Amends
Your greatest message will be spoken by your life, not your lips.
It’s incredibly beautiful to see a client enter treatment, contend with their withdrawal, start feeling what they should feel, and all the sudden have things they’ve done eat away at them. This leads them to having a desire to apologize for all their wrongdoing. Because they aren’t using drugs, they must feel the pain of their past. While I think this period of recovery is beautiful, I also think “apologizing” is one of the last things that should be on our mind.
After any significant time being an alcoholic or addict, we are bound to have damaged relationships. Clients enter treatment, struggle with their withdrawal for a few days and then have a breakdown due to shame and guilt for their past actions. The desire to apologize for the way we act is normal and healthy. There are issues with it though:
1. We’ve been apologizing.
2. We can’t stop the self-destructive behavior.
We have a limited amount of energy, especially once we enter treatment. I’m talking physical and mental energy. Spending energy apologizing, or imagining apologizing is draining.
My dad sent me a letter when I was in treatment. I remember getting it. I remember going into my room and reading it. I remember crying trying to write a response and I just couldn’t. I had done a lot of wrong to my dad. I wanted to tell him everything and promise not to act like that again.
There was a knock at my door. My buddy that I met in treatment opened the door, peaked his head in and saw me crying. He didn’t ask me questions, he didn’t tell me it was going to be okay he just said: “I love you, bro” and shut the door. I haven’t seen this guy in roughly five years. I hope one day he reads this and understands he really helped me. After he shut the door, I no longer felt the need to write the response letter. In fact, I wanted to live an apology to my dad.
Around six or seven months later, I went to make my amends and my dad stopped me. He said, “I probably know everything you did, and I don’t care. I see the life your building. Keep going, that’s all the amends I need.” One year prior my dad looked at a .44 magnum on the dresser and told me he would put that gun in his mouth and pull the trigger without thinking if it meant I would live a happy life.
I believe this is the truth for any amends you feel the need to make. You will need to make direct amends, of course. Especially if you feel the shame and guilt tugging at you. To still have your mind in the past, is taking your energy from you in the moment. This energy is required for your growth. We make amends in order to have more energy. Do not forget, in the twelve steps there are eight steps before making amends for a reason. If you cant stop your self destructive behavior, all your amends will fall on deaf ears. Work on yourself, and you’ll find, most amends take care of themselves.
Spend six months, or a year working on yourself before you go to make direct amends. Live your amends, then speak them. To do anything else robs you of energy. Addicts and alcoholics, especially if it’s their first time in recovery, hear so much about the twelve steps that they think just doing the steps will them to freedom. I can apologize and make amends to so many people, and I did. It’s not like it automatically made me feel better about me. Making amends consists of making up for wrongdoing. The first people we need to make amends to are ourselves, and it’s not by saying sorry. It’s by acting in a way that makes up for what we’ve done to ourselves. Doing so leads us to a life where our amends are more meaningful and long lasting. It looks a little bit like this:
1. Cessation of “evil”
2. Direct amends
First, you’re not evil, that’s why it’s in quotes. An act of evil, to me, is an act you know you shouldn’t engage in. Too many of these acts leads to real evil. Do not do number two if you can’t do number one. This is true in so many instances of behavior change. First, you have to focus on stopping the bad behavior by engaging in good behavior. The only way we will succeed in stopping bad behavior is replacing it with good behavior. Essentially, this is going from hanging out with other people abusing drugs, getting high and drinking to only hanging out with sober people, working a job and going to meetings. The majority of people who fail in staying sober do not engage in the good behavior long enough to see a return on that investment. They can last 3, 6, or 9 months when the miracle could be right around the corner at 12 months. This is why we can’t judge our progress. This is why it’s so important to believe living a good life will bring you something that will keep you from continuing your downfall. Often, this downfall occurs simply because we have too much focus on our past.
The reason our windshield is so much bigger than our rear view.
Maybe you’ve heard it, maybe you haven’t. I don’t even remember who said it. The point is, our windshield is like forty times bigger than our rear view because we need a lot of focus on the future with very little focus on the past.
For addicts and alcoholics I’d suggest you throw the rear view out the window. I’m not saying your past is not important, it is. I’m not saying you don’t need to make direct amends, you do. What I’m saying is getting clean and building a life is difficult. You need 100% of your energy on you. You can go make amends, but it won’t make you feel the way you wish to feel until your life is an amends in and of itself. Literally, I live every single day to make up for my past. It’s the reason my dad didn’t care for his direct amends from me. The people who haven’t forgiven us, haven’t forgiven us because we continue to hurt ourselves. They removed themselves from our life because they care and they didn’t find it valuable to continue to care. They invested care into you long enough, they want to see you invest some care into you. I nearly guarantee that if you do the following for a year, most amends you need to make, you’ll find aren’t necessary as the ones you want to make amends to have been watching you:
Admit your problem and seek help.
After you received help, you changed your life drastically instead of going back to old environments.
You exercise, your body begins to change. You look healthier, feel better and that effects the way you act.
You begin saving some money, something you never used to do, and managed to buy a car.
More and more time passes where you haven’t destroyed relationships. In fact, it seems you continue to build more.
If the people you want to make amends have seen you do this over the course of a substantial period of time, their perception of you has changed. You literally gave them new things to consider about yourself, leaving less energy for them to remember who you used to be. Because you took these actions and stuck with them you feel drastically better, more prepared to make direct amends that may actually last, direct amends that people may actually believe.
Unfortunately, after thirty days in treatment, clients are chopping at the bit to return to old environments, make amends, and move on with life. They don’t understand what kind of under taking this actually is. Because they think direct amends may fix their life - and saying sorry is easier than changing who you are, they return, say sorry, time passes and inevitably they return to old programming. Life is hard sober or fucked up. We must build our life so that we are more prepared to deal with it’s problems.
Do not focus on amends. Focus on you. Doing so is an act of amends in and of itself.
