If you have devoted the necessary time and energy to the first 8 steps, you should have a solid foundation from which to approach making amends in Step 9. Your relationship with a higher power—no matter how you define it—can help you to remain open and willing, even as you acknowledge hard truths about pain you have caused to others. Each person’s experience of addiction and recovery is unique. Just like each person needs an individualized approach to alcohol addiction treatment, your approach to making amends in AA may look completely different from someone else’s. It’s also important to take great care when making amends to someone who is in active addiction because our primary responsibility is to safeguard our own health and recovery from substance abuse. If making an amends means exposing ourselves to triggering environments, we ought to reconsider and discuss healthy alternatives with a sponsor or addiction counselor.
- This decision forever changed my life and caused me an excruciating amount of pain, trauma, and desperation, and finally, my spiritual malady became clear due to the extreme nature of heroin.
- We believe that when you are paying for at least a portion of your stay at a facility, you’re more invested in the recovery process.
- Just like each person needs an individualized approach to alcohol addiction treatment, your approach to making amends in AA may look completely different from someone else’s.
Does My Loved One Have a Problem?
Living amends touches deep parts of our lives and souls if we allow them. A few months back, she was traveling for an extended period of time. Well, the time came to continue my living amends to her and redo her entire master suite, including her bathroom. She came home to what she described as “a completely different house”.
Programs and results
No doubt you will experience challenges and setbacks along the way. But by prioritizing your recovery on a daily basis and doing whatever that next right thing might be for you, you will keep moving forward in living a life of good purpose. No matter how much we feel the need to make things right, forcing another to meet with us or hear from us is not part of the Steps. When those we’ve hurt are not able or willing to accept our amends, we can still move in a positive general direction by taking intentional steps to be of service to others or making living amends. People get tired of broken promises, of forgiving over and over and giving second and third, fourth, or fifth chances only to get hurt again.
How Taking Responsibility Improves Recovery
After the last presidential election, I heard many people in meetings bitterly joke that they were either moving to Canada or having a drink. Luckily, most of them did neither, regaining their focus on the microcosm of their own lives. They focused on what was right in front of them, remembering to take things one day at a time. Given these statistics, it’s easy to apply the second and third steps to a career setback. If you turn over the disappointment to a higher power and have faith that another opportunity will arise, then relapse is less likely to occur. If you discuss the problem in a group, you will receive support and learn from the similar experiences of other people.
Promises to do things differently
Often beginners in 12-Step programs call their sponsors every day. Father Phil agrees that a healthy sobriety often enables former addicts to incorporate the church into their spiritual path. And he sees 12-Step programs as spiritual living amends communities that fit well with Catholicism. AA and other 12-Step programs also help people see God as active–no, make that essential–in their everyday lives, because only God helps them overcome their addiction each and every day.
Who Is an Ideal Applicant for the Living Amends Scholarship Program?
For many, 12-Step programs highlight the distinction between “spirituality” and “religion,” and they find religion wanting. When she found herself unemployed, a friend from OA helped her get a new job at a dynamic parish, where she eventually became a Catholic at Easter Vigil. With that knowledge she was able to begin to pray to this God, first with popular AA prayers like the Serenity Prayer. “As I started to experience God more directly, I was able to converse with God and say what I was feeling, including a lot of pent-up anger,” she says.
- A sponsor or therapist can help you talk through your choices, determine the best course of action for making amends, and consider how your actions may affect others as you seek to make amends.
- No matter how much we feel the need to make things right, forcing another to meet with us or hear from us is not part of the Steps.
- Think of amends as actions taken that demonstrate your new way of life in recovery, whereas apologies are basically words.
