The 8th Step of Drug and Alcohol Recovery -- Making Amends

The 8th step is one of the hardest steps to climb but once you get past it, the other four are much more attainable. The 8th step for drug and alcohol recovery involves essentially making a list. But not just any list. This is a list of all the people you have harmed. Once you have this list created you have to be willing to makes amends with everyone you wrote down. It's an immense healing process but can be an overwhelming task to consider, not just in making the list, but in trying to determine how you will go about making amends with these people. It's as if God were saying, "Okay, now you want me to take all of your character defects, fine. Then you can be free and serene and the person I want you to be. But first you must see that almost all your troubles involve other people. You've tried to control them one way or the other or fix them; you have guilty or resentful feelings about them; or you have been so preoccupied with yourself and your feelings, dreams, and plans that you have ignored them emotionally and caused them to experience some of their worst fears of being deserted. Now I want you to face what you have done and own your part in hurting each person in your life so you can move into the future." Mark Houston Recovery wants to help you and your family look to the future. That's why we're here to help you through this important step in your recovery and every other step.

Taking The 8th Step In Recovery

Twelve steps and twelve traditions says Learning how to live in the greatest peace, partnership and brotherhood with all men and women, of whatever description, is a moving and fascinating adventure. Every A.A. has found that he can make little headway in this new adventure of living until he first backtracks and really makes an accurate and unsparing survey of the human wreckage he has left in his wake. To a degree, he has already done this when taking moral inventory, but now the time has come when he ought to redouble his efforts to see how many people he has hurt, and in what ways. This reopening of emotional wounds, some old, some perhaps forgotten, and some still painfully festering, will at first look like a purposeless and pointless piece of surgery. But if a willing start is made, then the great advantages of doing this will so quickly reveal themselves that the pain will be lessened as one obstacle after another melts away.   Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, p. 77-78

Step Eight is basically a social house cleaning, in the same way Step Four was personal housecleaning. In Step Eight of alcohol and drug recovery we're basically setting out to clean up all the bruised relationships and the pockets of guilt, pain, fear, resentment, and sadness that we have kept inside all this time connected to the shameful past of addiction. All of this locked inside of us presents a major obstacle to reconnecting with ourselves, our friends, family and God. Mark Houston Recovery wants you to get past that internal roadblock on your path to recovery and a life free of addiction.

Drug And Alcohol Recovery -- The List Is Life

The list you make comes from your inventories that were made in step 4 and spending some time in prayer asking God to show us any harms we have put into the universe that we need to clean up, to repair. This step like some of the others requires the action of the pen and the paper. The power of the word. Reminding ourselves we agreed to go to any lengths for success over alcohol and drugs, with the 8th step you put forth the effort to pay back in kind the wreckage and damage you've caused, to payback the loans, to set the wrongs right and to begin a powerful process of healing. At Mark Houston Recovery, this is where we want every resident to be at the 8th step -- ready to be accountable for their life of addiction to drugs an alcohol and ready to make a change not only within themselves but with the relationships they had with everyone in their life.