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Psychotherapy has been practiced now for a little more than a century.

Psychotherapy is helpful for most people.

Psychotherapy is as much about acceptance as change.

Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche proposed in his famous Stoic aphorism of amor fati (“love of one’s fate") that we should not only seek to accept but willingly embrace all that happens to us in life as necessary—the good, the bad, and the ugly. The concept of acceptance is particularly prominent in Eastern philosophy and religion, as well as in Christianity and other great religious systems. For instance, acceptance is central to so-called spiritual enlightenment, as illustrated repeatedly in timeless texts like the Old Testament's Book of Job, the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, the noble teachings of Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha), and the Tao Te Ching. But even practicing Buddhists, Hindus, Taoists, and other spiritual seekers can sometimes lose sight of the primacy of acceptance. Consider, for instance, this frustrated cry of one Buddhist devotee of meditation: "I've been meditating for thirty years—and I'm still angry!" In this case, the meditator evidently erroneously sought to change, eradicate, or transcend rather than accept, experience, and constructively express, redirect, or channel his angry feelings. (For more on dealing constructively or creatively with anger in psychotherapy, see my book Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic [SUNY Press, 1996].)

Drawing directly from these ancient wisdom teachings of the East, clinical psychologist Marsha Linehan incorporates what she calls "radical acceptance" in her dialectical behavior therapy (DBT). The secret to such radical acceptance is the nonjudgmental, tolerant, courageous, compassionate embrace of, rather than resistance to, whatever we are experiencing right here and now, in the present moment, juxtaposed paradoxically with the acknowledgment and unequivocal acceptance of the essential necessity for changing one's self-defeating behavior and negative self-talk. Another popular form of cognitive-behavioral therapy, acceptance and........

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