I personally don't think CBT is especially good for helping anybody accept tough realities. In my opinion, it encourages optimism rather than realism. In fact, I sometimes think people are encouraged to fool themselves about hard realities via mental gymnastics with CBT. Maybe that's helpful for people who are very emotional and not very logical, and therefore need to be taught methods to distinguish facts from emotions. I don't know. But I definitely wouldn't have thought CBT would help with accepting hard realities. I've always heard it been billed as something that would help someone realize their fears/beliefs weren't true. I could of course be wrong.