The Importance Of Accepting The Illness For The Process of Recovery

Accepting an illness for what it is can open the gates to recovery, especially for those dealing with mental health related problems.

Imagine having a cold but not accepting that you have a cold. You’ll be suffering from the symptoms, but without accepting a diagnosis, you’d have no course of action to follow to get better.

Of course, typically, people don’t have a hard time accepting most physical illnesses. The symptoms are very obvious, and a diagnosis is usually made following lab tests.

However, people often find it very hard to accept mental health-related illnesses.

Mental health can be very tricky to navigate through, and while we may often feel that our feelings, emotions, and reactions are temporary and normal—a therapist may feel otherwise.

And agreeing with their diagnosis about our mental health is often the first step on the road to recovery.

Without Acceptance, There Is No Change

Often, our mental health illnesses can put us in uncomfortable and emotionally painful situations. Poor mental health can also start affecting your physical health, making day-to-day life pretty difficult. Needless to say, such a life isn’t the ideal.

So, one reason why acceptance is crucial is that acceptance is the only way to trigger a change. Unless you accept your condition, you won’t be doing anything constructive about it, and that would result in a repeated pattern of self-destruction every day. Any real change is only possible with acceptance.

Acceptance Can Lead to Healing

It’s also important to keep in mind that mental health issues often have deep-rooted underlying causes such as childhood traumas or significant loss or a profoundly unsettling situation, and so on.

In order to get better, it’s important to accept the illness and its root causes and make peace with them. Denial will push bad memories into the recesses of your mind, only for them to come back to you in your darkest, lowest moments.

Once you accept what you’re going through and why you can begin the healing process by changing how you think and feel about certain people or situations. Of course, that will take a lot of hours of therapy and other efforts, but acceptance has to be the first step.

Acceptance Make It Easier for Others to Help You

Another reason why acceptance is so important is that it aids recovery in many indirect ways.

Illnesses, primarily mental health-related ones, require a whole team to come together for a successful recovery. This includes not only you and your mental health experts but also your friends and family.

Without support from your family and guidance from experts, you’re not likely to make it too far on the road to recovery. But they can only help you if you let them and accept your illness, to begin with.

And most importantly, acceptance is vital if you want to forge your way forward and start dreaming and hoping again.

If you want to learn more about accepting illnesses and what that means for recovery, you should read A Notebook of Love, written by Luis Trivino. He’s a war veteran with an inspiring story of battling not only the country’s enemies but also his inner demons.

Download the book and get inspired today!