10 February 2024
As a sectional summary, the critical points here are natural internal tendencies, choice, and character. If we are unable to make choices that better our selves, character is an unnecessary concept as is psychotherapy. Those concepts would be unnecessary because improvement, indeed, conscious movement, requires voluntary action i.e. we must choose to act and then follow through with that action in order to improve our characters, abilities, or the many other conditions life brings. Both Aristotle and Heraclitus were supportive of this position. With some conditions, the Stoics were also supportive of voluntary movement toward the good.
Full endorsement of the Stoics is difficult given both metaphysical and deontological (duty-based) conditions that form part of their body of ideas. Nonetheless, they had a significant positive impact on contemporary psychology (Wiener, 1988; Seligman & Reichenberg, 2014) and deserve explication. Most of what needs to be said may be best understood through the Serenity Prayer.
G-d, 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.
Let’s begin with G-d, a spelling adopted upon my fledgling studies of Judaism. The stricter Jewish explanation of the respect entailed, in not fully spelling out His name, struck me as right and powerful. Though I’ve had a failing career as an atheist, upon this writing, I am a resigned and reluctant atheist in direct deference to evidence-based thinking.
That resignation and reluctance comes from opposition to the Stoic belief that those on Earth find themselves in a created, providential universe—something I dearly wish were true. Instead, evidence-based thinking requires that we find ourselves the products of enormous negative odds trying to make sense of a universe so large and morphologically complex that it is incomprehensible to nonspecialists. Far from being providential (kindly disposed and well-stocked), human survival on Earth has arisen as the direct result of vast forgotten quantities of trial and error. Those mortal trials have only occasionally been displaced by statistically based calculation in the last 2,500 years but especially since the Renaissance, which is here dated to Florence and the Medici (c. 1400 CE).
What that means is that with the advent of Ancient Greece, and the philosophers’ identification and articulation of reason and logic, proponents of the logos* (cf. logos, logic) have waged an unnamed but recurrent war with belief. No school of philosophy provides as much evidence of that war as Stoicism which is the singular other to Christianity’s tripartite I. As stated at the opening of this book, we are in the midst of a cultural war. I don’t know a time, in the history since Heraclitus, at which that war wasn’t in flux between poles roughly characterized by, on one hand, reason-freedom and on the other dogma-control. While I have seen and accepted good arguments in favour of enlightened religions as a proponent of reason-freedom they are undercut by the very dogma that binds them.
One of the main reasons this book is in your hands is that I am very much afraid that reason-freedom based progress has been arrested by the adoption of current negations of ideas roughly aggregated in the nadir that is dogma-control driven Wokeism.
To return to the Serenity Prayer, G-d aside, serenity, acceptance, and the unchangeable arise as concepts populating the first line. As part of the research for this discussion, the APA Dictionary was examined but their terms go from serendipity (happy coincidence) to Serentil (an anti-psychotic medication. Morris (1975, p. 1183) defined serenity as “1. The state or quality of being serene: dignity, tranquility; quiet…2. Clearness; brightness. —See synonyms at equanimity.”
It's an odd quality, serenity. My sense is that we come into life and go through parts of childhood having an easy, intimate, and offhand familiarity with that quality of bright tranquility, with a then naïve belief that life is unfolding as it should. As the concerns, hormones, and social tensions of adolescence beckon, serenity becomes all but extinct. It then takes considerable adult effort—paradoxically—to rediscover that peaceful, quiet brightness. Yet in the deepest way, I believe this is a human being’s optimal eudaimonic state—the state that most naturally fosters composure, easy laughter, balance, and longevity. It is the blue zone of conscious states, if my intuitive sense is correct.
Acceptance seems a multilayered way of being. In delivering therapy, it has been helpful to juxtapose expectations and acceptance to make both clearer. The easier concept is expectation which the addictive community defines as disappointments in waiting. Within that definition is an inferable alternative: acceptance. To not have expectations is to embrace acceptance. At this writing, acceptance seems a readiness to live with whatever comes. As such, there is a large but easy ontological* confidence that an accepting person will be both receptive and resilient in the face of whatever comes next. As with self-actualization, above, I have knowingly met few people who have integrated acceptance, though more than have self-actualized.
Returning to the root of all this palaver, the prayer asks to be granted the serenity to accept. That phrasing makes serenity a precondition of acceptance. If we recall the peaceful childish curiosity, above, as an approximate equation of serenity, the additional qualities required to be accepting are, per the paragraph above, receptivity and resilience. A child may have neither quality while maintaining peaceful curiosity. If true, acceptance is an adults-only sort of quality i.e., one intentionally chosen and maintained, which feels just about right, experientially. That need of choice and maintenance is also consistent with the need of prayer (or being where your feet are) to return to that accepting serenity.
The final term, in the first line of the prayer, concerns the things I cannot change. Again, that involves ceding control or, more accurately, a recognition of one’s human limitations. This is really complex, in a behavioural sense, as it invokes the ethical and effective limits of the self, recognition of the existential autonomy of others, and boundaries to protect the self from straying into another’s no-go zone. In much simpler terms, SMART Recovery uses the analogy of the hula-hoop. What is within an imaginary hula-hoop, centred on your being, is within your control; what is outside of your hula-hoop, is the no-go zone.
Affected family members (AFM), a term describing those who love people suffering addiction, sometimes take years to acknowledge that acceptance of things they cannot control is a reality. The reasons for this reluctant acceptance are telling.
To be continued next week.
Dan Chalykoff is a Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying). He works at CMHA-Hamilton and Healing Pathways Counselling, Oakville, where his focus is clients with addiction, trauma, burnout, and major life changes. He writes to increase (and share) his own evolving understanding of ideas. Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery. Please email him (danchalykoff@hotmail.com) to be added to or removed from the Bcc’d emailing list.
References
Morris, W. (Ed.) (1975). The Heritage illustrated dictionary of the English language. American Heritage Publishing Co, Inc.
Seligman, L. & Reichenberg, L. W. (2014). Theories of counseling and psychotherapy: Systems, strategies, and skills. Pearson Education Inc.
Wiener, D. N., (1988). Albert Ellis: Passionate skeptic. Praeger.
Dictionary
Logos, n. account of, understanding of. Meaning. More fully, n. 1.a. Cosmic reason, affirmed in ancient Greek philosophy as the source of world order and intelligibility. b. Reason or an expression of reason in words or things. [Greek, logos, speech, word, reason.] (Morris, 1975, p. 767).
Ontology “n., the branch of philosophy that deals with being.” The roots are ontos and logos, the latter defined above and the former which “…indicates being or existence…present participle of Late Greek for einai, to be” (Morris, 1975, p. 919). As indicated in the definition of metaphysics (above), this is part of that foundational division of philosophy alongside teleology and cosmology.
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