Amends
From Drug Rehab Wiki
"Amends" refers to Step Nine in the 12-step program invented by the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935. By now millions of people have used the process to recover not only from alcoholism, but also from addictions of all kinds, including drugs, sex, gambling, compulsive shopping, and more. Each step is an action taken in order to become free of addiction.
In Step Eight, members of a 12-step group make a list of all the people they have harmed and decide to make direct amends to them. In Step Nine, members make amends to all each person they identified, except if doing so would injure them or others.
According to the "Big Book" used in 12-step recovery groups, making amends means to set right past wrongs or to repair damage due to mistakes you made in the past. Drug addicts and alcoholics often have long histories of harming other people through lying, stealing, embarrassing them, physical and verbal assaults, getting in trouble with the law, and forcing others to cover up for them. Making amends cannot just be about praying and meditating on these mistakes, but whenever possible, members must take practical action to repair what needs to be fixed. For example, if you stole money from a friend to pay for drugs, it is not enough to simply apologize. Instead, you need to pay back the money.
The "Big Book" says that members making amends "must not shrink from anything, even risking their reputations or going to jail."
Making amends must be thoroughly planned, thoughtful, and take into consideration the feelings of others. Making amends must never be about hurting or embarrassing other people or even the member himself. Sometimes making amends can just be about building bridges to someone you have been ignoring for years.
Step Nine can take a few days or many years to finish. Some members go back into their childhoods and address transgressions that are many years old. For example, one recovering alcoholic replaced a bicycle he had stolen from a childhood friend over 50 years before.
Members often say working through Step Nine can be extremely beneficial and even life-changing, as they experience a new freedom from guilt, self-pity, uselessness, and fear of interacting with other people they avoided for years. The "Big Book" says, "If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are half way through. We are going to know a new freedom and happiness. We will not regret the past, nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity, and we will know peace."
