Acceptance often becomes the topic for a Discussion meeting in Twelve Step recovery groups.
While not expressly included in the Steps themselves, acceptance is seen as an important tool in recovery.
Click Play to Watch Gregg’s Video About the Importance of Acceptance in Twelve Step Recovery:
Accepting the Things We Cannot Change
Twelve Step meetings often begin with the Serenity Prayer, asking for the serenity to “accept the things we cannot change.”
In the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, this gets turned around in the famous quotation from page 449 often heard in meetings:
“I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing, or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment.”
In other words, in the prayer, we ask for serenity in order to accept, while in the Big Book, we accept in order to gain serenity.
The Answer to All Your Problems
This Big Book acceptance can then become the answer to the “spiritual axiom” contained in the Tenth Step discussion in AA’s Twelve and Twelve:
“It is a spiritual axiom that every time we are disturbed, no matter what the cause, there is something wrong with us.”
The Big Book leads us into the discussion on acceptance as “the answer to all my problems,” by explaining this relationship between disturbance and acceptance:
“When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing, or situation – some fact of my life – unacceptable to me….”
So, following the spiritual axiom, when I am disturbed, what is wrong with me is my lack of acceptance of some fact of my life. The solution to the disturbance then becomes acceptance of the people, place, things, and situations of my life.
Change the Things We Can
The Big Book notes that this acceptance is only that everything is “exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment.”
It doesn’t mean that you don’t start working for change in the very next moment! After all, the next line of the Serenity Prayer asks for the courage “to change the things we can.”
But the acceptance has worked a vitally important change in your attitude: you can now begin working for change from a place of acceptance instead of a place of resistance.
And that makes all the difference…
Wishing you all the best in recovery,
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Addiction is such a powerful thing that not only takes over the life of the alcoholic/addict, but it can cause incredible pain to the family and friends as well.