The 12 Step Program - Step 8 (Part 2)

Send us Fan Mail In today’s episode, I will be finishing up on the 8th step. The 8th step is, “I made a list of all persons I is harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.” The last portion, the one I will be discussing today, is, “became willing to make amends to them all.” This part of the step I always kind of, took for granted is, “Well, sure, of course I’m going to make amends to them all.” If you notice, I left out the word “willing”. It was always a lot easier to come up with all of the names of those people and shut them down on a list. “There”, I would think, I’m done with that. I thought that all I had to do was include as many folks as I could remember on this list and I would be finished. But, was I? In looking at my list in this, real and final 12-step approach. This is when the word willingness surfaced. I did not like it one bit! Why couldn’t I just write those names down and be done with it? It turns out that some of those people I didn’t even want to see again, no less visit them with my hat in my hand, telling them I was sorry for what I had done to them. Well, that’s the way I thought about this step before. It’s no wonder I so easily easily and casually left out the word willingness. After all, I knew it was important. When I wrote the book, Gifts from God, the gifts that I associated with the 8th step was willingness! Isn’t it amazing, I thought, how I can twist words around or totally eliminate them when I’m not serious about the steps? So I had to carefully go over my list again, making particular note of those folks that I knew I had to make amends to, but I really didn’t want to. They were either people who I would be really embarrassed to have to face again, never mind the amends I had to make. Or they might be people I just didn’t like at all, but that I had to make amends to in order to follow my program.