Meditations on "Amends"

In the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous there is a section on making amends and sorting things out with our families.

An important part of recovery is coming to a truthful view of what happened in our relationships.

Step-10 encourages us to regularly take personal inventory and when we are wrong about anything to promptly admit it.

Step-9 requires that we make direct amends to the people we have harmed, except when to do so would further harm them or others.

S In Step 8 we make a list of all persons we have harmed and become willing to make amends to them.

One of the central pillars of the recovery world is the sharing of our experience, strength, and hope.

All of us who have weathered the storm of an addictive lifestyle know that our days were filled with trials of one sort or another.

When we begin the recovery process we are often overwhelmed by the guilt and shame of the mess we have made of our lives.

Making amends requires a will to do so. Some of us struggle to be sorry for our actions towards another or are more offended by what they did.

For most of us compiling a list of people we have harmed and becoming willing to make amends to them is extremely intimidating.

As we sit at home watching our leaders on TV it is easy to make controversial comments about how they are running the affairs of the country or city where we live.

When we say in Step 12 that we have had a spiritual wakening, we are describing the impact we have experienced as we’ve completed the first eleven steps.