Making amends involves acknowledging and correcting past behaviors. It’s a transformational part of addiction recovery that takes courage, self-awareness, and a willingness to change. In a Psychology Today article, Winch also explained that guilt and drug addiction shame play a large part in the struggle to apologize.
What’s the Difference between Making Amends and Offering an Apology?
You likely have a lot of emotions surrounding the situation. Take action to correct past mistakes—for example, paying someone back. Recognize and acknowledge amends definition your behaviors that caused harm to someone else. Accurate, complete profiles best connect you with the right people for your services.
Intensive Outpatient Treatment Facility
- We do not and have never accepted fees for referring someone to a particular center.
- They decided to amends their friendship after a long-standing dispute.10.
It is very important to recognize that the act of making amends is for you and not the other person. You are setting the record strait to clean up your side of the street, so to speak. However, some may be tempted to take this step too quickly with the primary goal of making themselves feel better fast, avoiding uncomfortable feelings that come up when examining negative behaviors. Direct, face-to-face amends are encouraged to facilitate genuine healing. For example, if you once stole from a coworker, you could apologize and offer repayment.
Step 9 is All About Action
Used in everyday language to indicate fixing a mistake or error. Commonly used in academic or professional settings to indicate making changes or improvements to written work, plans, or processes. Make changes to a text or legal document in order to correct or improve it. Ideal for situations where errors or mistakes need to be fixed in documents, work, or speech.
Examples of amend in a Sentence
Talking with your sober community about your history with drugs or alcohol can help you identify what you need to make amends for. Every month, 150,000 people search for addiction or mental health treatment on Recovery.com. We can also make amends by living very purposefully within the bounds of our principles. For example, if we hurt people with our lying and we cannot make amends without further injuring them, we would make living amends by making a decision to behave and communicate with complete honesty.
An apology is expressing regret or saying sorry for causing harm to someone. Making an amend means taking accountability and action to repair any damages done. Through these restorative actions, you demonstrate your commitment to change.
Mental Health Support
More than an apology, it’s about making genuine amends—taking action to correct past mistakes without causing harm. Here, we explore Step 9, its goals, possible outcomes, and effective language for making amends. “It’s best when someone starts demonstrating longstanding behavioral changes before they attempt to make amends,” adds Lowry. While it can be tempting to want to make amends right away in the recovery journey, it is best to wait and build a foundation for progress first. When you https://www.offametropolitanclub.com/the-most-addictive-drugs-in-the-uk-blog/ make amends, you acknowledge and take responsibility for your actions that have hurt others.
If your actions match your intentions and you reach out in person, you are doing the next right thing to right past wrongs. And remember, if you are feeling ashamed about mistakes made and damage done during your using days, you are not your disease. Today I am working on (the behaviors noted above) by ___________________.
In Twelve Step recovery, your pace is your own to determine. No doubt you will experience challenges and setbacks along the way. But by prioritizing your recovery on a daily basis and doing whatever that next right thing might be for you, you will keep moving forward in living a life of good purpose.