A therapy session recently spotlighted how adult children of "gray divorce" carry grief long after their parents split later in life. In the story, a client named Olivia worked through years of unresolved pain with her therapist, Hughes, using a concept called radical acceptance.
Olivia had described feeling abandoned when family members on both sides of her parents' marriage moved on with their own lives, likening their exit to the parting of the Red Sea. Hughes shared a line from Toni Morrison, who described grief as having no bottom or top, only circles of sorrow. Olivia said the description matched her own experience exactly. She realized she had been grieving on repeat for years without naming it.
Hughes pointed out Olivia's resilience in still seeking healing despite the weight she carried. He brought in the Serenity Prayer from Alcoholics Anonymous, built around accepting what cannot be changed. But Olivia pushed back. She said acceptance felt like giving up, like agreeing to something she never wanted. She didn't want to approve of her parents' divorce. She just wanted to survive it.
That's where Hughes offered a distinction that reframed the whole conversation. The word "accept" traces back to Latin roots meaning "to take to oneself" or "to receive," not "to agree." Radical acceptance isn't about approval. It's about facing what already happened without fighting it. Fifteen years earlier, Olivia couldn't have absorbed the reality of her parents' divorce and everything that came with it. As an adult, she now had the capacity to hold that truth differently, to open her hands to it instead of keeping them clenched in resistance.
Olivia responded physically. She turned her palms upward on her lap. Her dog, Friede, rested his head between her open hands. A few minutes later, she said she felt a kind of serenity she hadn't understood before, even though she'd heard the prayer many times. She described a shift from fighting the past to simply acknowledging it happened.
What I'd tell a client about this
I coach people through the moments life throws at them, and this session captures something I see constantly: the difference between agreeing with what happened and simply receiving that it happened. Clients often think acceptance means they have to be okay with a painful outcome. They don't. Acceptance just means you stop spending your energy fighting a fact that's already settled. Olivia didn't need to approve of her parents' choices. She needed to stop closing her hands around the pain and instead let it exist without a daily battle attached to it.
That's the lesson worth carrying into any hard chapter, whether it's a divorce in your family, a job loss, or a relationship that ended badly. You can feel the grief fully and still stop resisting the reality underneath it. Those two things are not in conflict. In fact, loosening your grip on resistance is often what makes room for the grief to finally move instead of loop.
One thing to try this week
Pick one fact from your life that you've been resisting, something you know is true but still fight against internally. It might be a relationship that ended, a decision someone else made, or a change you didn't choose. Sit somewhere quiet, turn your palms face up on your lap the way Olivia did, and simply say the fact out loud without adding "but" or "it shouldn't have happened." Notice what shifts in your body. You're not agreeing with it. You're just finally receiving it.
Grief doesn't move in a straight line, and neither does healing. But as this session shows, sometimes the smallest physical gesture, open hands instead of closed fists, can mark the start of a real shift. You don't have to like what happened. You just have to stop pretending it didn't.
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