Step Eight

Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.

Step Eight is about getting real with the consequences of the way I have lived, and comprises an undertaking—a physical list, not some nebulous blob of names in my head—that has healing of relationships with others as its goal. Presumably this means means that I have already done a significant amount of healing within when I embark upon this list. I have to get the balance of my relationship to Self healed before I can hope to engage in real healing with others.

Healing my relationships with others doesn’t translate as making everybody happy with me. If I think of my relationships as concentric circles moving away from me, healing means being authentic enough to allow everyone to move to their right place with respect to me, and vice versa. 

In early white-knuckle recovery, when I wasn’t interested in AA any more than I was interested in church, somebody handed me a pamphlet with the 12 Steps written on it. I breezed through them: nope, nope, ha!, not doing that, no thanks, whatever, as if!...hey, oh ya, maybe—

Step Eight caught my eye, or actually Step Nine did, because it seemed to offer a valid excuse to call up an ex-girlfriend. And possibly get lucky! So, without a single meeting under my belt and no exposure to the Steps or a sponsor, I called up Ms. X to explain to her how I’d reformed my ways and hinted how she was, through my amend, lucky enough to have another shot at me. 

I don’t think we need to tell the rest of that story to surmise that acting in ignorance and without awareness of why I made the decisions I made, my attempt at an amend was likely more harm than good—for both of us.

Months later, after having gone through the rest of the Steps, Ms. X came up again in Step Eight, and my sponsor at the time suggested that the best way I could make amends to this woman in particular is to just stay out of her life completely. That was harsh to hear, and more painful to come to understand as truth. 

Sometimes our relationships may seem so broken that it’s difficult to know where to begin; I need to start by reviewing what I have learned so far in the Steps. I have to get it through my head that I am not now in the business of persuading anybody to buy into my newly minted spiritual worth. 

I am here to get authentic. 

When I reach Step Eight, I should have an emerging understanding that the resentments I am holding are often a reflection of what i am denying in myself. Now I have to shine this spotlight of experiential wisdom on all the relationships I have or have had. 

Let’s not pretend that I am responsible for saving or healing anyone other than myself. Yes, I have a Higher Power, but God isn’t going to sort through my feelings for me. However, and this is the ongoing miracle of recovery, my own healing will indirectly provide the help necessary for those willing to receive it. Trying to force healing is as damaging as some of the behaviours I used when I was still drinking.

I can’t get anywhere with this stuff until I accept that I am worthy of healing—and we all are, though it may require some significant trauma reduction work to understand this. 

I also must have a genuine intent to heal.

This is a sticky wicket, especially with years of practice in justification, rationalization and denial. If I simply say I have intent to heal but continue manipulating others by playing the role of denial, then I cannot heal. I can stick around in the rooms for years whining and pointing fingers, but this doesn’t mean I have ever actually moved into the belly of the whale that is the recovery journey, what Joseph Campbell has called The Hero’s Journey. 

When I have a genuine intent to heal, I must recognize that others have the same spiritual rights that I am claiming for myself. 

How am I supposed to deal effectively with raging resentments and heaps of fear when everyone is telling me, at times rather smugly, to clear my side of the street? Sooner or later I’m going to have to deal with the fetid mess in the sewer on my side of the street. This is exactly what I’ve been trying to clear out in Steps Four, Five, Six and Seven—why would I want to dump more garbage in it now by pretending to ignore my resentments, as if there is a magic sober wand that makes my feelings about the other side of the street simply vanish? In truth, it is not simple. It is precarious work, releasing emotions without damaging others or myself. It’s far more effective than denying them.

I had to find ways to deal with resentment, and these ways are multifarious: acting it out with a trusted ally, writing a letter and then burning it, yelling at the top of a mountain, screaming in the belly of a cave. Whatever way I choose—and the best ways come from my own intuition—it is helpful if it can be witnessed by a trusted ally.

I have to get my relationships with myself and my Higher Power as right as possible. And here is a good opportunity to express some of the rage I am holding against  what some call God for these feelings of being terrorized, abandoned, ignored, mistreated, or misunderstood. We each have our own version of the less-than-nurturing aspects of our own existence, and some rage about them. God can take it. 

This isn’t about blame; it’s about release, and release clears the lines of communication to let in more light. Unreleased anger and fear cut me off from others and from myself.  

One of the tricks of false spirituality that I subscribed to for a long time is the notion that either I am operating out of fear or I am operating out of love. Only recently have I discovered how this erroneous premise leads me further into denial by pressuring the fear I’m holding to hide itself under a veneer of centered bliss, or to fragment itself outside of me. Whatever I deny, I’ll eventually have to face in the reflections that come back to me. 

The answer for me is to accept terror and rage as part of love. If I don’t, part of me is outside of love, and that cannot be. As soon as I accept my feelings and allow them to move, something else gets released, one of the most toxic elements to humanity: guilt. 

At my first AA meeting some young punk had a Screw Guilt badge pinned to his jean jacket. It has taken me over a decade to fully understand this simple message: Guilt is never true. 

I can allow that everything has its place without needing to understand how or why; who’s to say I’m not a reflection of Divine fear or Divine anger? A preposterous notion for most, but even the smallest meditation on this prospect leads me further into the appreciation of how truly very little I cognitively understand. 

If guilt isn’t true, and Step eight is about relationships, I need to explore the limitations on intimacy, connection, and sexuality that I’ve learned and rehearsed during my time on this planet in this body. I’m looking for a sane perspective on relationships and a reasonable comprehension of where I stand in relation to others. 

This can’t be clear until I have an honest perspective on where I stand with myself and with God, Source, the Ultimate Reality. 

To glean the granular details about the beliefs I am holding, I’ll likely have to comb through my Step Four to review the recurring patterns in my behaviour and my life. 

One of the most important understandings I can have here is that while it is useful to have a sponsor as a sounding board, I am not evaluating harm in terms of someone else’s perspective, but on my current, active and most informed beliefs about how to treat another human in an honest and spiritually authentic way—not based on perceived slights that others may wish to hold over me. 

It is notable that being truly authentic is sometimes the opposite of conventional notions of what it means to be polite. 

This is precarious ground, because my own denials might wish to convince me that I am not in the wrong when in fact I have done harm. I can’t engage in ‘purposeful forgetting’ when attempting a ‘deep and honest search of motives and actions.’ 

I’ve heard a lot in AA that my instincts are garbage, and that I shouldn’t trust my own feelings, my feelings aren’t facts, and that they are just going to get me drunk. This is true on the one hand, if I’m having the feeling that a single malt scotch wouldn’t be a bad idea to enhance my research on recovery. 

On the other hand, there has to be some trust in my intuition as my own will comes into alignment with Divine will.  

As nobody else lives in my body with my history and my chemistry, nobody should be given the power to tell me what to do or how to feel here. My sponsor—if I have an honest one, not one interested in supporting his own beliefs my making me parrot them—can offer a helpful reflection here. 

I need to do much inner work and release to gain the perspective necessary to understand the nature of my relationships. This is what the Steps leading up to number Eight have been all about.  Then I can examine the relationships I have and have had, starting with the circle closest to me, and moving outward, applying the new perspective I carry to my actions vis-à-vis these relationships of my turbid past. 

The formation and substance of my Step Eight List will shift every time I gain a new insight. As Ghandi said, I must be dedicated to truth, not to consistency. 

This process is potentially painful, but ultimately proves to be an edifying and uplifting one. 

Where have I been an energy vampire? Where have I enabled others to use me as a doormat in order to get the benefit I feel from playing the victim? I need to have a clear understanding, an intuitive knowing, about which releases of anger and fear are cleansing and which are damaging. I also need to define what selfishness means to me, and whether or not I am going to subscribe to a general, vague interpretation of it, which often gets misconstrued and remedied with the erroneously harmful act of putting the needs of others above my own. 

This is playing the martyr, a passive type of victimhood that kills the very thing it is attempting to uplift and protect. 

More and more, the understanding is that I need to stop treating my physical body as a rented vehicle, and treating my emotional body and will as a whipping boy to conform to the ideals of ‘Spirit’. It is all one package that must find its balance in the Heart. 

Step Eight, if done with right intention, can go a long way to accomplishing this, and lifting the veil on a whole new way of living, which has been called the beginning of the end of isolation from others and from God. 

I would also add: from Ourselves.