Step Eight
STEPS Eight and Nine focus on relationships with others. First, people look back and try to identify where they've been at fault; next, they make a serious effort to repair the damage they've caused; and third, having cleared away the wreckage of the past, they consider how they can develop the best possible relationships with every person they know, using their newfound self-awareness.
This is a huge undertaking. It's a task people can perform with growing skill, but never truly complete. Learning how to live in the greatest peace, partnership, and connection with all people, regardless of who they are, is an ongoing and fascinating journey. Many AA members have discovered they can make little progress in this new adventure of living until they first backtrack and honestly survey the human damage they've left behind. To some degree, they've already done this during their moral inventory, but now it's time to double down and see how many people they've hurt, and how.
Reopening these emotional wounds—some old, some perhaps forgotten, some still painfully raw—will at first seem like pointless and unnecessary surgery. But if people make a willing start, the great benefits of doing this will quickly become so obvious that the pain will lessen as one obstacle after another dissolves.
The Obstacle of Resentment
These obstacles, however, are very real. The first, and one of the most difficult, involves forgiveness. The moment people think about a damaged or broken relationship with another person, their emotions go on the defensive. To avoid looking at the wrongs they've done to another, they resentfully focus on the wrong that's been done to them. This is especially true if the other person has, in fact, behaved badly. Triumphantly they seize on their misbehavior as the perfect excuse for minimizing or forgetting their own.
Right here people need to stop themselves short. It doesn't make much sense when someone with a serious drinking problem calls someone else out for their flaws. Let's remember that people with addiction aren't the only ones struggling with emotional problems. Moreover, it's usually true that their behavior while drinking has made other people's problems worse. They've repeatedly pushed their best friends' patience to the breaking point and brought out the worst in those who already didn't think much of them. In many cases they're really dealing with fellow sufferers—people whose pain they've increased. If they're about to ask for forgiveness, why shouldn't they start by forgiving them, each and every one?
The Fear of Making Amends
When listing the people they've harmed, most people hit another major obstacle. They get a pretty severe shock when they realize they're preparing to make face-to-face admissions of their terrible behavior to those they'd hurt. It had been embarrassing enough when they privately admitted these things to God, to themselves, and to another human being. But the prospect of actually visiting or even writing to the people involved now overwhelms them, especially when they remember how poorly they're thought of. There are also cases where they have damaged others who are still happily unaware of being hurt. Why, they protest, shouldn't they let sleeping dogs lie? Why do they have to think of these people at all? These are some of the ways fear teams up with pride to prevent them from making a list of all the people they've harmed.
Some people, though, stumble over a very different problem. They cling to the belief that when drinking they never hurt anybody but themselves. Their families didn't suffer because they always paid the bills and rarely drank at home. Their coworkers didn't suffer because they usually showed up for work. Their reputations hadn't suffered because they were sure few people knew about their drinking. Those who did would sometimes assure them that, after all, an occasional bender was just a good person's fault. What real harm, therefore, had they done? No more, surely, than they could easily fix with a few casual apologies.
This attitude, of course, is the result of intentional forgetting. It's an attitude that can only be changed by a deep and honest examination of motives and actions.
The Importance of Thoroughness
Though in some cases people cannot make restitution at all, and in some cases action should be postponed, they should nevertheless make an accurate and truly thorough survey of their past life as it has affected other people. In many instances they'll find that though the harm done to others wasn't great, the emotional harm they've done to themselves was significant. Very deep, sometimes quite forgotten, damaging emotional conflicts continue below the surface of consciousness. At the time these events occurred, they may have given their emotions violent twists that have since distorted their personalities and changed their lives for the worse.
While making restitution to others is the primary goal, it's equally necessary that people extract from an examination of their personal relationships every bit of information about themselves and their fundamental problems that they can. Since troubled relationships with other human beings have nearly always been the immediate cause of troubles, including addiction, no area of investigation could yield more satisfying and valuable results than this one. Calm, thoughtful reflection on personal relationships can deepen insight. People can go far beyond those things that were obviously wrong with them, to see those flaws that were fundamental—flaws that sometimes were responsible for their entire life pattern. Many in recovery have found that thoroughness will pay off handsomely.
Defining Harm
People might next ask themselves what they mean when they say they've "harmed" other people. What kinds of "harm" do people do to one another, anyway? To define "harm" practically, we might call it the result of conflicting instincts that cause physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual damage to people. If tempers are consistently bad, they trigger anger in others. If people lie or cheat, they rob others not only of their material goods, but of their emotional security and peace of mind. They essentially invite them to become contemptuous and vengeful. If sexual behavior is selfish, they may cause jealousy, misery, and a strong desire for retaliation.
Such obvious misbehavior is by no means a complete catalog of the harms people cause. Let's think of some of the subtler ones, which can sometimes be just as damaging. Suppose that in family life people happen to be stingy, irresponsible, callous, or cold. Suppose they're irritable, critical, impatient, and humorless. Suppose they shower attention on one family member while neglecting the others. What happens when they try to control the whole family, either through rigid rules or by constantly micromanaging how their lives should be lived from hour to hour? What happens when they wallow in depression, with self-pity oozing from every pore, and inflict that on those around them? Such a list of harms done to others—the kind that make daily living with practicing addicts difficult and often unbearable—could go on almost indefinitely. When people take such personality traits to work, to social situations, and into their community, they can do damage almost as extensive as what they've caused at home.
Making the List
Having carefully surveyed this whole area of human relationships, and having decided exactly what personality traits injured and disturbed others, people can now begin to search their memory for those they've offended. Identifying the nearest and most deeply damaged ones shouldn't be hard. Then, as they walk back through their lives year by year as far as memory will reach, they're bound to create a long list of people who have, to some extent, been affected. They should, of course, think carefully about each situation. They'll want to stay focused on admitting the things they've done, while forgiving the wrongs done to them, real or imagined. They should avoid extreme judgments, both of themselves and of others involved. They must not exaggerate their defects or theirs. A calm, objective view will be their steady goal.
Whenever the pen hesitates, people can strengthen and encourage themselves by remembering what AA experience with this Step has meant to others. It is the beginning of the end of isolation from fellow human beings and from God.