As we live, we experience different situations and emotions. We go through different stages, we meet many people, we lose people along the way… And life inevitably leads us to processes of personal change and mourning processes to reorganize our reality and to face these losses.
Faced with the same experience, we can act in multiple ways: accept it, conform or resign ourselves to it. But what differences between acceptance, conformism and resignation do we find? Is there one healthier way than another to respond to life’s experiences? In this article we talk about what each concept is and how we can differentiate them, depending on what each of these attitudes brings us.
As we will see, these are three coping strategies that entail a series of consequences at the psychological level. And it is that in life it is not so important what happens to us but what we do with what happens to us; that is, how we react to experiences, how we manage them and what meaning we give them in our personal biography.
Acceptance as an adaptive strategy
- Acceptance implies recognizing situations that we do not like as part of our reality. It is an active attitude, which involves becoming aware of what has happened to us, accepting it and integrating it into our life story.
- When we talk about acceptance, in psychology, we usually mean assuming some event or experience in our life that has hurt us. Accept a loss, a painful situation or one that causes us suffering. Accept that this is how it happened and that there was no other way for it to be.
- In the face of loss processes, and with the consequent grieving process that is experienced, acceptance is considered the last phase in this process. It comes from an effort, on the part of the person, to reposition the painful situation as part of his life, and it implies liberation and healing.
- Accepting does not imply that things have not marked us or that they no longer have an impact on our lives. And even, it doesn’t mean that something stops hurting. Everything we experience marks us, leaves us a mark; but with the acceptance the process culminates and the experiences lived acquire their meaning.
- With acceptance we let go of a stage or a person, it is like saying to the other: “you no longer owe me anything, nor I you, I am at peace”. Thanks to acceptance we close one stage and start another, and we prepare to continue having experiences. We open ourselves to continue living.
Conformism means adjusting
- Conformism, for its part, implies adjusting to the changes or modifications produced in the opinion or behavior of a person. Normally, it appears as a result of pressure from other individuals or from a group.
- In reality, conformism is a passive attitude, unlike acceptance; because? Because it implies settling, many times, with less than what we deserve. It is not an attitude towards change, towards a new stage, as it happens in acceptance.
- It is an attitude that makes us grant more reliability to the judgment of others than to our own. It implies accepting situations that, in reality, do not convince us, either due to fear of not being liked, personal insecurities, the desire to fit in, fear of reprisals, etc.
Resign or give up a change as impossible
- Finally, resignation is defined as the “acceptance with patience and conformity of an adversity or of any harmful state or situation”. When we resign ourselves, we surrender to what the other wants for us, to his will. It is, like conformism, a passive attitude. It does not carry change or the desire to improve; It only implies accepting what we don’t really like, either out of fear, insecurities… It’s similar to conformism, although it has its nuances.
- Resigning ourselves to something means that we are predisposed to accept as impossible an improvement or a change that could actually occur. It implies, in a certain way, to stop fighting, to stop trying. That is why it is an attitude that feeds passivity, because it does not promote changes in us, but the acceptance of something unpleasant or something that we believe we cannot change.
The differences between acceptance, conformism and resignation
When we accept something we accept it because we know that it is something that we can no longer change. It is a past or present situation, but it is part of our life and that we must assume to adapt to that situation.
Acceptance is an active attitude, as we said, while conformism and resignation are passive attitudes. This is the first of the differences between acceptance, conformism and resignation, although we find some more:
Recovery and change
- Acceptance helps us recover from a painful situation. It involves assuming that there are things that are beyond our control and that, therefore, we cannot change. In acceptance there is liberation. Instead, in conformism or resignation, we do not free ourselves.
- On the contrary; we can be “anchored” to a painful past, because settling for something means accepting it even knowing that it does not benefit us in the present. And resign yourself, more of the same; it implies to stop fighting (but not as in acceptance, when there is nothing left to do, but to stop fighting when change was still possible).
Learning
- With acceptance ends up coming, over time, learning. The fact of understanding how we got here. It is like opening a door to the truth, to what has happened to us and to its meaning. But this is only achieved through acceptance, thanks to the fact that we stop fighting against something that we could never change.
- What happens with conformism and resignation? That learning follows another path; If we resign ourselves to a negative event, we will focus on everything bad. And that leaves no room for learning. The same happens with conformism: conforming does not lead us to look at other perspectives, other points of view. It implies accepting a fact and not going beyond it.
Perspective
- In relation to the previous point, we can say that acceptance can help us see things in perspective, thanks to time and our effort to assume a reality, even if it hurts. Accepting is embracing the inevitable, giving it space, allowing yourself to experience it, stopping resisting.
- When we accept, we take a detached perspective on things (which is why the final stage of grief is acceptance). We have traveled a road and now we look through it; It is the so-called warrior’s rest.
- Instead, when we settle, we stay there; We do not analyze the path traveled, because there is no path traveled. And with the same resignation; we are paralyzed at that moment, we only appreciate the bad and we are unable to look up at everything that experience has brought us.
Helplessness
- Acceptance promotes in us a way of perceiving vital events where suffering ceases to matter: it is an attitude that involves embracing pain, giving it its space. Thanks to this, we can mobilize when looking for resources that teach us how to act next time.
- On the other hand, in resignation, suffering “does matter”; when we resign ourselves, the discomfort experienced demotivates us and reduces our energy, leaving us more exposed to other possible risks. It leaves us, in a certain way, “defenseless”, with insufficient resources to improve or to adapt. In the case of conformism, we are also talking about an attitude that brings us closer to defenselessness, because it does not promote a search for resources in us, as acceptance does.
Consequences of each attitude
Remember: accepting implies assuming a reality, integrating it into our life trajectory. It implies letting go of the expectations we had of something and assuming that reality is what it is. But it is a healthy attitude, of change, that motivates us to continue advancing because it helps us to close a stage.
On the other hand, settling for something leaves us, in a certain way, paralyzed, and carries a negative emotion in the face of that acceptance that, in reality, we did not want. The same happens with resignation, an attitude that involves accepting something with which we do not agree, not to obtain calm or peace of mind, but rather to avoid disappointing or for fear of not achieving what we really want, for example.