Addiction takes over your life, stealing both your joy and your time, and making it impossible for you to give back to others and live a generous life. Instead, as you pursue a life in recovery, focus on being generous with your time and giving back to others. In this way, you can take the focus off of yourself and choose to live a life of greater meaning. If you’re in doubt about a specific name on the list, tell your sponsor the whole story. This way, they can help you decide if direct contact is a good idea. Approaching step nine can spread anxiety and fear in the hearts of many of those going through the AA program.
When not working, Katie can be found gardening and snuggling rescue dogs. Living amends is a concept linked to addiction recovery and part of the twelve-step https://loweringbloodsugar.com/16-celebrities-who-don-t-drink-alcohol-2/ program for sober living. Many alcoholics in early sobriety struggle with how to make direct amends for certain offenses against others. To help, we’ve compiled a list of examples of making amends in recovery that deal with ambiguous scenarios. As the person in recovery continues to grow and evolve, they may uncover additional relationships or harms that require attention and repair. When making amends it is important that you focus on your behaviors only and your amends.
Many aspects of the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) can be humbling.
Assess whether making amends might cause additional harm to the other person involved. For example, contacting someone you’ve harmed may exacerbate their living amends distress, especially in severe cases like drunk driving. When planning, start with the people closest to you and create a communication strategy.
In detail, write everything you’ve done that caused them pain. Don’t skip details; just because you want to forget doesn’t mean those you’ve hurt have. Acknowledge the full extent of the pain or damage you caused, whether it was emotional, financial, or physical. Compile a list of all the people you’ve wronged or mistreated through the what is alcoholism course of your substance abuse. Addiction is often labeled a “family disease” because it affects not only the person struggling with addiction but also everyone in their close circle. Family members may attempt to “fix” the problem and get sad, frustrated, or upset when their efforts don’t seem to make a lasting difference, fracturing relationships and causing emotional distress.
