...And then Actually Made that Amend!

Not all amends can be made without causing more harm than would make the amend worthwhile or helpful.  Some amends wouldn't mend anything: they would only serve to rip off a scab and reharm the other person or cause "fallout" harms on other innocent people.

In the case of the amend that I was facing (I almost wrote "confronted by" but as with most things in this recovery process, it wasn't something outside of me that was my problem: it was within me!) the other day, I ended up deciding that I could make an amend without causing more harm to my son's ex-girlfriend or to my son or to anyone else.  Even me.

Contrary to the advice given me by An Irish Friend of Bill (one of my all time favorite recovery bloggers!) I decided against making any sort of humorous approach with this amends.  While such an approach might work in a situation where the amend was being made by a woman to a woman, my sense (male as it is...) is that humor doesn't go in my favor when making an amends to a woman.  It never has worked that well when I've tried it with my wife, the object of most of my living amends, and I suspect it wouldn't have gone with with this woman either.

My amends was done as a response to her last unanswered text to me, in which she had apologized for any confusion she might have caused through the last couple of texts between us.  I'd never responded because I was just digging myself deeper and deeper with each text I made and I decided it best to just put down the shovel.  But on this last Saturday, I felt that I could simply respond to that text of hers and let her know that I needed to make a really big amends to her for what I had said in my earlier text to her.    I had struggled with remorse over my text for several days and it finally became clear to me that the statement I made was probably untruthful and certainly unnecessary and unkind.  I finally realized too that the source of my anger and saddness (which was the source of my stupid and ill-advised statement to her) was my emotional reactions to her and my son breaking up.  I hadn't dealt with these feelings head on, I'd pushed them down and negated them---and instead focused on her as the cause of my feelings. 

In time, I realized that my feelings had nothing to do with her or my son or their breakup.  They had to do with my own issues: anger over someone hurting my son, helplessness at being able to make my son's hurt vanish in an instant, saddness over her decision to break up not so much with my son, but with our entire family and, I suppose, with me.  She'd become another daughter to me and I hurt badly as a result of her decision.

I explained that to her briefly and told her to let me know if there was anything I could do to make this right.  I was going to try and avoid such statements in the future and I was going to try and be as helpful to both her and my son as they worked through this separation.

It worked I think.  We've had several text and email exchanges since then and no hard feelings or tension has been evident in them.  And I feel much lighter.

I love this process.  Much better than a bottomless bunch of drinks!

Take care!

Mike L.