I recently came across some advice in AA on Steps Eight and Nine.
It suggested the following:
- Make amends to yourself first, on the basis that you harmed yourself the most, and your life is the one that most needs repair
- Forgive yourself first, and then you can forgive others
- Accept yourself and others will accept you
The Steps were devised by the early AA members, who set down the programme in the Big Book ('Alcoholics Anonymous'), according to which Steps Eight and Nine are about making amends to others. Whatever a person is doing by 'making amends to themselves' may or may not be worthwhile (I believe the latter; but see below), but this is not Step Nine.
Furthermore, the above advice-giver is suggesting that one should make amends to oneself before making amends to others, in other words to postpone making actual amends. The Big Book suggests making amends without delay. The advice-giver is thus suggesting the exact opposite: delay. It makes little sense to actually reverse the Step then pass off the reversal as the Step itself. This is very typical of the ego's upside-down thinking.
It is questionable whether the individual harmed themselves the most. The evidence of children whose lives remain ever distorted for years after the alcoholic has recovered is one of many examples where the alcoholic proves far more resilient than those he or she affected. Ask members of ACOA whether the alcoholic damaged themselves the most, and you may get some sharp intakes of breath.
This line of advice about making amends to oneself is commonly given, but it's rare to hear any concrete examples of what this means. Do I stand and look at myself in the mirror and apologise to myself? Or do I rebuild my career, family life, and community activities? And when is the process complete? Do I wait for many years, essentially until the damage is repaired, before even embarking on the process of making amends to others? The advice-giver does not disclose any procedures for this. If the mirror exercise is the amend, then, sure, do that first, but that means you can start making amends at 9.05 a.m. on the first day of your Step Nine rather than at 9.00 a.m., since it cannot take more than 5 minutes to apologise to yourself. If the exercise is in fact to rebuild your life before you make amends to others, let's see how that would work in practice.
It is certainly true that the alcoholic's life needs repair. But the assertion that delaying amends is most likely to promote repair is nonsensical. Let's say you want to make amends to yourself by repairing your family life. This would necessarily entail rectifying relationships with others, which in turn would necessitate amends. People tend not to want to play their part in rebuilding the relationship until I have admitted I am wrong. The idea that maintaining hostility is preferable to reconciliation and good works in the repair of one's relationships is preposterous. The same principle applies in every domain of life. In no circumstances can a life be repaired without first making amends to those we have harmed and switching concertedly to working to contribute constructively to the lives of others.
In addition, we owe it to others to make amends. It is not fair on those we owe money to, for instance, to ask them to go without the money they are due because we're learning to accept ourselves, for instance, which may take some time. The same applies to any other amends: it is wrong to make people wait for apologies and rectification due. They have already waited long enough.
Let's now look at the forgiveness question. Aside from the fact that the advice-giver does not offer any procedure for forgiving oneself, it is simply impossible to forgive oneself until others have been forgiven and in particular until others have been made amends to. If you hate everyone and feel guilty because of decades of wreckage, good luck developing a healthy sense of self. It's impossible. The fact is that forgiveness is an exercise of withdrawing judgement, adopting a helpful attitude, and learning to be kind and loving, and that it's much easier to practise on people we're relatively uninvolved with and then gradually work towards what is often the hardest person to forgive (ourselves). I can forgive a complete stranger for cutting me up on the road by recognising that he might be in a hurry (like me), he might be angry, frightened, and impatient (which I identify with), etc., before tackling the thorny question of my own decades of guilt and shame. Gradually, we work through all the people on our resentment list, recognising that they, like ourselves, are sick not bad. The process of forgiveness laid out in the Big Book starts with others, and that forgiveness then reflects back on us. This procedure works.
Note also that, in the resentment inventory, if we resent ourselves, we can write about that (see page 66, on the topic of remorse). The page 67 exercises can then be performed on ourselves, in the context of performing the exercise on others.
It's exactly the same with love: we typically learn to love others by being kind to newcomers, making people cups of tea at meetings, and warmly greeting nervous visitors. People who hate themselves find it oddly possible to show kindness towards others who are suffering. This is how the goodness starts to shine through. Again, the love we show others reflects back on us. It is almost impossible to foster self-love unless we are loving others. But if we foster love towards others, we start to feel love towards ourselves automatically. By contrast, any attempt to foster self-love whilst maintaining an embattled position of hostility and resentment towards others is doomed to failure. This is very specifically the ego's plan, and the plan whose failure propels most people into AA. Most of us had far too high a regard for ourselves and scant regard for others. The solution to conceit and carelessness is not to back-burner forgiveness of and amends to others.
In short, the question of self-forgiveness and self-acceptance is already covered in Step Four in the context of forgiving and accepting others. If a person has got to Step Eight and does not have in place a regular practice of forgiveness and acceptance of others and self, they have not taken Step Four. The approach in that case is not to delay Steps Eight and Nine or turn them on their head but to go back to the part of the programme that was missed.
Now onto accepting ourselves so that others will accept us. This is flawed for several different reasons. Whether others are hostile, condemnatory, and intolerant of us or are kind and accepting is a function of their spiritual condition, not ours. Most people in AA have had the experience of being loved and accepted by many people their whole lives even though they could not love and accept themselves. Whether we accept ourselves and whether others accept us are two entirely different topics. If we are dripping in self-hatred, sure other people avoid us, but that has more to do with attractiveness than acceptance: the people that reject us may well be perfectly accepting; they have accepted they don't like us and have quietly moved on. Acceptance and liking are different things.
Lastly, when we do finally accept and forgive ourselves, that is absolutely no guarantee that those who in the past have rejected us will come back. None of the people I made amends to in 1993 subsequently remained in my life on a regular basis, except for some family members. What the self-acceptance and self-forgiveness equipped me for was a foray into an entirely new life.
To sum up: the AA programme as laid out in the Big Book adequately covers the topics of forgiveness, acceptance, and amends in a systematic, practical, and effective way. The wheel does not need to be reinvented or replaced with another form of locomotion.