“Connect with the crisis”

Accepting a crisis and “connecting with it” means finding a way to deal with the difficult or painful aspects of life during challenging times without closing your eyes to them. It represents an important step in overcoming a crisis.

We all have our own strategies for dealing with a crisis. People often tend to deny crises until they become so big that they can no longer be ignored. Or we run away, lose ourselves in blind actionism, or perhaps even fight against them.

ACT — Acceptance and Commitment Therapy — is an approach based on consciously integrating and embracing the difficult or painful aspects of life. The unique value of this approach lies in the fact that acceptance includes an active component. It is not about passively enduring painful states. On the contrary, it involves a conscious decision, a shift in attitude. I can choose to accept the crisis and integrate it into my life. Instead of investing energy in repeatedly fighting against the pain or confronting it with self-reproach, acceptance opens up a completely different mode of being.

Let’s be honest — we all know these moments. We sense that something is becoming more and more unbalanced, and we desperately try to hold on to it and manage it as quickly and quietly as possible with our individual coping strategies. And this is exactly where the shift in thinking happens: whatever is off balance here is calling for a pause and a moment of awareness. It’s less about figuring out the “why” and diving deep into root cause analysis. Instead, this mode refers to a state of awareness — a compassionate and observing gaze at oneself — without judgment.

The attempt to banish discomfort from our lives as quickly as possible, if it works at all, can only succeed temporarily. The fact that something painful or difficult has entered my life is something I cannot change — no matter how much energy I invest in fighting it. That energy is wasted.

If we manage to direct this energy toward ourselves instead — to stop pushing away or avoiding the pain — an important first step toward acceptance can take place. This is about adopting an attitude that turns toward inner processes, observes them, and develops an interest in the uncomfortable. What is really behind it? What does the pain need? What makes the pain grow? What soothes it?

Tom Pinkall describes acceptance as a skill that we can cultivate, understanding it as a dynamic resource rather than a static one. Just like meditation, it can be seen as a muscle that we can train.

And if it seems impossible to accept a crisis, we may still be able to acknowledge it as something painful or difficult — or even honor it.