The Serenity Prayer makes me uneasy. It shouldn’t, right? It’s a fifteen-second prayer, over in a flash, and it doesn’t have a lot of embedded theology like the Lord’s Prayer does. For that reason, a lot of people think it’s a good prayer for agnostics or people who describe themselves as “spiritual, not religious.” Even atheists have less to contend with in the Serenity Prayer than they do in the Lord’s Prayer and in six of the twelve steps. Just snip the first word, and the rest of the prayer will be fine. After all, who could object to a plea for serenity, courage, and wisdom?
Nonetheless, I do question the view of recovery implicit in the Serenity Prayer. In a nutshell, the prayer inculcates habits of mind that obstruct the habits of mind I need to maintain a sobriety that is strong, vital and productive. And, because I have said the prayer over and over again, in thousands of AA and NA meetings, I now have to think carefully about what I told myself every time I bowed my head and said the words, “God, grant me the serenity….”
One thing I told myself was to divide my reality into two categories: things I can change and things I can’t. The “can change” category is undoubtedly smaller than the “can’t change” category, though the difference will vary with a person’s resources, abilities, and ambition. Bill Gates has more things in the “can change” category than death row inmate Billy Ray Waldon. For most of us, the majority of things in the “can change” column are personal—thoughts, habits, and behavior. The steps of AA further clarify that many are moral, the “character defects” that members must identify and strive to eradicate.
In other words, the serenity prayer suggests from the beginning that there’s a fair amount of my life that needs changing—not just the fact that I drink too much but other things as well—then it charges me to change those things. There’s no space to protest: (1) maybe not so much about me needs changing or (2) maybe it would be better not to change some things I could possibly change. I’m just supposed to identify changeable things and change them. I think that’s odd.
The next wrinkle is that I require courage to make all those changes, not ingenuity or inspiration or compassion or some other quality. The fact that I need courage to change says a lot about what the prayer thinks change is. What does a person normally need courage for? Marching into battle. Jumping out of an airplane. Giving a speech. Facing a life-threatening disease. Courage is necessary when you’re fighting something: an enemy soldier, a virulent pathogen, your own fear. The need for courage says that change is fundamentally combative.
Change is me fighting my defects and my fear, which are too strong for me without supernatural assistance. Praying for the courage to change is saying:
(1) I need to change
(2) change is adversarial
(3) I need help to cope with the struggle.
After mumbling the serenity prayer a few thousand times, I came to reject all three implied claims. I came to believe three different things:
(1) Aside from the drinking, I don’t actually need to change that much. Though far from perfect, I’m okay. In the moral language of AA, I have a good share of virtues and pretty minor vices. However snippy I can be about issues in print, I treat other people with kindness and respect. Sure, if pressed, I could tally up a good-sized list of “character defects,” but when I do, I sometimes find that what needs to change is not me but the culture. And sometimes what needs to change is the need to change, which need so often prompts me to regard a neutral or mixed trait as a “defect.”
I’ll give you an example. In real life, I’m a bit of a doormat. I reflexively take care of other people, even when doing so hurts me. That’s something I could change and something many people believe I should change. But, on balance, I’m okay with it. I like to help people, I like people who help people, and I think the world would be a better place if more people liked to help people. I’m also really good in an emergency because I don’t experience any hesitation; I just jump in. If you’ve just broken your leg in a motorcycle crash, and you’re lying on the side of the freeway with your leg bone sticking out of your pants and traffic rushing by, you want me to be in that traffic. Okay, you’d prefer a doctor or EMT, but if you can’t have a medical professional, you want me because I’ll pull over without thinking, call 911, kneel between you and the traffic, and keep you calm. Like many traits, this reflex is both defect and asset, and I’m comfortable with the duality.
(2) My second insight is that treating unwanted traits as adversaries is the worst possible way to change them. Battling them just energizes and entrenches them, making them harder to dislodge or modify. This insight is huge! For me, the only way to change bad habits or errant ways of thinking is to focus on them with compassionate awareness.
It’s amazing, actually. Habits I fought for years faded when I stopped fighting them and just paid a certain kind of attention to them. For example, I always craved sweets but didn’t like the way sugar made me feel so I preferred not to eat it. My ambivalence felt like a battle: me versus my sugar craving. I regarded the craving as a clever and resourceful insurgent force that had to be suppressed, and, in so doing, gave that craving a lot of energy. And I expended a lot of energy fighting it. When I stopped regarding my desire as an internal enemy and just looked at it, deeply and without judgment, it weakened and began to fade.
In short, the potential for change is in acceptance, rather than resistance, so, if I were going to pray, I’d ask to be granted the serenity to accept the things I can change. Paradoxical, I know, but that’s how it is for me.
(3) My third insight is that only I can cultivate this serenity. Nobody is going to grant it to me; it’s a skill I have to acquire through practice.
Let me pause to stipulate that I’m not making an argument against the existence of God here. I don’t know if the universe has a power or principle that could be called by that name. Studying mystical theology, I’ve seen some very abstract, very elegant definitions of God, so I have an open mind on the subject. I don’t, however, relate to the “guy upstairs” version of God, the divine concierge who gives and withholds and plans every detail of my life. In other words, I have no problem with the word “God” in the serenity prayer; it’s the “grant me” part I question.
I cultivate serenity through mindfulness and the practice of meditation. I work at it. If I don’t work at it, I don’t have serenity. The situation really is that simple, for me.
The serenity prayer turned out to be part of a larger problem I had with recovery culture: the way it set me against myself. Recovery was an endless battle: “I” and my rag-tag militia of undernourished virtues warring with “my disease” and its vast army of allied vices. The battle was relentless, exhausting. It is exhausting to fight yourself all the time; you’re giving energy and resources to both sides.
When I finally got really sober, it was because I stopped fighting. I decided to accept everything about myself, including my cravings, my defects, and my stinkin’ thinkin’. I just looked at what was there, not to inventory it, but to know it as fully as I could. I tried not to judge it but to cultivate an attitude of compassionate curiosity. The only reason I knew to try these things—or had the capacity to try them—was from practicing meditation.
So, yes, I practice mindfulness, and for me it is the best way to stay sober. But meditation-based mindfulness is only half of what works for me; the other half is what I might call cultural mindfulness. The more closely I observe my impulses and ideas, the more aware I become of the influences that shape them, which are both psychological and cultural. For years, I tried not to indulge my inner cultural critic in dealing with my addiction. I was told that such criticism was, at best, a distraction that would not help me get sober. At worst, it was a “defense mechanism” that would actively worsen my addiction. I’m ashamed to admit that, for several years, I accepted the idea that there was no practical value in investigating how I (and the people around me) understood drinking and not drinking. I accepted the relative insignificance of media myths and marketing strategies and the politics of substance use and abuse.
One day I realized the insanity of that acceptance: these cultural constructs are what my brain accepts as “truth.” These constructs shape what I see, what I half-see, and what I completely fail to see. They shape my feelings and my relationships with other people and my experience of sobriety and the likelihood that I will maintain it. The notion that there’s a psychological realm over here and a cultural realm over there is preposterous; they create each other. Worse is the notion that, of the two “realms,” the psychological matters more, which stems from the equally benighted notion that emotions matter more than ideas, feeling more than thinking. They’re all relevant.
More precisely, they’re relevant in different proportions and different ways to different people. If there’s one overriding problem with recovery culture, it’s adherence to a one-size-fits-all model of sobriety that hurts more people than it helps. It then compounds the harm by blaming its failures on those it has failed. Fortunately, the internet allows us to share information that does not conform to dominant models, so we can all contribute to the evolution of alternatives and to communicating them to people in need.
May we all develop the serenity to change the things we should.
Thank you for publishing this. I have been agnostic and areligious for most of my adult life. After doing their best to raise me in the Catholic faith, my parents were disappointed upon telling them I was agnostic when I was 26 years old. After trying many different combinations on various search engines to find criticisms of the Serenity Prayer, I finally found your column as the fifth entry with the search term “Atheists dislike serenity prayer”. I have a mood disorder and a past psychologist gave me a list of the 12 steps despite her knowing I was agnostic and did not drink, use recreational drugs, smoke, or gamble. By the way, I do not consider myself better than those having such difficulties. Recently, my psychiatrist suggested the Serenity Prayer several times when I told him that much of my depressed and anxious mood is mostly environmental due to the repressive rightwing political climate, climate change, and having to survive on governmental financial support. Being told that I have to accept I am powerless in such matters is not self-empowering. Human beings create societies. It just takes a lot of prolonged effort to change them. I would rather resist and defy than acquiesce. I do not need an “imaginary higher power” to give me courage. I definitely agree that self-empowerment and self-acceptance are much more helpful.
Great comment, Mark, thank you! I’m not surprised that two clinicians pushed 12-step material on you, even though you’re agnostic AND not struggling with a substance use disorder. Since the 1980s, a lot of 12-step material has been embraced by the therapeutic community, not to mention self-help literature and, more generally, popular discussion of mental health issues. Partly that’s sheer desperation, a lack of effective treatment options, and partly it’s the insistence of 12-steppers that “the program” improved every facet of their lives, making them better, happier, more successful human beings that they were, even before alcohol (or whatever) took them down. If you spend any time around a 12-step program, you’ll meet hundreds of people who say they’re grateful, not just for their recovery, but for their affliction because, without it, they would never have encountered the program. So some therapists conclude that it’s worth trying on all patients, regardless of their diagnosis.
It’s also possible that they think, as a lapsed Catholic, you may still retain some of the religious architecture you were brought up with and thus might find 12-step ideas more congenial than someone raised by atheists. But the main appeal of 12-step, I think, is that it “privatizes” a lot of suffering caused by social and economic injustice. For example, statistics clearly demonstrate that alcohol use disorders increase as income decreases, yet AA insists “alcoholism is an equal-opportunity disease,” as the media publish another mug shot of a celebrity arrested for DUI. That way we never have to ask “Why are so many people’s lives so intolerable that they’ll do anything to feel okay for a few hours, even hurt themselves and the people they love?”
Similarly, we really don’t want to ask why mental health issues have become so prevalent–unless it’s to ask and answer our own question with a soothing bromide, such as that recently offered by Psychologist Lucy Foulkes, who said it’s because we now talk so much about mental health in schools that children feel left out if they can’t claim to have anxiety, depression, or some other mood disorder. Yes, folks, someone with a Ph.D. really said that! Anyway, the world has no shortage of academics peddling comforting half-truths to sell books, so I shouldn’t pick on poor Lucy, except to remind us all to be suspicious when the solution to a large, complex problem is “talk about it less.”
Anyway, I agree with you that resistance and defiance are the path forward, the only path that can change the social and economic structures that cause so much of our misery. At the same time, we also have to scratch out a little peace for ourselves right now, and the only place we can do it is in this broken world. I don’t think that means acquiescing to injustice; I think it means exercising discernment about what we can and can’t control in this moment, doing what we can (ideally in solidarity with others), and letting the rest go–maybe not forever, but for now. At least that’s my solution, and I really hope you find some of your own because I really like the way you think and appreciate that you shared some of that thinking with me!