Welcome to the Emancipate Your Mind podcast.

I'm your host, certified religious transition and trauma recovery coach, Terry Hales.

I help people step out of the shadows of religious fear and shame and embrace their

authentic selves with love and empathy.

If you're ready to throw off the shackles of learned binary thinking and explore

a more nuanced approach to life, this is your playground.

Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Emancipate Your Mind podcast.

This week we are talking about a topic that has come up in so many conversations on social media.

And it even came up in our conversation in the live discussion this past week.

And I really want to address it because I think there's a lot of misunderstanding around the topic of acceptance, what it is, what it isn't, and how we can both

receive more acceptance and give more acceptance to others.

Maya Angelou said, when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

And this is sort of the basis of acceptance.

When we accept someone, we allow ourselves to believe the reality of who they are.

Some of these realities are going to leave us feeling warm and fuzzy and connected to this person,

and other realities may leave us feeling annoyed or frustrated or hurt. The paradox of human

relationships is that we may experience both kinds of realities even with the same person. At its heart,

accepting someone is understanding that they have the right

to be their own person, to have their own personality, their own thoughts, feelings, beliefs,

and opinions. They have the right to be working through their own stuff in their own time.

They get to choose how they show up in the world and what patterns of

behavior feel best for them. And when we accept someone else, we stop trying to overtly or

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