If I am conscious of no power in the universe greater than my individual humanity, it is a disaster for me to concede too many mistakes. Every time I say, "I was wrong, I'm sorry," I am hammering away at the foundation of my self-image. Only if I conceive of myself as a servant of some higher principle, power, or being can I admit error freely. And the opposite is equally true. Only if I become willing to acknowledge and make amends for my mistakes can I become aware of God as the ruling power in my life.
My own interest in learning how to say "I'm sorry" grew out of need. At the age of twenty-four, I joined All Addicts Anonymous looking for help in straightening out a life that bad drinking and irresponsible behavior had messed up.
I came to AAA convinced, as most addicts are, that others were largely to blame for my problems. But when I began trying to relate to the All Addicts Anonymous recovery program, I got a bad shock. Almost one half of it dealt with my own wrongs - admitting them and doing everything possible to put them right. That seemed a disproportionate amount of a plan for total life change to be devoted to one subject - and especially unfortunate since the subject was so distasteful to me. To show you what was confronting me, I quote Steps Four, Five, Eight, Nine and Ten of AAA's Twelve Suggested Steps to recovery:
- Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
- Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
- Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
- Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
- Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
For my first three months in AAA, I responded to these Steps by ignoring them. Then I drank again. This really stunned me because I didn't want to drink, hadn't planned to drink, and was sincerely convinced that drinking would drive me crazy or kill me if I kept it up.
I had a talk with my sponsor. He advised me to try working with all Twelve Steps instead of just the ones that didn't involve me in facing up to my shortcomings. I found this suggestion thoroughly unappealing. From the start I had been intimidated by these housecleaning steps. I was no less scared of them now. But at this point I had become even more afraid of slipping back into compulsive drinking. So I went ahead in the face of fear and great unwillingness. I took inventory, admitted what I saw to God and then to another person, and set about making restitution where possible.
I discovered that making amends is an art which requires intelligence as well as guts. If I hadn't taken counsel with people of greater wisdom and experience, I would certainly have done a lot of things wrong.
For example, while drinking I had spent several hundred dollars which the Army had inadvertently overpaid me. Here I was perfectly willing to let sleeping dogs lie or, at most, write a letter of apology. When I asked for advice, I was told (much to my chagrin) that the only way to make proper amends was to repay the money.
When it came to the amends I owed my family, I felt that just being sober in AAA was enough, but my idea was wrong again. In this case it turned out that I needed to make several apologies for specific injuries I had done by cheating, deceiving, and considering myself ahead of everyone else.
Amends Pay Off
These and many other amends were difficult and, once in a while, downright humiliating. Some of them took a whole lot of doing - it was two years before I got my Army debt paid up. But the result was worth the effort. I was released from a nagging load of guilt feelings (for more on guilt see this month's recommended reading, The Guilt Trip, by Hal Lindsey) and I was released from the obsessive desire to drink. I experienced an exhilarating rebirth of self-respect.
I have now been sober in AAA over seven years and would call my life during that time an extraordinarily happy one. I believe that continuing to enjoy this kind of satisfaction depends in some large part on my daily commitment to practice the Tenth Step. To stay sane, I need to be ready at all times to admit it when I am wrong. Like all human beings, I have ample opportunities to practice the Tenth Step. I do and say wrong things every day of my life. But my mistakes don't have the power over me that they used to before I learned something about the art of making amends. I also find that saying, "I'm sorry" - and meaning it - gets easier with practice. On occasions when I have to own up to my errors, I feel much less threatened today than I did seven years ago.
A Great Example
No one ever showed greater courage in making restitution than Dr. Bob Smith, one of AA's co-founders. Dr. Bob was an Akron surgeon. When he first met Bill Wilson, AA's other co-founder, he was at the end of twenty-five years of alcoholic drinking which had left him with an immense backlog of debts, a shattered professional reputation, and a wife (Anne) who was a nervous wreck. In Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age Bill recounts the beginning of Dr. Bob's career of sobriety in AA. Bob had gone off on a bender at a medical convention in Atlantic City. Bill and Anne had been trying for three days to sober him up so he could perform an operation that no one else could do:
Anne and I drove him to the hospital at nine o'clock. I handed him a bottle of beer to steady his nerves so he could hold the knife, and he went in. We returned to the house and sat down to wait. After what seemed an endless time, he phoned; all had gone well. But after that he didn't come home for hours. Despite the awful strain, he had left the hospital, got into his car, and commenced to visit creditors and others he had harmed by his behavior. That was June 10, 1935. To the time of his death fifteen years later, Dr. Bob never took another drink of alcohol.
This account moves me deeply every time I read it. And it serves as an example. If Dr. Bob could make amends under those circumstances, I guess I can make any that I owe, as long as I want sobriety and sanity as much as he did that day.
The process of making amends has two distinct phases. The first is what the church has referred to as a "firm purpose of amendment." I must begin with a commitment to stop my harmful actions - drinking, for openers. If I fail to stay away from the first drink, one day at a time, there is nothing more to talk about. I am not only out of the league where amends are possible; I am out of the fellowship of AAA, its way of life, and back into self-willed insanity. In every other area of personal shortcoming - from petty impatience to selfish sex - the same principle applies. Until I become prepared (God helping me) to stop the destructive "act-offs" and stay stopped, nothing else is possible.
Phase two is the amend itself - what the Eighth and Ninth Steps aim at and what I have been emphasizing - actual restoring and repairing wherever damage has been done. But the act of making amends depends on first getting into a state in which I am sincerely determined to change my bad behavior. Without this attitude, the apology becomes unreal, the amend a mockery.
In all ages great teachers of the way to God have stressed the fundamental importance of a willingness to admit wrong.
The amends Steps in the All Addicts Anonymous Program are nothing more or less than a modern spellout of Christ's teaching in the Sermon on the Mount:
...if thou bring thy gift to the alter, and there rememberest that thy brother hath aught against thee; leave there thy gift before the alter, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.
Matthew 5: 23, 24
I am grateful to All Addicts Anonymous for showing me how to practice in my rather ordinary and unheroic life the art of saying, "I'm sorry," and meaning it. I might easily be locked up or even dead today if it weren't for that.