Anxiety can play a big part in our lives. There’s always something to worry about. It can be a question of control, or rather the lack of it.

‘Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.’

The original version of the Serenity Prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr asked God to do the granting, but, for me, it stands alone as a smart summary of our struggle to let go of the reins sometimes. Which can be scary, and having slight control-freak tendencies myself (I am a man after all!), I know what a challenge it can be. But I think that ultimately it’s freeing. And when the world seems to be going to hell in a handcart we can be left feeling that the ground we stand on is shifting and moving under our feet. The good news is that we are, or at least have the potential to be, in control of one thing: how we react to events outside of us. It isn’t events causing the anxiety, it’s our reaction to those events. In the course of my bereavement counselling I speak with a lot of people who have lost loved ones and each one reacts slightly differently to their loss. There are similarities but no certainties. Some have lost elderly grandparents, others tiny babies, or uncles, parents, siblings: some have suffered the most appalling losses and yet all react slightly differently. Something I hear very often is:

“there must be far more deserving people than me who need your support, I’ve only lost a….”

But, as I say to them, there is no scale of grief, no measure whereby one loss is greater than another. It’s how we react to the loss that is the key factor. Otherwise everyone would feel exactly the same way when confronted by difficulty and stress, and that’s clearly not the case. Changing the way we react/deal with difficulty takes courage, but I believe it is possible. Partly be repeating and ingesting Reinhold Niebuhr’s prayer, the act of which is really the basis of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) as well as Neuro-Liguistic Programming (NLP) and partly by ‘practice’ we can begin to feel serene enough to let go of the uncontrollable and find the courage to take control of our inner lives.