Step Nine, Part One---Timing

The moment we tell our families that we are really going to try the program, the process has begun. In this area there are seldom any questions of timing or caution....we usually want to sit down with some member of the family and readily admit the damage we have done by our drinking. Almost always we want to go further and admit other defects that have made us hard to live with.... At this first sitting, it is necessary only that we make a general admission of our defects. it may be unwise at this stage to rehash certain harrowing episodes. Good judgment will suggest that we ought to take our time.
12 Steps and 12 Traditions

Many years ago I was working with a young woman whose alcoholic father had been in recovery for a number of years. As our work in therapy progressed, she realized she wanted to talk to her dad about what had happened and how it had affected her. She also wanted to ask him questions in order to get a better understanding of her childhood. We spent a number of sessions considering what she wanted to say and ask and how she wanted to say it---she was clear she didn't want it to be an angry confrontation where she would attack her dad for all the harmful things he had done. But she did want the chance to talk openly about how it had affected both of them.

She was almost in tears when she came to a session following the meeting with her dad. When she told him she wanted to talk about his drinking and how it had affected her, he cut her off by saying, "That's all in the past. Why do we need to talk about that now? I already made my amends." And that was the end of that as far as he was concerned.

In the 12x12, Bill Wilson talks about how eager a person is to tell his immediate family when he has surrendered to the reality of his alcoholism/addiction and made the decision to get involved in a 12-Step program. He goes on to say that such a person will readily admit the damage he or she has done and will even "almost always" want to go on to admit other defects that made him/her "hard to live with." I'm not so sure that most alcoholics/addicts are all that eager to admit to the damage they have done or to talk about defects that made them hard to live with just as they are acknowledging they have lost control and need to work a program. That doesn't fit with my experience as a clinician or as a member of AA.

But I do think that all too often, we alcoholics and addicts believe that once we have done a Ninth Step with our partners and any other immediate family members we are off the hook so to speak. We have acknowledged and taken responsibility for our wrongs, and for many of us that should be the end of it, as my client's father believed. But that kind of attitude is not helpful if we are truly interested in healing our closest relationships.

First of all, we are likely to make amends to our partners and children when we are ready to make them, not when they are ready to hear them. Most of the time, we are ready before they are. We have been going to meetings, talking to our sponsors, and doing a variety of other things to enhance our recovery. By the time we get to the Ninth Step, we are ready for this to be the end of looking at the wreckage of our past so that we can move on with our lives. Moreover, most of us will have apologized to our partner at least a couple of times for the "bad things' we did while drinking and using.

But other members of our immediate family are not nearly as likely to be ready to truly hear our Ninth Step amends. It is exceptional when the spouse of an alcoholic/addict makes the same kind of commitment to a 12-Step program and the recovery process right from the beginning. It is even rarer for children to realize their need for participation in the recovery process. Thus it is often the case that a partner and children are still struggling with so much angry resentment and/or anxiety about a relapse that they are unable to take in the alcoholic/addict's Ninth Step. So, as Bill Wilson says at the end of the quote that begins this post, "good judgment will suggest that we ought to take our time" about making amends to immediate family members. A "careful sense of timing" means paying attention not only to when we are ready to make the amends, but when our partners and children are ready to hear them in the spirit in which they are being made.

Timing is not just a matter of when, but also of how many times. By this, I don't mean saying, 'I'm sorry" over and over again for our behavior when we were drinking and/or using. That wears awfully thin after about the second time. But making verbal amends (I will talk about "living amends" in a subsequent post) should not be the end of the matter as it was for the father of my client. Our behavior when we were still practicing our addiction was often experienced by our partners and/or children as confusing, shocking, deeply hurtful, traumatic, or abusive. In order for them to understand and make sense of what happened, to heal the anger and pain they still carry, and to come to a place of acceptance and forgiveness, most of them will need to talk about the past multiple times. If we wish to go to any lengths to heal the damage to our closest relationships, then we must be generous with our willingness to talk about what happened over and over again if need be.

Finally, the willingness to wait until people in the family are genuinely ready to hear our amends and to be open to talking many times if necessary about the damage our drinking and drugging caused does not mean that we are giving a partner or our children carte blanch to beat us over the head again and again with what bad, unloving, uncaring people we were. When a partner misses no opportunity to berate us once more for what we did to them before we got clean and sober, they are not trying to heal themselves or the relationship. Instead they have gotten stuck in the victim/martyr mode and are refusing to do their part of the work to heal things. We are not doing them, ourselves, or our relationship a favor by repeatedly making Ninth Step amends when this is happening. That will only feed the dysfunctional process and keep it going. The best thing to do in such instances is to make an effort to talk about the process that is occurring and how destructive it is to the relationship.