Radical Acceptance In A Snowy Season

In this episode, we reflect on radical acceptance during a snowy holiday week, tracing how clarity can exist without closure and how the body registers truth as a small release. Through divorce, loss, music, and daily boundaries, we practice naming facts without judgment and choosing calm over the why loop.

• setting the scene and why old stories still matter
• radical acceptance as nervous system regulation
• ending the why loop and choosing clarity
• grief, death, and listing facts without judgment
• love as necessary but not sufficient for change
• incompatible definitions of peace in relationships
• using restraint and music to model acceptance
• practical reflection to start daily acceptance
• holiday sign-off with warmth and self-kindness

As always, you can give me a follow at Life's the Blogca on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok

Transcript

Snow, Holidays, And Setting Intent

Speaker 1 0:05

Hey there, welcome back to Lightest the Vlog. Only six more days till Christmas. Are the kids excited? Do you have any special plans? Mine's gonna be pretty quiet. It's going to be filled with family and friends and lots of food and a lot of cookies because I've been baking a lot lately. A friend phoned me the other day and complimented me on my previous podcast. And I spoke to her and I said, You know, it sounds like I keep repeating myself over and over and over again about my past relationships. But the thing is, every topic that I bring up or every subject, it's all relational to those relationships. And those relationships, when you're going through pet therapy, can often have different meetings and realizations that help you grow and learn to find somebody out there or to even just learn to love yourself in a more healthier fashion. It's what you accept, what you choose. So all of my topics, I'm you're sure you're listening going, oh my god, not him again or him again. But I do want to articulate that healing isn't linear, even though I hate that line, and that sometimes giving examples can make you think about your relationships a little bit deeper. They may not be aligned, but in something that I say, and today it's going to be about radical radical acceptance, that if I say something that resonates with you, and maybe perhaps you could dig a little deeper into your life and love and how you handle relationships in the matter we're speaking about in each podcast episode. Anyway, here we go. I hope you enjoy snowing here tonight. It was quite bad around two or three o'clock today with the wind, but I just heard my neighbor say that it's not too bad out now. And I'm preparing to go down to Port Frank's tomorrow, so that's a good thing. And but if you're out and about, be safe. I suppose tonight would be a good night if you don't want to do anything, it's a good excuse, I suppose. But the roads are still busy here and lots of time to get some your Christmas shopping done nonetheless. Before we begin, I want to be clear about how I'm sharing this story. What you're about to hear is not every detail, and it's not meant to be. It's the version that reflects where I am now. Not everything I lived through then. This episode is about integration, not exposure, and what acceptance looks like when the story doesn't feel doesn't fully close. This is a space where we talk honestly about healing, grief, relationships, and the songs that help us make sense of what we've lived through. Every story has a song, and every song has a story. Later on, I'm going to spend some time inside a country song called Space Cowboy that captures radical acceptance in real life. Not the definition, the nervous system version. The moment when you stop fighting reality and start telling yourself the truth. If you ever love someone deeply and still had to let go, if you ever stayed longer because it felt safer than leaving, if you ever realized that clarity doesn't always come with closure, then radical acceptance in this episode is for you. In 2021, I wrote a blog post called Radical Acceptance After Divorce. Three years had passed since my divorce or separation, we never got divorced. Yet it still felt immediate. Lawyers, school, rebuilding my life, anxiety that lived in my body constantly. And yet, even then, I wrote something that still stops me. I'm good now. I'm happier now. My smile is original most of the time. That sentence wasn't optimism, it was regulation. It was the first time I noticed that healing didn't mean joy, it meant calm. Looking back, I can see that I was learning acceptance without calling it that. I wasn't healed. But I was no longer fighting reality every second of the day. You see, for a long time, my mind lived in one place. Why? Why didn't he try? Why didn't he talk it through? Why didn't he fight for the family we built? And really those questions felt responsible. They felt like how you process something fairly. But here's what I learned. Why can become a form of resistance. It keeps you busy without moving you forward. It feels active while you keep being stuck. A friend finally said something that ended the loop while we were out for lunch. Trina, it's because you didn't want to. That sentence didn't bring peace. It brought a lot of grief. But it also brought clarity. And clarity is where acceptance begins. In regards to my ex-husband, there are so many parts of this story, I will never know. It still bothers me to this day. In the deep dark night. Radical acceptance required me to stop chasing missing pieces. What I'm sharing here is not a complete record of events, it's an honest account of how I learned to live without answers. And that matters. Because sometimes healing isn't about knowing more. It's about needing less. A few weeks ago in therapy, I was asked to name the situation hardest to accept. And for me for me, that was my ex-husband's death. I'm not gonna share the graphic details at this time. What matters isn't how it happened, but what came after. The thought that kept looping was simple. This shouldn't have happened. That sentence carried shock, anger, helplessness, but it also kept my nervous system locked in vigilance. When I was asked how resisting reality increased my suffering, the answer surprised me. I'm awake all day long, even when I'm sleeping. Hyper-vigilant, unable to rest, unable to settle. Fighting reality didn't protect me, it exhausted me. Then came the hardest part. Naming the facts without judgment. I found out he took addictive drugs while having Crohn's disease. I found out some horrible truths. I went crazy.

Speaker 7:59

I went crazier trying to save him. And then I decided to stop.

Naming Facts Without Judgment

Space Cowboy - Every Song has a Story.

Speaker 1 8:11

No interpretation, no emotional padding, radical acceptance doesn't ask you to like the facts. It asks you to stop rewriting them. The acceptance statement I return to is this. When I say that, the tension I carry in my lower back softens. It doesn't disappear. It softens. And that's how acceptance shows up in the body. Not relief, release. Radical acceptance is a practice that you have to do daily, and it is very difficult when trying to reason with so many under unanswered questions, heartbreaking loss. But if you look at it as the reality of, instead of what if, the practice does become easier. I I can testify to that. And radical acceptance of my ex-partner meant being honest about what was actually true, not just what I hoped was true. He knew he was in a safe and loving environment. My kids cared for him deeply, and they still do. There was no silent treatment. There was no shutting him out. Love was present, stability was present, safety was present. But I also came to see the trauma and abuse he carried long before he ever entered our lives. Not in a way that made him a villain, but in a way that made him feel made calm feel unfamiliar and steadiness feel uncomfortable. And when the chaos settled, our nights of drinking. I wanted a life that didn't rely on emotional volatility to feel alive. And he still gravitated towards drama and judgment. Not because he didn't care, but because that was the emotional language he understood as love. We couldn't coexist wanting two different definitions of peace. No amount of safety could replace work he hadn't chosen. No amount of love could override patterns he hadn't questioned. No amount of patience could make him incompatibly disappear. Radical acceptance meant letting go of the belief that love alone would be enough. It meant choosing clarity over hope. So as you can see here, I'm very defined with my ex-partner. I know exactly what happened. I hold no guilt because I look at it as it was, as it is. However, with my ex-husband, I'm still grappling through it. I'm still trying to move forward. I have so many questions. That was 30 years of my life. And it's like a ball of yarn in a gazillion knots that you want to unravel because you want to sew again. Or you want to knit again, excuse me, not sew. But, you know, you want to unravel this, and there's some things that you just absolutely can't unravel. So when you get to those knots, just know that you have to look at it and go, what is the reality of this? Yes, I can look it back at other things that bother me, but with each and every knot that you undo, look at it and state the reality of the situation rather than why did he do this? Why did he do this? Why did he do this? Or why did this happen? Why did this you know it's it's such a challenge and it radical acceptance is very challenging, like I said previous to this. But if you keep at it, it gets easier. There's many situations like my landlord, I can easily define the reality in this situation. He wants me to be his little daughter bitch living in his apartment. That's it. He wants me to obey. But I'm a 53-year-old woman who has a life of her own, and I don't need a landlord telling me what to do. But the reality is of it is, he wants me to be his daughter bitch. And then really, when I look at that, there's so many scenarios of his own doing that's making him do what he's doing. So I can handle it in a more business-like fashion, because I know that situation is a reality, but I can handle it and take it to the tendency board and say, father's stalk, father's watch, father's do this, but I'm not gonna say that to the tendency board. But really, at the end of the day, the reality is if you just back off and let a person live the way they want to live, things would be great. But he wants me to be his daughter bitch. You cow the window while I look at you.

Speaker 13:34

Say and I don't know what be like saying I'm just getting blue.

The Transiberian Orchestra - The Lost Christmas Eve

Speaker 1 13:40

Casey Musgrave's Space Cowboy is a country song that captures this entire process better than most therapy language ever could. This song isn't about anger, it's about restraint. There's no begging, there's no bargaining, no demand for explanation. That's what makes it a radical acceptance in musical form. The nare doesn't try to convince the other person to stay. She doesn't rewrite herself smaller, she doesn't harden into bitterness, she sees reality. You want to roam, you want chaos, you want movement without grounding, and I want peace. The song doesn't say either of those desires are wrong. It simply acknowledges that they can't coexist. That's the maturity. This song captures the moment when you stop arguing with reality and start responding to it. You can hear the acceptance in the restraint, in the lack of accusation, and the refusal to perform pain. This isn't resignation, it's self-respect. And since it's Christmas, and I saw this performance last year. There is a story by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra called The Lost Christmas Eve. And reflecting on last year and reading the story over again on their website helped me understand this pattern. It's about a man who experiences devastating loss early in life, then spends decades emotionally frozen. He lives, but he doesn't fully inhabit his life. He keeps one foot in the past and one foot in the present. That split is what keeps him stuck. Resistance doesn't just hurt, it delays living. That's the parallel. Not the story, the pattern. Acceptance restores movement. And before I close, I want to offer a reflection. This isn't therapy. It's a practice that helped me stay grounded. My mind wanted to keep negotiating with the past. And believe me, it still does. As I say, it takes practice. Bring to mind one situation you're struggling to accept.

Speaker 16:38

Name the facts. Notice where your body tightens. Ask yourself, how am I fighting this reality?

Keep Your Feet Committed to the New and Radically Accept

Speaker 1 16:51

And how is that fight costing me? Then offer yourself one sentence. It can be this is what happened. I don't have to like it to accept it. I can still move forward. That's radical acceptance. I saw a quote recently that stopped me in my tracks. Yep, it was on Instagram. You can't have one foot in your old life and one foot in your new life and expect change. You have to fully commit to the new life. And that is radical acceptance. It doesn't erase the past. It stops living divided. Cheering selectively doesn't mean I'm withholding, it means I'm honoring where I am now. Radical acceptance isn't something you master. It's something you return to. Again and again. Acceptance doesn't mean indifference. It means choosing to live. And that is not weakness. That is strength. So as I close off 2025, because I really doubt I'll be doing a podcast between now and Christmas, because I plan on having a lot of gatherings starting tomorrow and ending on Boxing Day. Where I'll never be alone. And I hope that you, my listeners, my 17 fans on Spotify, oh 18, excuse me, my friend Shauna just uh subscribe. Have an amazing Christmas. Have lots of family and friends around you. Have great tidings and much prosperity, health, and happiness in 2026. May you get everything you always wished for. May you have joy, maybe you have peace, may you have love. May you have that person beside you every night when you go to bed that you can say I love you too. If you don't, just make sure you get in bed yourself and tell yourself that you love yourself because you matter the most. As always, you can give me a follow at Life's the Blogca on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. I'm getting a little better with those videos, and I'm gonna see how good I can do uh over the holidays while I get a little bit of time to reset. Anyway, take care of yourself. Happy holidays.