How Might The Serenity Prayer Guide You Today?

Invaluable guidance packed into three little lines.

The Serenity Prayer, as it’s usually called, is said to have been written by Reinhold Niebuhr, a Protestant theologian, in the 1930s. In the early 1940s, the 12-step group Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) began using it in meetings. These days, it’s recited at the beginning and/or end of most AA meetings.

Let’s start by addressing the “prayer” aspect of the Serenity Prayer. Just as there are those people who don’t want to join AA because of the centrality of a “higher power” in AA philosophy, there are people who might avoid the Serenity Prayer because they are atheists or agnostics.

These lines don’t have to be a prayer, though. You can take “God” out and call it the Serenity Poem, or something entirely different, if you want to. The important thing is that it’s a helpful summation of a principle that offers guidance for pretty much any area of life.

Just as the Serenity Prayer can exist without referring to God, it can exist without Alcoholics Anonymous. Many people learn it through AA and other 12-step groups, but it’s not exclusive to those groups.

This prayer is one of many pieces of wisdom promoted by AA that anyone can apply to their own lives, whether they’re an alcoholic/ addict/ codependent/ Adult Child of an Alcoholic or not.

Let’s look at the first line of the prayer again: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change…”

I’m pretty sure I’ve never met a person who had problems with alcohol who didn’t also have control issues. My idea of “control issues” is different than what many people think of, though. When I think about someone having control issues, I don’t picture an evil puppet master pulling people’s strings. Instead, I picture someone whose life has felt out of control for as long as they can remember; they’re just trying to find safety and personal agency.

Problematic drinking often begins as an attempt to control or cope with something like anxiety, stress, traumatic memories, or relationship problems. It’s only a temporary fix, though, because drinking just kicks the can down the road; at some point, a person has to stop drinking. When they do, they realize that the original problem is still there, but now they have a drinking problem on top of it.

It’s ironic that people drink to gain control, and then drinking takes control away from them.

The most frequent targets of control issues are other people. Some members of AA add a couple of words to the Serenity Prayer to address this. This is their version: