Making Amends

Making amends is a vital step in cleaning out the toxic energies you have within you. Shame, guilt, feelings of inadequacy, embarrassment and regret are all energetically inside you on a cellular level. They don't sit politely in your memory waiting to be dealt with. They sit in your gut and in your shoulders, and they wake you up at three in the morning.

I know this from the inside. When I was using, I did things I'm not proud of. I lied to people who loved me, I disappeared on people who needed me, and I was dishonest in ways big and small, because addiction runs on dishonesty the way a car runs on gas. When I got clean, the drugs were gone, but every one of those things was still in me, festering. Getting sober was only the beginning. Getting clean all the way down took amends.

To detox your negative energies is vital. Taking accountability for your actions, and for your inactions, will help cleanse your energetic field. It also facilitates some level of healing between you and your person, and I say some level on purpose, because you don't get to decide how much. That part belongs to them.

Here is where a lot of folks get it wrong, and I got it wrong too at first. Apologies are great. However, taking action to create a new way of BEING is most important. An apology says I see what I did, while a changed life says and I'm not doing it anymore. The second one is the amends, and the first one is just the doorway.

And there's a piece nobody warns you about. Learning to listen to the people who feel you have harmed is a huge growth opportunity. It's also excruciating, because every part of you will want to explain, to add context, and to say but you have to understand what I was going through. Don't do it. Sit there and let them tell you what it was like to be on the other side of you. You survived far worse than an uncomfortable conversation. You can survive this, and something in you will get lighter the minute you stop defending the person you used to be.

Some amends can't be made face to face, because some people are gone and some people would be harmed by hearing from you, and part of taking accountability is knowing the difference. For those, you make what we call living amends, which means you become, every day, the kind of person who would never have done that thing. That counts, and in some ways it counts most of all.

Be courageous and take the next step! You already did the hardest thing, which was to look, so now go clean it up. On the other side of that conversation is a version of you who can look people in the eye, and that is worth every bit of what it costs.