The Narcotics Anonymous Step Working Guides by Narcotics Anonymous

Author:Narcotics Anonymous
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Narcotics Anonymous World Services, Inc.
Published: 1998-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

“We made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.”

—Step Eight

To this point, the steps have focused mostly on repairing ourselves and our relationship with a God of our understanding. Beginning with the Eighth Step, we bring other people into the healing process—people we harmed in our addiction, people we harmed in our recovery, people we meant to harm, people we hurt by accident, people who are no longer in our lives, and people we expect to be close to for the rest of our lives.

The Eighth Step is about identifying the damage we caused. It doesn’t matter whether we caused it because we were overtaken by rage, carelessness, or because we were afraid. It doesn’t matter whether our actions were based in selfishness, arrogance, dishonesty, or any other defect. It doesn’t even matter that we didn’t intend to cause someone harm. All the damage we caused is material for the Eighth Step.

It may turn out that some of the harm we did can’t be repaired. It may turn out that we, ourselves, can’t directly make the repair. It may even turn out that we’re not responsible for something we’ve placed on our Eighth Step list. Our sponsor will help us sort that out before we go on to the Ninth Step. For now, our task is only to identify who we harmed, and what the harm was, and become willing to make amends.

It’s natural to wonder about the Ninth Step and how we will make our amends while we’re working the Eighth Step. What we think about our amends is bound to influence our work in this step. We may need to get some common misconceptions out of our way before we can make our list.

It’s wonderful that we’ve already begun repairing our relationships with some of the people in our lives. Our families are probably delighted that we’re no longer using drugs. Some of the more overt damage we inflicted on others ceased as soon as we stopped using drugs. If we managed to keep our jobs or stay in school, we’re probably already performing better in those places. We’re no longer harming our co-workers or employers, our teachers or fellow students in certain ways. But is that enough?

We have probably heard people in meetings emphasizing that “amends” means to change, not just to say “I’m sorry”—that what really counts is the way we’re treating people now. But this doesn’t mean that formal apologies have gone out of fashion in NA. Direct, face-to-face verbal amends are extremely powerful, both as a means of spiritual growth for us and as a long-awaited comfort for the people to whom we make them. What our members are emphasizing is that we can’t just offer people lame apologies and then go right back to doing what caused them harm in the first place.

Some of us may be feeling a bit weary at this point, especially if our sponsor had us do extensive writing on the first seven steps.

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