take one's medicine

1. Put up with unpleasantness, learn one's lesson. For example, After failing math, he had to take his medicine and go to summer school. This idiom uses medicine in the sense of “a bitter-tasting remedy.” [Mid-1800s]

Example Sentences

Sugar-coated new psychedelic pop, possibly advocating remembering to take one's medicine at regular intervals when feeling under the weather.

From The Guardian

Related Words

• apologize 
• redeem