Acceptance

Acceptance is, at least for me, the holy grail of fighting Aspergers. It towers light years above anything else I've learned or tried my whole life, and if I could only learn one thing to use against my AS, this would be it.

Acceptance is a mindset that is formed through experience, practice, and devotion. Acceptance is one of the hardest things to master in life, but also one of the most useful. It is possible, just not easy. But when has beating up Aspergers ever been easy.

Forming a mindset of acceptance, will help with any number of problems that you may encounter in life, but for the sake of explanation, I'll use Aspergers as an example.

Acceptance, is one part acknowledgement, and one part denial. It took me a while to understand it myself, but when I did, I came up with this.

You acknowledge something bad happened or is happening, but you deny it has any control over you. By deny, I mean you don't let the fact that you found out you have Aspergers in and of itself bother you.

The actual Aspergers symptoms may affect you, but the name doesn't have to. And for the symptoms, you can fight them, so don't get discouraged. That's the worst of things you could do.

By acknowledging that it really does stink to have Aspergers, and you do have it, you aren't ignoring any strong emotions. Ignoring things like this, may not always blow up in your face, but it's never good for you.

Acknowledging your feelings does not mean beating yourself up over having them, because in all honesty, it does suck to have Aspergers, and that feeling is justified. It just means facing those emotions in the eye and saying "Get away from me, you are useless, and I choose to ignore you."

You can't let dealing with strong emotions drag you into an emotional abyss though, which leads quite well into the second part of acceptance: denial. Denial in this context, means a refusal to let something affect you.

If that something happens to be depression or anger over having Aspergers, then denial is a good thing. Getting all bent out of shape over something you can't change won't do any good. After all, Aspergers is just a name.

The actual symptoms of AS may not be something you can fix simply through will power alone, but letting the name affect you won't help. I know I just said it one sentence ago, but I want to hammer it into your head, because it took me a long time to learn this.

After several years of not accepting my Aspergers, I eventually found a better way, acceptance, and ever since them I have been so much better with most of the symptoms, because I don't have negative emotions seething under the surface. If you get anything at all from this post at all, please let it be at least this:

Getting upset over a name won't help!!!!

Acceptance is truly the best tool to use in the war against Aspergers in my experience. Just remember acknowladgement and denial. This is Jordan from teenaspergers.blogspot.com signing off.