My experience of forgiveness through AA's Steps Four through Nine is that the process is quick. If the actions are taken quickly, the result will be mind-blowing.
Forgiveness involves the following stages:
- See through the ego's model: 'Happiness is getting my own way'
- Drop demands to have my own way
- Drop moralisation of others
- See others as powerless not guilty
- Identify with others
- Develop compassion for others
- Develop love for others
- Incorporate the page 67 prayers into my life
- Analyse my own wrongdoing
- Confess it to myself, God, and another
- Being prepared to abandon the old way
- Being prepared to adopt a new way
- Make thorough and direct amends
- Follow through over time with constructive action
These are all deliberately adopted stances or real actions.
Time does not need time.
The above process produces miracles, and miracles collapse time.
It does require vigilance for the brain's pathways to be rewired, and the new state of mind needs to be guarded very carefully and reinforced chiefly through work with others. But forgiveness and a change of heart are possible, and always quick when the above process is followed wholeheartedly.
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Very occasionally there is a misfire, even if the process is followed carefully. This can happen if the allegiance to self is not abandoned in principle in the early stages, and the notion of surrendering to serve God is not bought as the package deal on offer.
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It is certainly the case that there will be wandering from the path, second and subsequent surrenders, and sometimes grave mistakes.
But these represent lapses from the state of grace, rather than a persistence of hell with moments of relief.
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A far more common phenomenon in recovery is the perception that the process is terribly long, drawn-out, involving endless back and forth, cloud-breaks in the storm, and sometimes decades of endlessly rehashing, rehearsing, resuscitating, and revivifying the emotional corpses of ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, or sixty years ago. Shares are drawn back constantly to the abuses of others, and the case is rebuilt, again and again, whilst recovery slogans and catchphrases are scattered over the lurching undead like holy water. Sure, their putrid skin fizzes, but the world is still a world of menacing zombies, chasing the Penelope Pitstop heroine.
If the past keeps coming back to mind, if there is the need to continually reexplain what happened, to make others understand how bad it was, there is no forgiveness. If I use the past to explain my current state, there is no forgiveness. If forgiveness is seen as a process extending over years or decades; if the focus is on holding the space, feeling the feelings, accessing deep layers, grieving, honouring the experience, I'm going in circles. I'm actually perpetuating the problem by using recovery tools to provide temporary relief, which actually enables me to maintain the grievance, the victimhood, and the projection outward of my own darkness.
I did this myself for almost sixteen years in recovery. Until I was shown a different way, and the grievances of the previous thirty-odd years—which had been refractory to everything I had thrown at them in recovery and with numerous other external therapies, practices, religions, and approaches—dissolved.
A friend of mine had the unpleasant skin condition impetigo for months. Nasty scabs on his face. It affected his self-esteem, his behaviour, his desire to interact with others. He did not believe in western medicine (though he was highly educated and worked in the City) and applied all sorts of alternative medicines and therapies, including some foul-smelling mud. His life was spent finding ways to compensate for his condition and treat the emotional fallout.
Eventually he went to his GP, who wrote him a prescription. He followed it, the scabs fell off in two days, and his skin was back to normal in one week.
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It does not have to be this way.