Would you agree that acceptance leads to being able to achieve more?

But surely you're aiming too low here, only acceptance training? No, prescribe them the full ACT experience, as a condition of their employment, and see how they like it. Make them all accept that yes, we really are ill and we need help on many many levels, and then make them commit firmly to providing us with that help. We may be drowning in marshmallows first...

 

Not fighting against yourself might plausibly free up energy to do other stuff.

If you accept your illness, you might be able to pace better and acknowledge your limitations, thus avoiding the worst of your PEM.

You might also feel more in control and thus happier. That's not the same as being better, but it means you may be able to cope with the same level of illness better than before.

But it's far from guaranteed, and I doubt you'd find a benefit in clinical trials beyond normal variance in symptoms.

 

(Sarcasm) Maybe they should expect that they should be committed for doing all this to disabled people?

 

On that note I think it seriously needs to be happening as part of an anti-discrimination/'ism' (we need our own phrase for that because it's extensive) compulsory training. And yes it should be that intensive and extensive as a course given how deep their issues are/go, and how they've had it firmly trained into them by pathways and scripts for the last decade.

 

There's a huge difference between accepting a situation that can't be changed, compared to a situation that is largely the outcome of awful decisions, especially where there are no technical reasons for failure, just human failure.

There are incurable diseases, where the damage is done and can't be undone, at least realistically given the limits of technology. On this, acceptance makes some sense, as long as there is adequate support. Which is almost never the case, but that's a different thing.

This doesn't apply here. Accepting the situation with ME is like accepting to have been wrongfully imprisoned and choosing to do nothing about it. This is largely a manufactured crisis, made worse by systemic dysfunction and incompetence. This cannot ever be accepted. Not everyone should carry the burden of fighting this, but it's an unacceptable situation, especially when the people pushing the acceptance are the ones doing the harm in the first place. Especially as they use the coercive acceptance of us being bullied into silence as evidence that they're "helping".

If AIDS patients had accepted that there was nothing worth doing, nothing would have happened. We are what happens when the patient population can't fight back, can simply be bullied into silence. Which obviously did not allow us to achieve more, if anything, it just keeps destroying generations of people.

We know for a fact that the damage is not permanent, that people can recover even after many years. It's a solvable problem that hasn't been solved by choice, and that's always unacceptable, especially when the decision to fail is made by other people with zero stake in the matter.

 

In 2007 I wrote to our then Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, using his office internet message system, and basically said I am either waiting for a cure or waiting to die. Most of the rest of the very long message was about details and options and how to get a cure. I never even got a reply that I recall.

We may be limited in what we can do, and some of us severely limited, but as a community our options are not zero. One of us cannot do much, many of us might, a great many definitely can.

We are likely better off accepting that miracle change will not happen. Stop believing in heroes on white horses, and get involved in what ME political organizations are around. We are not better off accepting that we can have no options and should give up.

 

I agree!

When folks have told me that acceptance must mean I have given up, I generally say that acceptance is about the present moment. No one can predict the future. Therefore, no one can accept the future.

One could accept a diagnosis that includes the likelihood of not getting better, but no one knows for sure. So I completely agree that acceptance, as I understand it, does not mean resignation.

I can accept my current limitations, and do what I can to avoid symptoms, work around limitations, find joy in spite of the illness, and so on.

But at the same time I can monitor information about medical research/treatments, do some advocacy work to try to make things better, write letters to congress for more research funding, and so on.

Acceptance of the present situation, while also working to improve things, is not a contradiction.

Trish, thanks so much for listing those different interpretations of acceptance.

I have heard of CBT but I had never heard of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) until I read this thread. Saw the acronym and had to look it up.

I thought we were just talking about acceptance in a general way, not as part of a specific psychological therapy.

So, please take that into account when reading my other comments. Thanks!

 

Agreed - not 100% sure where (or if there is a single source or just noone stepping back from their took 1 second to make an assumption belief) the ideologies came from, or if anyone was actually following them or the guidelines just provided a back-cover for that.

But the reality is that these 'experts' were creating treatment instilling bigotry against themselves in patients. How that is not defined as psychological and.. because it meant training their mind to not listen to body and beat themselves up more when it collapsed on the physical harm?

Surely any 'treatment', even in this area should have to pass the common sense test in harm. Noone would be allowed to run a trial on self-flagellation ethically (although I assume that would come under therapist-delivered) just because it had some pseudophil from someone who wanted to try it. The psychology and impact here is little different, so I find it very confusing regarding the ethics and no basic scientific principles calling out when correlations get claim to be causality (but the wrong way round) and turned into reasons to propose something that would obviously make the situation worse

The more I think about this area, the more I know it is a problem area where they generalise and assume even on people's personality or background above actually asking the person in front of them - so in psychological you can find a condition caused by a situation someone can well explain and is logically obviously going to cause stress and impossibleness, you get some who will trot out without hearing from said patient 'must have had a bad childhood'. Because the dodgy data that was looking for correlations (so asking for it even when i mightn't have been that bad or the cause) which aren't that high or extensive get supplanted back as if they are 100% true.

Which, when done in an informal sense is the internal mechanism driving bias and discrimination: looking for things that will back up your presumptions and ignoring the rest. What 'reality' are they going to be driving in - I can safely assume Chalder's with little listening or hearing skills to inform that - so distortion think of yourself like Chalder does therapy again? There are better words for people who look at someone and assume they are where they are because of who they are and go looking for personality traits to 'back that up' without any proper scientific methodology. It shouldn't be an academic or scientific area.

 

In my severest years I couldn't find any acceptance, there was too much force imposed by the ME at extreme levels. It took many many years to improve to moderate level and that only happened by the ME forcing me to bed and rest.

I now accept that I have to manage my illness to keep from returning to severe levels. This acceptance is helped by the knowledge of how bad ME can get, and so I keep up my resting routine out of fear and past experience.

 

I don't find 'acceptance' leads to being able to achieve more.