After that, I did what so many of us do in grief. I somehow put one foot in front of the other and kept going, having no idea how I was doing it. Keeping approximately a million mental connections to my dad, I spent four years getting a philosophy degree which, in its own way, felt like a protest to acceptance.
The reasons were all the reasons you would guess, reasons you might have felt. It sounded like resigning oneself to what happened. Or worse, saying you were okay with it. It implied that there was some endpoint to grief, after which you accept and things go back to "normal". It is tucked at the end of the five stages, which sounded so neat and tidy, when grief was neither neat nor tidy. Many people grieving just didn't seem like the idea that they should be striving for acceptance in order to heal.
That said, I also know that so much misunderstanding exists around Kubler-Ross' work. Most people don't know her theory was developed as stages for people who were dying, not those who were grieving. Out of her hundreds of pages of writing, most people only know those five simple: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. From there, they make assumptions, define things themselves, take a guess. I knew if I wanted to hate acceptance (and I did) I needed to know more than just the word.
When I first read Kubler-Ross' book, I was fascinated by her actual definition of acceptance. Acceptance, she says: "is often confused with the notion of being all right or okay with what has happened. This is not the case. Most people don't ever feel okay or all right about the loss of a loved one. This stage is about accepting the reality that our loved one is physically gone and recognizing that this new reality is a permanent reality.
We will never like this reality or make it okay, but eventually, we accept it. We learn to live with it. It is the new norm with which we must learn to live. This is where our final healing and adjustment can take a firm hold, despite the fact that healing often looks and feels like an unattainable state.
Healing looks like remembering, recollecting, and reorganizing . . . we must try to live now in a world where our loved one is missing . . . In a strange way, as we move through grief, healing brings us closer to the person we loved. A new relationship begins. We learn to live with the loved one we lost".
Surprisingly, by the time I finished graduate school, I was thinking a lot about acceptance again. I had become a big fan of a therapy called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. ACT for short. Unexpected as it was, I had been drawn to a therapeutic approach with 'acceptance' right at the center.
Steven Hayes, the founder of ACT, explains achieving 'psychological flexibility' as a core piece of his approach. This psychological flexibility allows us to feel and appreciate all of our experiences.
Rather than embracing "good" feelings and experiences and quickly trying to escape "bad" or "negative" experiences, he describes a state in which all emotions have a place. Though there are some variations of the definition, this one sums it up well: "psychological flexibility is coming in full contact with painful experiences and with uniquely chosen values while consciously choosing to act and engage in a meaningful life".
Hayes tells us to think of acceptance from the Latin root of the word. This isn't to resign oneself or be okay with something. Rather, it is to accept something that is given to you, like a gift. And let's be honest, we've all accepted a gift we really didn't like from someone.
He suggests that the art of living in a meaningful way comes through learning to 'accept' all the experiences that our lives have given us. The good experiences, and the brutal and painful experience. The love and loss.
So, rather than seeing 'happiness' as a state of pleasure, devoid of pain, Hayes says instead that "happiness is living in accord with your values in a way that is more open and accepting of your history as it echoes into the present".
That history for most people, certainly for those of us grieving, is a very mixed bag. It isn't being grateful for that past. It isn't being glad that it happened. Instead, it is acknowledging the reality of that past and accepting that history as part of our wisdom in the present. It is part of who we are.
We can disconnect from difficult experiences and emotions, like those that come up when we think of the person we love who died. But in doing so, we disconnect from the love and power in our memories, from comforting connections, and from a past that can propel us closer to our values.
So now, all these years later, acceptance occupies a very different space in my grief. Acceptance is not resigning ourselves to a past we then put behind us. Rather, acceptance is creating a space to bring that past with us, the most beautiful parts and the most painful parts.
It is what allows me to create a space that is fully open to my history - to all the losses and the pain that came with them. To all the memories and stories and connections that carry into the present. To the way that pain and loss have shaped who I am.
The way that grief has allowed me to more deeply connect to the values that mean the most to me, to live in a way consistent with those values. My twelve-year-old self never would have guessed it. But then again, she probably wouldn't have guessed much about who I am today.
I will admit that I found it challenging to read this article. When anyone seemingly gives credence to the five stages, I grow deaf with the roaring in my mind. I had to crank the volume on this article to reach the part that made sense. The Kubler-Ross model was supposedly developed to help terminally ill patients to learn to accept death as it approached. Later someone thought the model could be applied with some degree of logic to grief. Perhaps because Death had already approached, wreaked havoc, and left us stumbling around in Her aftermath. My sister is a GriefShare counselor, and she immediately introduced me to the five stages. Fortunately, a friend explained it better by assuring me that I would vacillate among those stages and that there were not actual stages that seemingly indicate progress is to be attained. Losing my daughter truly put the whammy on my mind. Finally I discovered the illogical application of the model to grief and was able to toss that theory out the window. I have been reading about this newer theory of acceptance, and it goes along with something I learned in my youth. I was a so-called survivor of multiple types of abuse, and I was angry. I had been taught that anger was negative, not to show it, and as a result, I did not learn to deal with it appropriately. Finally a behavior modification psychologist revealed the truth or rather he let me gain my own understanding that anger is simply an emotion, not negative, not positive. That truth corresponds to the idea that if we disconnect from the bad in our grief, we also lose the good. Your last paragraph sums it up nicely. Thank you for your continued commitment to help others like me who continue to try to make sense of the senseless.
It's not about hate. It's more complicated than that. It's about bigotry, and misogyny, and the dangers of cultural traditionalism. It's about people, and what they do when they're put in an isolated environment over hundreds of years. Hate is a pretty small part of it, all told. The Analogue part, though? That's pretty spot on.
If you've not played any of Christine Love's games before, they're often thrown into the 'Interactive Fiction' bracket, although they deviate in a few interesting ways. Instead of presenting the player with a story that diverges a few key choice points, they instead make the game about the information the player receives, and how they react and interact to that information.
Digital set itself in an internet forum during the dial-up days, with emails back and forth between you and the girl you fall for. Don't Take it Personal... had you as a teacher reading the private messages of your pupils, supposedly looking after them in loco parentis, providing a critique on the increasing lack of privacy our electronic selves are afforded.
Both of Love's previous games stumbled between what the player wanted to do and what the game allowed the player to do. With only binary options, there was no way to properly anticipate what you wanted to say, instead leading you into situations you didn't necessarily want to be in. Ironically, Analogue takes this conceit and makes it its own, establishing a premise that makes a certain sense of your lack of choices. You're tasked with investigating a Mary Celeste-type spaceship that has suddenly shown up a few centuries after going missing. You never actually board the ship, though, instead interfacing with the ship's console, and, soon enough, the ship's AI, *Hyun-ae.
There's a bit of a malfunction (there's always a malfunction) and the AI can't parse your text, so you're limited to digital input only. Binary choices during conversations and no search function mean that as you comb through the ship's logs looking for a reason why it's empty, you can only see what the AI thinks you want to see, which introduces the main mechanic of the game.
Since you can't search or tell *Hyun-ae what you're looking for, you have to look through the logs and ping her when you'd like to know more about whatever you're reading. She'll explain a bit about the people mentioned then pull up a bunch of logs relating to the one you were reading, and you carry on following the trail. It's quickly engaging, not least because these are the letters and diary of an entire colony ship, meaning there are dozens of little narrative vignettes to follow, and the writing is more than compelling enough to tickle the itch that makes you want to find out what happens in each case.
For the first half of the game, you're given a clear directive; find the Admin password for the console so that you can start getting at all the files that *Hyun-ae can't access. It's smart, because it means that while you've got a very clear purpose, it forces you to comb the logs for any mention of the password, and at the same time get sucked into the narrative that Love has created. And you do get sucked in, because, voyeuristic as it is, these people have laid out their lives in private correspondence and journal-keeping.
795a8134c1