If we are to stay in a good and healthy recovery we need to make amends to people we have hurt, harmed, abused, disrespected or treated in any way badly in the past. This is because in order to be truly free. We need to put behind us the detritus from the past. This can be a very painful and humbling experience.
We can usually put together all the people we have harmed by looking at all our resentments, bad sex conduct etc from our step 4 work. This is something we usually do at step 8 of our twelve step programme. In some ways that is the easy bit. But make sure you do not get tempted to cheat and leave any one off – if you do you are cheating yourself. You should put everyone on the list even if seeing them again is highly unlikely. Even impossible if they have died. It should be a full and complete list.
Amends
You then need to think of a suitable way of making amends. This should be totally genuine. It is not about a hollow ‘sorry’ – it is about really feeling and meaning it. The most surprising amends I made was to my mother and daughter. I did them separately (as you should) but used the opportunity of some one on one time when we were all three out in Cairns in Australia, so it is a strong memory.
Over a meal in each case, I said that I was sorry that I had worried and hurt them so much when I was drinking. I expected them just to say ‘don’t worry, it is all over now’. My daughter did react in that way, and said how proud she was of me for having got through it and into recovery, but my mother started to talk about how awful it had been and what it felt like for them. It was uncomfortable listening but I am sure it also helped her to talk about it to the one person who was most involved at the time. Both were very emotional experiences.
Actions
Some amends might involve more actions than words. So if you have taken something you shouldn’t, you might need to go back and replace it, or apologise to a store manager, for example. With people close to us, apart from a formal amends, we can make a living amends – letting them see continuously that we now live our lives properly and can be trusted to do our best by them. If the person to whom we need to make amends has died, perhaps we can go and say sorry by their grave, or through prayer – or perhaps we can make a donation to a charity they favoured, for example.
Amends to the Right People
We also need to be wary of making an amends and doing more harm than good. So it is not advisable to go and make amends to someone if by doing so you are going to hurt them or others associated with them. This can happen if we need to make amends for our sex conduct. For example, do not make amends to someone’s partner for having had an affair. Such damage is not entirely limited to our sex conduct. Think things through very carefully before embarking on your amends and discus them with your sponsor.
Not everyone will react as you might expect when you make your amends. You may be pleasantly or unpleasantly surprised. If your amends are not accepted, you have to leave it at that and accept the other person’s right to ignore you and cut you off. You can only do as much as you can to make it up to them.
Overall, it is an amazing process and one that should leave you free to live a good life in recovery.