The Limitless Power of “I’m Sorry”

Without much debate, the single most humbling experience of my life was sitting in my parents’ living room nearly two years ago and telling them that addiction had taken me to such a low place that I stole from them.  This happened right after I admitted to my daughter that she didn’t lose a twenty dollar bill a month or so earlier. I was so desperate to feed and sustain my addictions that stealing from my own eleven year old daughter was safer than taking money from any of the accounts my wife and I shared.  

That’s what addiction can do.  It can coldly attempt to sacrifice two of the most important relationships humans will ever know, and it can rationalize the hell out of those decisions.  Those two conversations not long into my sobriety – the “making amends” conversations – were easily the toughest, most humbling, and most embarrassing conversations of my life.  

They were also the most awe-inspiring.  They were life-breathing.

If you’ve read anything I’ve written about AA and those twelve damn steps, you know I’m not a gigantic fan of either.  I don’t love the repetitiveness and monotony of the meetings, I don’t love the near command that I MUST turn my will and my life over to a “higher power,” I don’t love that I am apparently incapable of getting so fed up that I empower myself to beat addiction regardless of my allegiance to AA, and I don’t love the fact that – in the eyes of the AA veterans – I am nothing more than a “dry drunk” until I complete my twelve steps.

Well I’ll be honest with you.  I doubt I ever actually complete the twelve steps as required by AA and the Big Book.  And I’m okay with that. I will beat addiction regardless. No doubt in my mind. I struggle with the “higher power” thing too much to get past step two, in fact, so how in the hell am I going to get through at least six other God-centered steps?

Now please know that I am not some atheist heathen (or atheist saint, for that matter.)  I actually DO believe in God. As I have said many, many times in my life, I wholeheartedly believe that there is a creator of all things because absolutely nothing around me makes one bit of sense unless somebody or something is responsible.  In many ways, I’m far more deistic than formally aligned to Christianity. I absolutely believe in a creator, though I question his insertion or control or even meddling of our created world.

For instance, I will forever struggle handing my will and my life over to a God that lets one young child die of leukemia while another young child with the exact same diagnosis lives.  It’s far too uncertain for me, even if we ignore the unfairness. I can’t predict what God might do, but I’m fairly confident in predicting what I might do. I’m just not a guy capable of blind faith.  I have to learn to have faith in myself first. That, to me, is more important than lying about my sincerity of the sacred requirements just to complete the twelve steps.

But.  

That doesn’t mean that I can’t “twelve step” this recovery in my own way, and one of the best steps within the twelve is step nine, the step that states, “Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.”  To me, this is THE most important step after the “I quit” step. I’ve done it a few times now – this magical apology thing – and it is quite possibly the most cleansing exercise I’ve ever forced myself to complete.

The very first apology I made in sobriety was really a series of apologies, and they started happening months and even years prior to my last drink.  Most of them were hollow and phony since apologies mean nothing when they lack sincerity and repentance. These were the apologies to my wife, and very, very few of them were believable.  It was pretty obvious that even in sobriety, my words to her were wasted. The only way I could make amends to her was through the passage of time. Sustained sobriety, daily repentance, and day after day after day after day of truth.

And I’ll say this.  Twenty months into this thing, I have made amends to my wife.  She asks me occasionally how I’m doing, and I know exactly what she means, but every single time, there’s this knot of pride that comes up from my gut and nestles somewhere near my heart because I know what I’m about to say to her is the truth.  My answer is always a version of, “I’m really doing good. Some days it’s a struggle, and usually that’s from depression, but I have no interest in going back to that place. I’m good. I truly am.”

And the best thing about that is that she believes me.  Because it’s TRUE!! Only time can be thanked for that. No apology would have gotten us to this place.  No one apology DID get us to this place.

As I look back on my life, and especially the last twenty plus years, it’s pretty clear when I hit my rock bottom.  When a thirty-nine year old man steals twenty bucks out of his own daughter’s wallet just to get through the day, that’s desperate.  That’s despicable. That’s a call to Social Services. I didn’t deserve to be her father anymore after that. I still can’t believe I did it. And I really can’t believe I am at a place in my life that I am comfortable admitting it publicly.  

There are two reasons why I am comfortable admitting it.  First, the sick man that had almost universal control over me is almost completely gone.  He’ll never be completely gone, but that’s okay. That’s preferable. I need to keep a sliver of a memory to ensure I never embrace him again.  I’m shoving him further and further away every single day, and all the while a new man is emerging. Yeah, it might be a slow go, but I don’t really care.  As long as the new man is not a man so desperately addicted that he would steal from his own daughter, I’m okay with the identity of this new man materializing at his own pace.

The second reason I’m comfortable admitting this is because of the young woman that I raised.  She’s remarkable, and she was remarkably forgiving. I wrote about her, along with my other guilt and regrets, with my last blog post.  This incident was left out of that blog post, but I thought long and hard about that in the days after I uploaded it. I said all along that I would be completely honest in telling my addiction and sobriety story. As much as I may not like it, that is a chapter.  I HATE that chapter, in fact, but it’s in the book. I cannot forget a single page of it, and withholding that is not fair to someone who might be reading this needing some brutal honesty to help them feel normal enough in their addictions that seeking help is easy by comparison.

The theft from my parent’s house happened over a longer period of time – a couple of months – but it was also near the end.  I was crashing fast. I was so desperate to hide “addiction expenses” from my wife that I went snooping at my parent’s house one day until I found several baggies full of change hidden under some clothes in my mom’s closet.  It was easily a couple of hundred dollars worth of change. My plan was just to take enough to get through the weekend, because I was going to quit Monday. This was my plan for approximately a decade, mind you, this “I’m going to quit Monday.”  Yeah right.

Well, a couple of months later, the baggies of coins were nearly gone.  Somewhere not long after all of this desperate coin thievery, I actually did quit.  It all snowballed on me, and I had had enough. I was stealing from my daughter and parents.  It was over. I knew it was. I found rock bottom. And on May 28, 2017, I began my journey as a sober man.

Making amends to my parents was on my to-do list, but it wasn’t very high.  There was a grotesque amount of embarrassment. I knew I had to admit what I’d done. I knew I had to tell them I was an alcoholic. And I knew I was going to hear either condemnation or love (and I knew it would be love.)  It was similar to all the years I was “going to quit Monday,” though. I told myself I would talk to them next week. And then next week came and I said I would talk to them the next week.  I was just avoiding the unavoidable.

Until I found out my mom was about to question the cleaning ladies about stealing from her.  I had to make amends immediately. And for the second time in my journey of apologies, it was awe-inspiring.  It was truly life-breathing. For the first time in my life, I understood unconditional love. My parents welcomed me back.  They said all of their prayers about me (because of course they already knew) had finally been answered. Their love for me would not end because of this.  And it didn’t. It grew. And it continues to grow in ways I haven’t begun to understand yet.

I didn’t really hurt anybody other than my family.  I was a completely reclusive drunk who basically kept to myself.  I can’t blame any relationship failures on drinking, and the one relationship that was hindered severely by my alcoholism just welcomed a third child via a fabulous marriage.  Yes, there were some people I dated who I never got serious about because they weren’t as important as alcohol, but none of them were serious enough to warrant an apology.

My head principal and one of the assistants during my rock bottom days saw an employee they probably weren’t thrilled to employ, and until they learned the truth, they never understood why, but they forgave, too.  I was never a terrible employee, but I was far from winning awards. I remember texting them both when I hit a year of sobriety and the pride I felt in their supportive replies. These things are memorable in the early days of sobriety.  Again, life-breathing.

So when I really started breaking down all the amends I needed to make, I’d tackled about 90% of them.  My life revolved around my family and my job, and those were now good. But then I thought about the one thing I had slowly abandoned and neglected gradually for at least the past decade:  friends.

It was perhaps a little cowardly in hindsight, and the more I think about it, I’m probably not through feeling comfortable with the extent and sincerity of my apology, but I texted a bunch of friends who were once my “boys” and told them I was an alcoholic and apologized for disappearing and I told them I missed them.  Most of them texted back. It was good enough at the time. I recognize now that I need to do more, though. I will. The ball is rolling now. The door is open. I’ll make it happen.

And then as I was writing this, I thought back to my oldest peers.  I was in college when I started drinking heavily, but I had done something way back in high school that carried with it a lifetime commitment.  I was senior class president, and that job traditionally must plan and execute class reunions every five to ten years.

I helped plan the ten year reunion.  I didn’t help plan another one. I didn’t even respond to people when they asked me if I wanted to help or attend or anything. I just completely ignored them.

In the grand staircase of life, the magnitude of class reunions on your life is so miniscule that they will never produce stories important enough to tell your grandkids one day.  When you’re on that top step, looking back down at life, I just can’t imagine that high school class reunions would make the top thousand memories. They’re just not all that important, memorable, or necessary.  But that’s my opinion. Or it was. And it could simply be because I never really stayed close to any of my old high school friends because alcohol was more important. And it shouldn’t matter what I think of class reunions, anyway, because the planning was and is my obligation. I signed up for that. I was wrong to abandon it.

The easiest and cleanest way to apologize for that abandonment was to post an apology on FaceBook and tag as many of my classmates as I could.  So that’s what I did. And the response was once again awe-inspiring. Over sixty comments and they were all positive, supportive, and appreciative.  I guess I expected that, but the reality of seeing it doesn’t make the reaction any less memorable or poignant.

So what does all of this actually mean?  When I look back over the past twenty months of sobriety and I try to discern what impact making amends had on my recovery, what does it mean?  

In a word, everything.

I have a relationship with my wife that inspires me every day.  I have an unbelievable relationship with my daughter that I could have lost entirely.  I have two very young children who I get to watch grow and learn and fail and overcome and all those other wonderful and tragic days of innocence that I now get to breathe in and know they are more important than alcohol or tobacco.  I have a relationship with my parents that was getting shakier and more ominous the older I got and now involves me visiting with them ON PURPOSE.

I have a career that I can take pride in knowing that I am not only a good teacher, I am a dependable coworker.  I also have this terrible yet forgivable past that I can lean on if I ever need to help a kid who is either struggling with addiction or substance abuse, or comes from a home where that is present.

Lastly, other than “FaceBook friends,” I don’t really have any of my old friends or acquaintances back in my life again, but that door is open now.  The crazy thing is, that door was never closed by any other person who ever considered me a friend. I closed that door. I had to be the one to open it back up.  I had to be the one to open all of the doors I was closing.

Even if alcoholism or substance abuse was never a part of your life, I wholeheartedly recommend looking back at your past and finding those people you didn’t treat the way you wish you had.  Apologizing is easy when you mean it. If it weighs even an ounce on your heart, it’s a candidate to amend. The thing is, though, when you make amends, you don’t just lose that weight. It’s such a positive experience that it lifts you up in ways you won’t even imagine, some completely unrelated to the apology you just made.  

And look what you gain by doing so.  You gain people to love and to love you.  You gain smiles. You gain happiness. You gain peace.  You gain grace. You gain honor. You gain friendship. You gain forgiveness, not to mention this wonderful injection of a desire to forgive others.

I’ll leave you with one thought, and I’m doing so because it has to be experienced to be understood.  I’ve said throughout this article that making amends is life-breathing. It truly is, but that might not be profound enough.

It might be bigger than that.