed).

So here’s the article’s Ten Commandments (who doesn’t love a decalogue?).

The first great radical acceptance of my life was absorbing my firstborn’s stage-IV pediatric cancer diagnosis — a process I’ve shared here:

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The second was recovering from that whole fight — a form of post-traumatic stress disorder that I finally cracked when my company at the time sent me to the Maine woods to a weeklong group-therapy retreat for troubled young execs — something for which I remain grateful to this day.

There have been a dozen or so similar journeys since then, but those two were seminal for me because they turned me into a writer — for real.

But I’m very lucky to be married to my spouse because of who she is and what she does professionally (social work with foci on elder issues, death (hospice), and mental illness — pretty much my to-do list as I age and fear cognitive decline (let’s be honest that I totally live in my head — a personal trait and occupational hazard).

More to the point of today’s post: one can never revisit these things enough, like reciting the Our Father or Hail Mary — my favorite mantra-like incantations pulled out for life’s most stressing moments. Why? Because they are magic words that put my head in the right place to radically accept what I am presently facing. You. know … what would Jesus do?

To the article, with my commentary:

1. Observe that you are questioning or fighting reality (“it shouldn’t be this way”)

Admit you have a problem and that your instinctive escapism isn’t healthy or sustainable and that it disables you in your life roles (worker, spouse, parent, etc.). You cannot sit out the entire four years, mentally raging against the machine. You still need to be useful to others and there are plenty of good things you can do in the meantime to vent while still being a great American.

Pick your fights. Pace yourself. Don’t retreat from the world.

2. Remind yourself that the unpleasant reality is just as it is and cannot be changed (“this is what happened”)

I think many of us have been doing that since Election Day: I believe in the Constitution. This was the outcome of a fair election. We’ve done this before with this guy and we can do it again.

The whole not my president thing feels good, but it also feels like tantrumy denial: You’re not the boss of me! When, in truth, he is for 48 months, able to wreak significant havoc on your circumstances and plans and even your financial survival — all in the name of some theory (or is it just nostalgia?) he wants to test and we’re all just the guinea pigs huddling in corners of our collective cage.

Nobody likes being put in that vulnerable position, and accepting that vulnerability is even worse. You want to escape the reality. You hope for deus ex machina developments (bolts from the blue), so you obsessively doom-scroll on your phone.

To this former Sovietologist, it reminds of how people described living under Stalin: how he just invaded your life and your mind with his constant overbearing presence that you instinctively want to escape but cannot.

So, you muddle through. Maybe you self-censor and keep your head down. Maybe you vent publicly under the assumption that you’re too small a target for retribution — a calculation so many people are today discovering they underestimated.

It feels like life during wartime because war is being waged — figuratively and, in places, literally — against things you hold sacred (like that Constitution). But, since you’re not rich, you can’t decamp to Europe or some island paradise. You’re stuck and you need to accept that.

3. Remind yourself that there are causes for the reality (“this is how things happened”)

Biden blew it alright, as did his inner circle, on the whole age thing. Harris ran a pretty good campaign but it wasn’t the amazing breakthrough required by the tight timeline. Trump didn’t get that many more votes so much as the Dems and Dem-leaning voters didn’t show up, leaving Harris millions of votes short of the support Biden received in 2020.

The MAGA faithful remained firm. The opposition’s lawfare approach backfired. So many young were willing to roll the dice because Trump is totally normal from their limited perspective.

COVID fired Trump and COVID’s inflationary tail rehired Trump — it’s as simple as that.

It’s just the latest in a long, uninterrupted string of “change elections,” so just wait 24 months for the next one.

Next!

4. Practice accepting with your whole self (mind, body, spirit) - Use accepting self-talk, relaxation techniques, mindfulness and/or imagery

Get on that Trek every day and put in your 20 miles like somebody’s chasing you (you know, like bankruptcy), and when you can’t, it’s yoga. Say yes to every walk with your spouse. When your kids ask you to stay up and watch a movie with them, you do, because someday they won’t be there to bug you all the time and you’ll miss that desperately.

Don’t binge on DC-centric news. The vast majority of it is sound and fury — signifying nothing.

Get enough sleep.

Watch a lot of rom-coms and Star Trek — stick to optimistic imagery.

Recite the number of days until the midterms.

Try to avoid Schadenfreude when those you blame suffer as a result of their choices. That’s just unhealthy and unkind and un-Christian and not very democratic.

5. List all of the behaviors you would engage in if you did accept the facts and then engage in those behaviors as if you have already accepted the facts

Get on with your altered plans. Look at the upsides afforded by those changes.

If you’re somebody like me, you still want to participate in solutions, wherever they are found and with whomever is driving them. You can’t sit out four years of your life and we all still want America to succeed, so pitch in where you can and feel comfortable.

“Collaborating with the enemy” doesn’t make you a traitor to the cause, any more than resistance makes you an enemy of the state. Democracy is a participatory and — yes — contact sport. Don’t abandon the field.

Many good things can and will result from Trump 2.0. We’re Americans, goddammit! Find them and work them like our future depends on them, because it does.

Be a happy warrior. These people are your friends and neighbors and relatives — don’t forget that.

6. Imagine, in your mind’s eye, believing what you do not want to accept and rehearse in your mind what you would do if you accepted what seems unacceptable

I don’t want to accept that America’s political system is poorly structured for the new realities we face this century. I want to believe it can adapt itself, as it has in the past.

But the truth is, that adaptation comes with transformational figures like FDR and Trump. I greatly prefer the former model, but that’s not where we are on the political pendulum right now, so I have to hope and believe that good things will arise in response to all this demolition.

The public wanted nation-building at home and, by God, we’ll need it after all this vicious destruction. Nation-building typically follows wars, does it not? Trump is giving us that conflict — self-inflicted, but there it is.

7. Attend to body sensations as you think about what you need to accept

Everybody is feeling more stress in their lives right now, with one of the most obvious signs being rising social anxiety and heightened blood pressure — the silent killer. Trump may thrive on chaos but humans in general do not. So, in your mind, separate the friction (Trump, MAGA) from the force (the big structural changes we collectively face in our world today) and understand which is cause and which is effect, because getting rid of the effect is not the same as dealing with the cause.

8. Allow disappointment, sadness or grief to arise within you

Unpleasant as it is, it beats the Schadenfreude route. That sort of toxicity is growing sooo tiresome. Eventually, Whites in America will get over themselves and stop pretending like every inevitable loss of social privilege and political centrality is a conspiracy to diminish them — because they’ll come to realize that there’s a huge world out there beyond this 15% of humanity we dub as the “true” civilization, “true” faith, and so on.

Everybody is disappointed to find out they’re not as special as they were led to believe. Here it’s good to go Buddhist: stop desiring your special status and then the “pain” of losing it will go away.

9. Acknowledge that life can be worth living even when there is pain

Again with the Buddhism! Although there’s plenty of Christianity to be mined here as well — at least the Catholicism I know.

Life is hard. We’re going to screw up almost all the time and yet we will succeed in living a worthy life.

So, you know what you do when you’ve done something unforgivable? I’ll tell you what you do: you forgive yourself! (h/t, David Mamet, House of Games).

10. Do pros and cons if you find yourself resisting practicing acceptance

Classic scenario-izing your daily. life. I do it all the time.

Today’s version: High school rings me and it’s my youngest. She’s forgotten her assignment collage on her desk and needs it pronto! Can I deliver right now?

SCENARIO 1: I say something rude in reply, hang up muttering to myself, grab the collage and jump in the car for an aggressively-driven three-block trip to the school. I pull up in front of all of her peers eating lunch outside in the sun. She spots me and runs over. I berate her publicly. She walks away ashamed and embarrassed. I drive off still angry, get home, and fume about it for several minutes. Her day is ruined. She fears meeting me once home, because I inevitably berate her some more. This is what she is learning to expect from men in her life. I am ruining far more than the moment — but only if I am self-aware.

SCENARIO 2: I say, great! A break in the action! Some reason to get my fat ass off the couch and put away my ever-present laptop. I grab the collage and the dog and we walk over to school on a beautiful day. My youngest sees me walking up and runs over to grab the collage and pet Charlie, to the delighted stares of many of her friends. We laugh. I walk Charlie back home. My daughter is happy, I feel good. The dog is loving every minute of it. I get back to this post and have a worthy example to share.

The kicker? Her collage is on Social Anxiety.

I could have ruined that moment and her day, thinking she deserved it for disturbing mine, but I chose differently and it was all good for all involved.

You may think the choice between the two scenarios is sooo obvious, but it never is.

Radical acceptance comes in many small actions in response to many big questions:

Am I still an American? Yep.

Do I still want America to succeed? Absolutely.

Can I find ways to help? Of course! But only if I ditch the us-v-them mindset just enough to make myself useful to others — no matter their affiliations.

Focus on the good. Make it overwhelm the bad.

Accept that you can only do so much and then git ‘r done!

Here endeth today’s sermon. Go now in peace and sin no more.

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