Step 9 AA: When to Make Amends and When Not to FHE Health

To learn how your gift supports our scholarship, click below. My name is Kyle, and I have been a blessed recipient of [a] sober living scholarship program from Living Amends. We gain humility as a result of taking a good look at the damage we did to others (and ourselves) and accepting living amends responsibility for it. After acknowledging to ourselves what we’ve done, we take responsibility for making it right. There is nothing quite like experiencing increased humility while making amends in your Ninth Step and recognizing the self-empowerment and self-love that comes with it.

The Science of Step 9 AA: How Making Amends Can Help

Your AA sponsor, therapist, or another trusted person can help you determine how best to address making amends. Finally, your amends script should underline the commitment to change and transformation. It highlights the essential work of aligning one’s actions with values, moving away from past behaviors, and towards a meaningful and forthright way of living life sober. Developing your amends script shouldn’t be an isolated endeavor. A sponsor plays a critical role, offering guidance and expertise during script development and approach. Leveraging their personal experience working the 12 steps, sponsors provide relevant advice and insights tailored to individual recovery journeys.

To understand what living amends are is to understand the concept behind amends in a 12 step program.

Another example is a substance or alcohol-addicted adult child who regularly steals money, jewelry, and other valuable items from their elderly parent’s home. However, they may suddenly feel guilty and decide to change their ways. They can make a living amend to change their lifestyle, get sober, and stop stealing from their parent. Living amends, in this event, can include making changes to the behaviors contributing to the falling out between the survivor and the person they owed an apology to. For example, let’s say a mother didn’t make an effort to escort her children to the school bus stop. One of her children is killed crossing the street on their own even after telling their mother that they were afraid to cross the busy street alone.

Slogans, Quotes, and Sayings to Support Making Amends

It is important to note that just because you have made amends does not mean that your relationships will be completely healed or return back to normal. Many people think of making amends as simply apologizing for whatever wrongs they did in their using, however an apology is not an amend. An amend involves rectifying or making right what was wrong.

• We are not attorneys and are not providing you with legal advice.
• When you make living amends, you make genuine changes to support your emotional and physical sobriety.
• By Step Nine, we’ve eliminated many of the destructive attitudes, perspectives and feelings we used to have, which makes room for love in our lives.

In such cases, living amends—ongoing changes in behavior and attitudes—are made to demonstrate a commitment to sobriety, personal growth, and making a positive difference. By consistently embodying these changes, individuals can rebuild trust and repair relationships over time. When someone struggles with addiction, they are not the only ones affected. Individuals battling substance abuse can become different versions of themselves and make decisions or behave in ways that hurt their loved ones. Addiction is often isolating, which can make quitting difficult. With proper treatment, individuals can become sober and turn their lives around.

• So, to truly make amends, we have to offer more than words.
• By proactively correcting previous mistakes, those in recovery may be able to prevent future conflicts that could trigger a relapse.
• We came from very humble beginnings, and would love to tell you our story of success and recovery.
• This would not be possible without the spiritual preparation we received from the previous steps.

The Key Components of an Effective AA Amends Script

He’s a teenager, so I try to let him function at that age level. When he runs out of clean clothes, I don’t lecture or offer solutions. I let him decide if he wants to do laundry at midnight or wear dirty clothes.

We approach God, ourselves and others with compassion, respect and understanding, maintaining our humility, spirituality and boundaries to the best of our ability. Older children will more clearly understand our explanations of addiction and how that affected us, but that doesn’t mean we should spend much time on the subject. Lists to Help you Through Any Loss is for people experiencing any type of loss. This book discusses some of the most common grief experiences and breaks down psychological concepts to help you understand your thoughts and emotions. It also shares useful coping tools, and helps the reader reflect on their unique relationship with grief and loss. With all those articles (that you should go back and check out if you haven’t read them), it would be easy to assume we have said all there is to say.

Once we have done this we are ready to forgive, but not until then. Forgiveness done too soon will be ineffective and will require re-doing. We understand that fact and don’t choose to run from it, and we understand that words cannot make those painful memories disappear. We can only become who we intend to be, and acknowledge to others that those addictive behaviors have no place in our lives from here on out. In early recovery, parents might feel pressured to make up for lost time and experiences. We’ve had a spiritual awakening, and we suddenly want to fit as much as possible into each day—and we want to quickly repair all the harm we caused during active addiction.

When held in the bonds of an addiction, it’s not uncommon for many relationships to feel strain, or to fall apart together. Admitting the wrongdoing is the initial step in developing your amends script. This signifies the acceptance of one’s responsibility for harmful actions. It involves specifying the particular behaviors and actions that led to harm, ensuring the admission is not vague or wishy-washy.

But the rewards you’ll reap from living amends can help make the challenges easier and more productive. Whether or not you’re intimately familiar with the Twelve Steps of AA, you’ve probably heard of Step Nine. Making Amends with Others has positioned itself in the public eye to a degree that many of the other eleven steps haven’t. That’s because it attempts to rectify the outward consequences of the disease.