What about the relationships we ruined, the emotional wreckage we created? Sometimes direct amends are not possible, and this is where living amends come into play. It’s possible to be too early in the healing journey to start making amends. If you’re actively using drugs or alcohol, making amends can seem like an empty gesture to the other person. While you may genuinely want to repair your relationships, it’s a good idea to focus on your sobriety first.
What Does Making Amends Have to Do With Sobriety?
For those with a serious alcohol problem, it was a worthy decision, maybe even a lifesaving one. It could even be fun, when it wasn’t all amends and affirmations. Making amends is challenging, but the outcome can be one of the most rewarding parts of recovery. It’s hard to find the right response to someone making amends. You likely have a lot of emotions surrounding the situation.
Be Patient and Understanding
But amends are so much more than just making a list and saying you are sorry, and this is where it becomes important to understand the difference between making an amends and making an apology. By making direct amends to the person harmed the temptation to skirt the issue because of embarrassment or pain is avoided. However, even if you feel extremely motivated to make direct amends, it is advisable to take your time with this step. Make sure that you are comfortable with your progress during recovery and that both you and the other person are ready to engage in the process.
What Does Step 9 (Making Amends) Have To Do With Sobriety?
In Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), making amends is considered a crucial component of long-term recovery. 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.
What is making amends in addiction recovery?
Talk with your sponsor or others in your recovery community about what has worked for them. If your actions match your intentions and you reach out in person, you are doing the next right thing to right past wrongs. And remember, if you are feeling ashamed about mistakes made and damage done during your using days, you are not your disease. When first writing your list, don’t worry about including everyone you have wronged. Over time, as you strengthen and deepen your recovery from addiction, you will undoubtedly revisit Steps 8 and 9 many times. Eventually you will find you are making amends day by day through the positive actions you routinely take in living by Twelve Step principles.
- Ms. Khar has taken issue with the #MommyJuice memes that have proliferated on social media with harried women juggling the pressure of careers and family looking for salvation in goblets of chardonnay.
- They miss the opportunity to be truly reflective about how your wrongdoings have impacted the other person and can be misread.
- At FHE Health, you’ll learn more about Step 9 and how to handle the worst of experiences.
- 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.
In Austin, Tex., a substance abuse counselor named Chris Marshall operates an event called Sans Bar, featuring sober glow-in-the-dark disco, karaoke and ’90s-rock singalongs. Mr. Marshall, 36, began a national nine-city Sans Bar tour this past January and plans to expand. No longer is the topic of sobriety confined to discreet meetings in church halls over Styrofoam cups of lukewarm Maxwell House. This living amends is according to a new generation of kinda-sorta temporary temperance crusaders, whose attitudes toward the hooch is somewhere between Carrie Nation’s and Carrie Bradshaw’s. To them, sobriety is something less (and more) than a practice relevant only to clinically determined alcohol abusers. Now it can also just be something cool and healthful to try, like going vegan, or taking an Iyengar yoga class.
- If the harm you caused someone included monetary damage and you do not have the financial means to make direct amends in a monetary way, this does not mean that you should not make amends to that person.
- Next, develop a specific plan for raising the necessary funds.
How To Rebuild Relationships
