I recently had a heated discussion with another fellow about the recovery method I am using. It was all done via text, and I am not a good communicator even by word of my mouth. I very regularly omit assumptions that I am making. Partly as a result of this, I found myself with a 12-step guy quite angry at me.
The man said that he was forced to end the conversation because it was endangering his sexual sobriety and he had to put himself first. This is the correct behavior in SA.
Then he posted a message on my thread saying "you are a great guy, and I wish you the best." This is "taking the actions of love." This is supposed to take away the resentment.
After that he wrote another post that said what I said was totally insane, and I must be in complete denial. You can see here that taking the actions of love worked to some extent, because the man found a possible reason why I could be wrong but he didn't have to hate me for it: I was out of my mind.
Then another user pointed out that maybe they misunderstood. This is an example of mindfulness. Meaning: my emotions are a result of how I understand reality, I literally make them myself. After that there was some informational questions back and forth, and the fellow calmed down. Once he had more data he concluded that I am not even out of my mind.
On my side the experience was completely different. I never felt anger. The reason is because since every day I remind myself of well-known thinking errors, I catch myself (most of the time) when I jumping to conclusions and when I tell myself that something "should" be a certain way. Conclusions that you jump to are not a basis for action, and things never "should" be any other way than the way they actually are. In fact, understanding where the other guy was coming from, I thought he should act exactly the way he was behaving.
I think this was a useful example of the difference between the different experiences that you can get with acceptance and mindfulness, respectively.