How to Make Living Amends: 5 Top Tips
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Essentially, it means making a radical shift in the way you live and sticking to that. When you make living amends, you make genuine changes to support your emotional and physical sobriety. In doing so, you promise to live a sober and honest life and never return to your old ways of lying and hurting the people you love the most. For the amends process to be successful, you first need to focus on healing yourself, then be willing to forgive yourself and others. The concept of making amends originates from AA’s 12 Step program, which provides a framework for individuals to build a long-lasting, sustainable recovery. The initial 7 Steps are about inward self-reflection and transformation, while Steps 8 and 9 focus on fixing interpersonal relationships.
Having long reckoned with the relationship between cynicism and hope, I often say that cynics — who are the people most deserving of our pity — are just brokenhearted optimists. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure https://ecosoberhouse.com/article/making-living-amends-during-addiction-recovery/ them or others. Be willing to listen to their side of the story, opinions, or thoughts on the matter. Validate their feelings by showing them you understand why they were hurt. Don’t make the amends unless you are ready to be sincere in owning your wrongs.
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In direct amends, you see the person you’ve harmed so you can take ownership of what happened. Taking ownership involves accepting responsibility, of course. Also, you need to be prepared to listen to the other person when they explain how you harmed them and what other consequences it had in their lives. By listening to them, you can begin to do the work necessary to repair the harm.
Living amends refers to the ways in which you change how you live your life in recovery or “walking our talk.” These changes affirm your commitment to the direct or symbolic amends you made with others. Living amends represent the long-term actions you will take to remain committed to recovery. You may also have the opportunity in the future to make more direct amends with certain people in time. However, this future possibility should not keep you from working your steps. To fix broken relationships, you have to put a lot of effort into making things work.
Commit to living a sober and honest life
This is a time to focus on the hurt you’ve caused, no matter how big or small. List out the people who you can identify as having caused harm to in some way— whether or not they are aware of the harm you caused them. For example, if you stole money from your mom’s purse, but she never found out, you should still write her name down and list what you did to harm her (stole from her purse) underneath her name. Again, you should only be making amends to people when it will not cause injury; do not make an amends if it will cause more harm than good. The purpose of making an amends is to mend the wrongs you have committed, not to create more harm to the person. Be cautious and use your best judgement when deciding whether or not to make an amends to someone.
In this way, you can take the focus off of yourself and choose to live a life of greater meaning. The 164 and More book is sold on this website at the Publisher List Price of $20.00 plus postage. The book may also be sold by Intergroup/Central Offices or recovery book stores at List Price
or slightly higher. But beware of others that sell the book marked up 400% or more.
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But the rewards you’ll reap from living amends can help make the challenges easier and more productive. Perhaps while you were in active addiction, you betrayed your loved one by stealing money from them. Now is your chance to apologize for that behavior and repay them.
What is the difference between making amends and apologizing?
There is a difference between making amends and offering an apology. An apology is when you just say, "I'm sorry" to someone you've hurt. When you make amends, you take action to right the wrong that you've done and restore the balance with the other person.
I’m just
saying deep inside they are wanting to do these things. It’s been so twisted throughout childhood and life that they’re
addicts now. When we work on ourselves, we open up the way to give out and
receive all those things that we’ve always wanted and just didn’t know how.