![]() But we can change how we respond to this fact. We must pray for the ability to accept this. In early recovery, the Serenity Prayer can take on a very simple meaning: we cannot change the fact that we have the disease of alcoholism or addiction. Often what we find we need to change is ourselves. If there is something we can change but we are afraid to, this prayer can give us the courage to do so. If we are trying to change the impossible, we need to pray for acceptance. In any situation where we find that we have lost our serenity, we can ask ourselves if there is something we need to accept or something we can change. The prayer can be a calming force if we use it daily. This single sentence prayer contains six important principles of AA: Higher Power, serenity, acceptance, courage, wisdom, and change. Saying the prayer is a powerful experience that can give us peace and balance even when we are stressed, angry, or frustrated. ![]() It is a good practice to say the Serenity Prayer often and to keep reminders of it around you. And even in the most arduous circumstances, two choices are almost always available to us: where to place our attention and what action to take next. Ultimately, courage is this willingness and capacity to choose. If Frankl could make choices in the desolation of a concentration camp, then we can start making them in our daily lives. Others committed acts of daily heroism, everything from sharing a last crust of bread to caring for the sick. Some betrayed their fellow inmates and secretly allied with German guards. Moreover, even in the humiliation of the camps, prisoners still had choices about how to act. Frankl concluded that everything can be taken from us except “the last of human freedoms-to choose one’s own attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”įrankl noted that the prisoners most likely to survive were those who hadĪ vivid sense of purpose in life. This is the quality that psychiatrist Viktor Frankl displayed during his incarceration in Nazi concentration camps. Doing this moves us on to another quality described in the Serenity Prayer: courage. However, we can influence our feelings through two other factors we can control-our thinking and our actions. But on a deeper level, the prayer points to a fact about our inner life: we cannot directly control our feelings. On one level, the prayer is about learning to accept external circumstances that we cannot change. Either way, the Serenity Prayer speaks wisdom to addicts and non-addicts alike. On the other hand, for some alcoholics or addicts like us, the need to control may be a response to the unmanageability caused by our out-of-control use of drugs. Ironically, the quest for absolute control leads to misery, which may contribute to our substance use disorders. This strategy, too, is doomed to failure. Second, we are trying to control our own feelings by medicating them with mood-altering chemicals. First, we are trying to control the behavior of others, a strategy that we may cling to despite its repeated failure. This hankering for control has two aspects. ![]() ![]() What we often seek to achieve, as alcoholics and addicts, is a sense of absolute control-one that is simply not possible for human beings. In the book Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill described the core trait of people like us who are alcoholics or addicts: self-centeredness, or “self-will run riot.” He further described the alcoholic or addict as “an actor who wants to run the whole show is forever trying to arrange the lights, the ballet, the scenery and the rest of the players in his own way.” Bill’s solution: “First of all, we had to quit playing God.” In its message about acceptance, it echoes insights from Bill W., cofounder of AA. It’s been a fixture at AA meetings and in the Grapevine ever since.ĭespite its brevity, the Serenity Prayer accurately expresses a central problem of addiction and prescribes a timeless solution. There it was credited to theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Many AA members were first exposed to the prayer in 1948, when it was quoted in the Grapevine, an AA periodical. It has been variously attributed to an ancient Sanskrit text, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Saint Francis of Assisi, and others. There are several versions of the prayer, each with a slightly different wording, and there are conflicting accounts of its origin. The Serenity Prayer meshes perfectly with the spirituality of the Twelve Steps. In fact, the prayer is widely embraced as a succinct statement of a path to sanity and sobriety. Those of us who are members of a Twelve Step program such as Alcoholics Anonymous have enthusiastically embraced the Serenity Prayer almost from the moment we discovered it. “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” ![]()
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