Now that we are willing to make amends to all the people we’ve harmed, we put our willingness into action by working the Ninth Step. We’re involved in a process that takes us from awareness of our wrongs and the conflicts they’ve caused, to a growing freedom from those conflicts and toward the serenity we are seeking. This process has called on us to examine our lives, identify our character defects, and become aware of how we harmed others when we acted on those defects. Now we must do everything we can to repair the harm we’ve caused.
We have our Eighth Step list, and we know what we have to do; however, knowing and doing are two different things. We may have a perfectly good plan for making our amends but, when the moment arrives, find ourselves overwhelmed by fear and feel unable to go on. We may be afraid of how our amends will be received. We may be worried that someone will retaliate. On the other hand, we may be harboring a secret hope that we will be excused from our responsibilities. We cannot base our willingness on the expectation that we won’ tactually have to make restitution. For each of our amends, every possibility exist, from being held fully accountable to being completely excused. We must be willing to follow through, regardless of the potential outcome. Once again, with the help of our Higher Power, we simply have to walk through our fear and go on.
We must be courageous when we work this step. Though the prospect of making amends may frighten us, we turn to the god of our understanding for strength. Our Higher Power is with us ans we make each of our amends. We rely on the presence of that Power, know matter how scared we are about approaching the people we have harmed.
We may hesitate, fearing other people won’t accept us as readily as our fellow NA members have. However, we have found that recovering addicts don’t hold a monopoly on kindness or forgiveness. Other people are capable of accepting us as we are and understanding our problems. But whether they are willing to accept us or not, we must go on with making our amends to them. The risk we take is sure to be rewarded with increased personal freedom.
The spiritual principles of honesty and humility that we’ve learned in earlier steps are invaluable to us in the Ninth Step. We would never be able to approach the people to whom we owe amends in the spirit of humility if we hadn’t been practicing these principles before now. The honesty examination we used to write our inventory and make our admissions, the ego-deflation brought about by our work in the Sixth and Seventh Steps, and the realistic look at how we harmed others have all worked together to increase our humility and provide us with the motivation needed to work the Ninth Step. Our path has led us to humbly accept who we have been and who we are becoming, resulting in a sincere desire to make amends to all those we have harmed.
This desire to make amends should be the primary motive for working the Ninth Step. Making amends isn’t something we do simply because our program of recovery suggest it. To be certain our motives are based in spiritual principles, we find it helpful to reaffirm our decision to turn our will over to the care of the God of our understanding before making each of our amends. A Power greater than ourselves will provide us with the guidance we need.
We should not expect a “pat on the back” or praise for living in accordance with the principles of recovery. People may respond to our amends in many different ways. They may or may not appreciate our amends. The relationships we have with those people may get better, or they may not. We may be thanked, or we may be told, “It’s about time you did this.” We must let go of any expectations we have on how our amends will turn out and leave the results to the God of our understanding. It is very important that we do our absolute best to make amends. Once we have done that, however, our part is finished. We can’t expect our amends to magically heal the hurt feelings of someone we have harmed. We may humbly ask for forgiveness but, if we don’t receive it, we let that expectation go, knowing we have done our best. As we are making amends, we ask ourselves if we are doing this because we are truly sorry and have a genuine desire to make reparations for what we’ve done. If we answer “yes” to this question, we can be assured that we are approaching our amends in the true spirit of humility and love.
Keeping our humility in focus, we ask for help from our sponsor. Whenever possible, we discuss each of our amends with our sponsor before we set out to make it. We tell our sponsor what we are making amends for, what we are planning to say, and what we intend to offer to set the situation right. What we intend to offer as amends should be appropriate to the harm we caused. For instance, if we borrowed money from someone and never paid it back, we don’t merely apoologize; we pay the money back. We talk directly to the person we harmed and amend exactly what we did wrong.
When we make amends to those we have held a resentment against in the past, an attitude of humility is imperative. We don’t want to go to someone, intent on making amends, and end up in a shouting match over who was injured more severely. Even though we are sure to have amends to make to people who have also harmed us, we must set our hurt feelings aside. Our responsibility is to make amends for what we have done wrong, not to force others to admit how they have wronged us.
In our experience, making amends is a two-stage process. Not only do we make amends to the person we’ve harmed, we follow up on those amends with a serious change in our behavior. We mend our fences and we mend our ways. For example, some of us may have destroyed someone’s property while we ere angry. When we make our amends, we not only apologize to the person and replace or repair the property, we back that up by repairing our attitudes. We amend our behavior, making a daily effort not to express our anger by damaging property any more.
Changing the way we live is a lifetime process and is perhaps the most significant amends we can make. Some of the people we’ve harmed, life our families or others we’ve been close to for a long time, have suffered for years. Amends of this nature can’t be made in a five-minute apology, no matter how heartfelt. Although an admission of wrong and an apology may be the starting point, we need to go on by making a concerted daily effort to stop hurting our loved ones. If we have neglected our families, we start spending time with them. If we have been thoughtless, always forgetting birthdays, and anniversaries, we begin to be thoughtful instead, remembering those important events. If we have been inconsiderate, always wrapped up in what we wanted and needed, we now begin to be sensitive to the needs of others.
Of course, we may not have an ongoing relationship with some of the people we have harmed. For instance, if we are divorced from a spouse with whom we had children, we may owe child-support payments. Making such amends does not require that we rekindle an emotional relationship with our ex-partner. Remembering that our obligations are more than financial, we can work out a mutually acceptable plan to fulfill those obligations to our children.
Because the action we take in this step can have a profound impact on other people, we don’t want to just carelessly step out and start making our amends without first discussing them in detail with our sponsor. Some of us have felt compelled to make our amends on an impulse, just to ease our own conscience; however, we usually ended up doing more harm that good. Suppose that, in our Fourth Step, we wrote about people we had secretly resented for years. Unbeknownst to those people, we had ridiculed, judged, and condemned them or otherwise defamed their character to others. Because of that character assassination was taking place behind those people’s backs, do we now go to them and confess? Certainly not The Ninth Step is not designed to clear our conscience at the expense of someone else. Our sponsor will help us find a way to make appropriate amends without causing additional harm.
Though it seems obvious that we wouldn’t make direct amends in a situation where we would injure someone, we may find that we have questions about how to make “direct” amends when the person to whom we owe them is deceased, impossible to find, or lives thousands of miles away. There are many ways to make effective direct amends without doing it in person. If someone to whom we owe amends is deceased, we may find it very effective to write a letter saying everything we would say if the person were still alive. Then, perhaps, we may read that let to our sponsor. It may be a noble desire to want to make amends in person to someone who lives thousands of miles awya, but most of us lack the means to travel greate distances solely for that purpose. In such a situations, a telephone call or letter could serve the same purpose as an amends made in person. The people on our list who we can’ t find should remain on our list. An opportunity to make amends may present itself later on, even years later. In the meantime, we must remain willing to make those amends. Of course , we should never avoid making amends in person only because we are afraid of facing the person we have harmed. We make every effort to find the people we have harmed and make the best amends we can make.
Choosing the best way to make amends requires careful consideration and time spent searching our conscience for what is right. Some of us have to face situations that can’t be corrected. Our actions may have left permanent physical or emotional scars or even caused someone’s death. We must somehow learn to live with such things. We live with indescribably remorse over such acts and wonder what we could possibly do to make amends. This is where we have no choice but to rely on our Higher Power. We may have difficulty in forgiving ourselves, but we can ask for the forgiveness of a loving God. We sit down, become quiet in the presence of our Higher Power, and ask for guidance in what we should do. Many of us have found answers in dedicating our lives to helping other addicts and other forums of service to humanity. There are no easy answers for problems like these; we simply do the very best we can, relying on our sponsor and the God of our understanding for guidance.
For many of us, the wreckage of our past includes such relatively minor things as outstanding arrest warrants for traffic violations, while others have committed crimes entailing very serious consequences. We may find ourselves in a dilemma over such issues. If we turn ourselves in to the authorities, we may go to jail. If we don’t , we may live in fear of being caught and sent to jail anyway. With the help of our sponsor and the God of our understanding, we are willing to do whatever it takes to maintain our recovery. We may also have to rely on legal advice before making such amends. Consulting a lawyer about these problems can be a great benefit.
Especially troublesome financial amends many also require professional advice. Many of us have amassed debts at an alarming rate. We may ow financial amends that are beyond our means to pay in the foreseeable futur3e. Some of us may ow bills that amount to more than we can conceivably earn in the next several years. Some of us rarely paid our rent, utility bills, or phone bills. We may have found it easier to uproot our lives and move rather than meet our financial obligations.
Just as we do for all of our amends, we discuss our financial amends with our sponsor first. Some of us have begun providing for our families since we’ve been in recovery; they are dependent on us for their food and shelter. We usually find that we have to budget our money very carefully in order to meet our current living expenses while paying as much as possible on our old debts. We may resolve such situations by contacting our creditors, explaining our situation, and expressing our desire to settle our debts. We agree on a reasonable plan for paying off our debts, and we stick to it. This is an example of how living our amends is a process rather than a “once and for all” occurrence. It takes great discipline, personal sacrifice, and commitment to continue to pay a bill for years and years, but we can regain our self-respect only by following through.
Most of us find making amends for the damage we did intimate relationships to be extremely uncomfortable. As we wrote our Fourth Step, we realized that we not only robbed ourselves of the chance for meaningful relationships, we also caused deep emotional wounds in our partners. Our fears of intimacy or commitment may have led us to use, be unfaithful to, or abandon the people who loved us. We were generally unavailable to those people. While there are times when we need to approach such people with our amends, there are other times when it is best to leave them alone so as not to reopen old woulnds. Knowing the difference requires complete honesty on our part and open communication with our sponsor. Whether or not we make direct amends to the people we’ve harmed in relationships, we definitely need to change the way we behave in our relationships today. If we ran from intimacy before, we need to sit down and learn to communicate with our partners. We must become more considerate, sensitive, and attentive to the needs of others.
Sometimes, the only way we can make amends is to change the way we live. As discussed in the Eighth Step, we may owe amends to our community or society as a whole. Though this may seem to be an abstract concept, we must make concrete amends by changing our behavior. If we harmed society, we start to make amends by becoming a productive member of society. We contribute. We look for ways to give, not take.
Our recovery is also a way of making amends to ourselves. We treated ourselves horribly in our active addiction. The guilt and shame we felt each time we harmed another human being took quite a toll on our self-respect. Our addiction humiliated us in a thousand different ways. Now, in recovery, we learn to treat ourselves in ways that demonstrate our self-respect.
The most important results of the Ninth Step will be found within ourselves. This step teaches us a great deal about humility, love, selflessness, and forgiveness. We begin to heal from our addiction and no longer live with as many regrets. We grow spiritually and find that we are truly gaining a new level of freedom in our lives. Our past is just that; the past. We have put it behind us so that it no longer hovers on the edge of our thoughts, waiting for a change to haunt our present.
One of the most wonderful gifts we derive from working the Ninth Step is the knowledge that we are becoming better human beings. We realize how much we have changed because we are no longer doing the things for which we are making amends. We may not have realized how much we had changed in our recovery until now. The amends process drives home the knowledge that we are becoming truly different people. The extended nightmare of our addiction is finally beginning to fade in the dawning light of our recovery.
Our humility increases as we face the people we have harmed. The impact of realizing how deeply our actions have affected other people shocks us out of our self-obsession. We begin to understand that other people have real feelings and that we are capable of hurting them if we are careless. We learn about being considerate of other people as we work this step, and what we learn is what we practice in our lives today. It becomes natural for us to think before we speak or act, keeping in mind that what we say or do is going to affect our friends, our families, and our fellow NA members. We approach people with love and kindness, carrying within ourselves a deep and abiding respect for the feelings of others.
Because of the humility and selflessness so necessary in making our amends, we may be surprised at the way Step Nine enhances our self-esteem. One of the most paradoxical aspects of our recovery is that by thinking of ourselves less, we learn to love ourselves more. We may not have expected our spiritual journey to lead to a fresh appreciation of ourselves, but it does. Because of the love we extend to others, we realize our own value. We learn that what we contribute makes a difference, not just in NA but in the world at large.
As a result of working the Ninth Step, we are free to live in the present, able to enjoy each moment and experience gratitude for the gift of recovery. Memories of the past no longer hold us back, and new possibilities appear. We are free to go in directions we never considered before. We are free to dream and to pursue the fulfillment of our dreams. Our lives stretch out before us like a limitless horizon. We may stumble from time to time, but the Tenth Step gives us the opportunity to pick ourselves up and keep walking forward. Our Higher Power has given us an invitation to live, and we accept it with gratitude.