Episode 237 -- September 8, 2022

Unapologetic Amends: Forgiveness and Step Nine

Our addictions kept us isolated from others—even the people we hurt. They also often made us strangers to ourselves. Those of us who also live with a mental disorder can have a hard time figuring out which of our diseases has done the most harm, and how we can possibly start healing our relationships as well as ourselves. This can make the direct amends of Step Nine feel almost impossible.

Marya Hornbacher's book Sane: Mental Illness, Addiction, and the Twelve Steps, is for anybody working towards healthy recovery—whether we have a diagnosed mental disorder or not. Hornbacher shares her own story of recovery to help readers explore how achieving sobriety is often complicated by co-occurring disorders. She offers hope that recovery is possible. In the following excerpt, Hornbacher describes how she went about separating her character defects from symptoms of her illness, and how the forgiveness—including self-forgiveness—she found at the heart of Step Nine gave her a new vision of who she was and what she was capable of.

Hornbacher helps us see that making amends is not simply repairing the past. Working Step Nine also helps build a foundation for future connections and relationships that are based on trust, support, and care.

This excerpt has been edited for brevity.

The principle at work in Step Nine is forgiveness. As we work this Step, we are not only asking others how we can be forgiven. In some cases, we are also forgiving them. And we are forgiving ourselves.

This practice of forgiveness allows us to let go of the last of the resentments that have been eating at us, and it allows us to let go of the anger at ourselves that has poisoned our relationships with others. For years, the fact that our unmanageability has caused such harm has created a toxic self-hatred. The guilt we've felt has tainted our ability to relate to other people and has made it nearly impossible for us to connect with the larger world. This in turn has created terrible isolation. We have developed the belief that our mental illness renders us incapable of forming healthy, lasting relationships. We have longed for emotional closeness but have watched ourselves destroy that closeness time after time, hurting others and bringing chaos into their lives.

For those of us with mental illness, Step Nine must be worked with special care. We need to be aware that we are not apologizing for brain disorders over which we have no control. Many of us carry a sense of guilt that we are sick in the first place; when we come to Step Nine, we may have a tendency to want to apologize for our illness itself. But what we are really trying to amend is the damage we've done that we could have prevented. Some of the harm we've done has been caused by refusing to manage our mental disorders; much of this has been through our active addiction, our use of substances, or our engagement in addictive behavior. We have triggered or worsened symptoms of our mental illness through our addiction, and this has caused harm for which we need to make amends. We have also, like every other addict, caused harm through character defects; we need to make amends for those as well. But we do not need to apologize for having a mental illness or for symptoms over which we did not have control.

Working Step Nine helps us to finally repair the broken ties, and it makes it possible for us to believe in our capacity for relationships in the future. It lifts the burden of guilt we have carried for so long. It frees us from the trap of our own past and moves us forward into a future where we are no longer alone. In this way, writes Kevin Griffin, our amends "transmute from a burden to a joy; from dreaded task to freeing leap; from drudgery to vital activity" (One Breath at a Time: Buddhism and the Twelve Steps).

The burden, at first, may seem very great. Those of us with mental illness sometimes feel we are looking back on an entire lifetime of damage, estrangement from others, social alienation, and shame. As we begin Step Nine, we may feel that we are taking on a task that is far from a "freeing leap"; instead, we may feel that it will drag us further downward into our own guilt and shame than we already are. But we're wrong. Working this Step, in addition to changing our relationship with others, changes our relationship with ourselves and with our mental illness. In facing our past, taking responsibility for our errors, and turning things around for ourselves, we gain a new vision of who we are and what we are capable of.

As I worked this Step and slowly began to lift the weight of my past, I started to see that I was not innately flawed, not inherently broken. I began to see that my mental illness did not make me a lesser person. I began to see that while I had made mistakes, I was not myself a mistake. It dawned on me that my mental disorder did not define me and that its symptoms did not consign me to a life of causing pain and chaos in my own and others' lives. As I began to repair my past, I realized that I no longer had to feel like a burden; I began to see that I had much to offer in relationships and that I could give love and support just as much as I needed them from others. I could finally see that I was not destined to cause harm; instead, I realized that freedom from addiction, management of my mental illness, and work on my character defects brought out all the gifts I had to offer the world.

In this way, it became clear to me that Step Nine was indeed about forgiveness. I was able to forgive myself, not only for harm I had done others, but for the damage I'd done to myself in carrying around so much self-hatred and shame.

When I came to Step Nine, I found myself wanting to apologize to everyone I'd ever met, for things I'd done or left undone, for things over which I had control and things I did not, for damage created by my addiction and damage I thought I'd done through my very existence. I wanted to apologize for myself. But I didn't need to do that. That desire came from a deep sense of shame about the fact that I have a brain disorder, and that shame was something that I had to let go. So as we work Step Nine, we need to carefully determine where we are responsible for harm done and where we are really seeing symptoms.

How could I tell the difference? In most cases, truly, it wasn't that hard: if alcohol or drugs were involved, I was responsible. If the action came about during a period when I wasn't making an honest and significant effort to manage my mental illness, I needed to own up to that as well. If the act was entirely based in character defects—as opposed to symptoms—things like selfishness, dishonesty, denial, or resentment, then that was damage for which I needed to take responsibility.

When in doubt, I expressed that very doubt to the person to whom I was making amends. I first acknowledged that I'd done harm, then explained that I had been suffering from both addiction and mental illness at the time, and told them honestly that I didn't know which disorder had caused the event. Ultimately, I expressed sincere regret and explained to them that I was now actively working on my recovery from both addiction and mental illness. And as in all cases where we make amends, I asked what I could do to make it right.

"If life is a story," writes Kevin Griffin, "then living amends moves the narrative toward growth and healing and away from destruction and pain." The friendship I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter and many others have been repaired. I am grateful for these friendships, which have flourished as the years have gone by and I have steadily grown in sobriety, serenity, and sanity. These things form the foundation of the kinds of relationships we have always wanted but that have so often eluded us or been grasped briefly only to be broken off by our illnesses. Those relationships are one of the gifts of Step Nine— they are the web of human closeness, of giving and receiving, of living healthy, spiritually sustaining, interconnected lives.

About the Author:
Marya Hornbacher is an award-winning journalist and the Pulitzer Prize¿nominated author of three books. Her best-selling memoirs Madness: A Bipolar Life and Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia have become classics in their fields, and her critically acclaimed novel The Center of Winter is taught in universities all over the world. Hornbacher's work has been published in sixteen languages. She lectures regularly on writing, addiction recovery, and mental health.

© 2010 by Marya Hornbacher
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