Acceptance: The First Step to Healing

• By candidasullivan
• March 4, 2025
• No Comments

Do you accept yourself and your circumstances?

For so many years, I fought against the reality of my life. I believed that the amniotic bands “shouldn’t” have attacked me. They shouldn’t have damaged my hands and made my life harder. I shouldn’t have to live with so many struggles and deal with the pain that results from it all.

Therefore, I felt like a victim of my life. We deny what is as long as we are in a should-or-shouldn’t mindset. And all that does is keep us in a cycle of pain that we can’t change.

The truth is that it did happen. I can argue about it all day, get mad at my circumstances, and live in a negative place with a victim mindset, but it won’t change what happened to me. However, it will change me. It will turn me into a bitter person.

As long as I have the mindset of a victim, I can’t overcome it. But when I turn my thoughts from “Why did this happen to me?” or “It shouldn’t have happened to me” to “How can I overcome this?” everything will change.

When we are ready to overcome our hardships and let go of the pain of the victim status, God will show up for us. We can’t have a victim mindset and an overcomer mindset simultaneously.

I used to believe that accepting my circumstances meant that I approved of what happened to me. But that’s not the case at all.

Acceptance means that we accept that it happened to us because it did. I can argue about it all day long, but the truth is that the amniotic bands attacked me. I have the scars to prove it. Regardless of my denial and resistance, I can’t change it.

Once we accept it, we can move forward, opening ourselves to new possibilities. When we surrender everything to God without resistance, He can show us how to heal and let go of the pain forever.

Healing means that pain is no longer attached to it. We can see things differently. When I realized that I could have died, but God blessed me to live, it changed everything for me. Now, I see my situation with gratitude instead of anger or grief.

However, I couldn’t do that mindset shift on my own. It took God.

God will sit with us in our pain, open our eyes to new ways of seeing things, and help us see that it all works together for our good. He can use our pain to help others and to create beautiful things. We just need to trust Him.

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