Step Eight: In Your Wake

Sin don’t happen in a vacuum, y’all — for realz!

Step eight: “Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.”

This ain’t as hard as it seem, ‘specially after you already done spent time righting down resentments, fears, guilt and shame. There’s names attached to some of the shit on your list (your “shit” list). Some of those people you might want to try and make up with for the things you did to them. Whether or not they feel the same way about you beside the point. Making amends ain’t about a bunch of happy endings.

This step can be like wishful thinking. Who, if you could make good with in your life, would you? Truth is, it may actually be there’s a lot of people out there you wouldn’t mind having choke on a chicken bone (a moment of respect for Mama Cass). Face it, there’s some people out there that have done you dirt and they don’t deserve your forgiveness. That’s part of making amends too. Forgiving people even when they’re don’t deserve it.

The people we can’t stand, chances are we did something and they took it the wrong way. Maybe we made ‘em jealous. Maybe we didn’t return their affection. Maybe we took the job they wanted, or the object of they affection. Maybe they snubbed us and we just retaliated. Point is we gotta be willing to consider our part. Most time we can find something that, if not the cause, made things worse ‘cause how we reacted to it, even if it was not telling the person what they did that bothered us enough to never wanna speak to them again.

Sometimes, like with situations of abuse, there’s nothing we could have done. We might even blame ourselves for things that happened to us that were out of our control. We might isolate and find other ways to protect ourselves that are also punishments. We may be carrying trauma for shit happened ‘cause we ashamed. A lot o’ folks can go ahead and put they own names at the top of the list for shit like that.

The point of step eight is making a list of the people, for one reason or other, we feel guilty to think about, or people who give us a knot in the gut when we think about certain moments with them. Those feelings we wanna get free from. We can look at why we feel that way and, when we can, doing something about it. What we do is the next step, so we ain’t gotta even think about that part yet.