Prayer for Recovery

Requests from people fighting an addiction, and from the people who love them. Both belong here.

Two kinds of people write here, and they need almost opposite things. One is the person using — trying to stop, or stopping and starting, or not yet sure they want to. The other is somebody who loves them and has run out of ideas.

Both belong on this page. It is deliberately not called Addiction, because for most of the people here the subject is not the substance. It is the long, unglamorous business of getting a life back, which includes relapse, and which does not run in a straight line.

Nothing here is going to lecture you. If you are still using and you are not ready to stop, you can still post, and people will still pray for you.

How people pray in recovery

The best-known prayer in this area asks for three things: acceptance of what cannot be changed, courage to change what can, and the wit to tell the difference. It is well known because it turns out to be the exact problem. Almost every prayer on this page is a version of it.

People in early recovery tend to pray in very short units of time. Not this year, not this month — today, or the next hour, or until the shop shuts. That is not a lack of ambition. It is the only honest scale, and it is how the thing is actually done.

For the people who love someone using, the prayer is usually about the limits of their own power. You cannot make another adult stop. Praying for someone you cannot control is one of the hardest things there is, and it often turns, over time, into praying for the strength to keep loving them without being destroyed alongside them.

For today only

God, I am not going to promise you the rest of my life tonight. Just today. Get me to the end of today without it. If it comes back in an hour, meet me again in an hour. Amen.

After a relapse

Lord, I did it again, and I do not know how to come back to you looking like this. I am not going to make excuses. Do not let this be the thing that ends it. Let today be a day I started from, not the day I gave up. Amen.

For someone who loves a person still using

Father, I cannot make him stop and I have tried every way I know. Keep him alive. Keep him from harm tonight, wherever he is. And show me the line between helping him and helping this continue, because I have not been able to find it on my own. Amen.

What helps besides praying

Get one other person involved who knows the whole truth. Addiction runs on secrecy, and the single most useful thing most people do is tell someone everything.
Groups work, and they work for families too. Al-Anon exists precisely because the people around an addiction need their own room to speak in.
Withdrawal from alcohol and some other drugs can be medically dangerous. Do not stop cold on your own without asking a doctor first — this is one of the few places where the safe advice and the brave-sounding advice differ.
If you are the family member: your own life is not on hold until they get better. Keeping some of it intact is not disloyalty, and it is what will let you still be there in a year.

Questions people ask

Is addiction a sin or an illness?: This page is not going to settle that, and in practice the argument helps almost nobody. What is clear is that shame is a poor engine for recovery — it is one of the most reliable predictors of relapse. You are welcome here either way.
I have relapsed after asking for prayer before. Can I post again?: Yes. Relapse is part of the ordinary course of this for most people, not evidence that the last attempt was fake. Post again. Nobody is keeping count.
How do I pray for someone who does not want to stop?: Usually for their safety first — that they survive this stretch — and then for the moment when something shifts, which no one can schedule. Praying for that is not the same as approving of it, and it does not oblige you to keep funding it.
Should I tell my church?: That depends entirely on your church, and you are the only person who can judge it. Many people find one or two individuals safer than the congregation as a whole. You do not owe anyone a disclosure you are not ready to make.