"Oh, God, grant me there serenity to accept the things I cannot change." And by acceptance, what is meant? It means you cannot deny reality. You cannot successfully resist the facts of your situation. Take people and things as they are. The longer you resist reality, frankly, the more desperate you will become. The longer you struggle and fight against what cannot be overcome or modified, the more unhealthy you will become. The longer you deny the facts of your situation, or try to control what is beyond your reach, the more insane you will begin to feel.

The only way to regain composure; the only way to regain your health; the only way to return to sanity is radical acceptance. It is this acceptance of all those things, people, situations, and expectation that we cannot change, control, manage, amend or make the way we would have them that leads to what Reinhold Niebuhr called, “serenity.”