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Making Mistakes Means Making Amends
Daily Herald October 24, 1998
You can't live without making mistakes. Some mistakes may hurt yourself.
But other mistakes, particularly in the way you treat other people,
can hurt others. There are many unhealthy ways of trying to deal with
mistakes. There is only one healthy to handle them. You can't erase
mistakes. You can't wish they didn't happen. They did. You have to
accept that you made them, and deal with the consequences of making
them. Many people try to avoid this. They may minimize their behavior.
They try to make light of it. They may deny they made a mistake or
hurt someone else, mainly because they don't want to have to face
the feelings they will have to handle within themselves, if they admit
to it. Another way of trying to avoid facing a mistake is to blame
someone else. If you can make or believe that others are responsible
for what you did, then you are off the hook.
Denying, minimizing or blaming doesn't do a thing to repair the
damage done by mistakes. Hurting someone is like punching a hole in
the asphalt on the street. The longer it is left unattended, the more
that wear and water will make that hole bigger and bigger. Eventually
that hole will swallow up anything that drives into it.
It hurts to accept that you made a mistake. You may feel embarrassed,
ashamed, foolish or guilty. But do these feelings help you to deal
with life better? Likely not. The healthy way to handle mistakes in
life is to admit to them, accept them, and respond to them. This is
difficult. You have to do this, both in your head, and your gut. It
is much harder to accept responsibility for a mistake than it is to
merely admit to it. It's even harder to find an appropriate way to
respond, which is to make amends for your mistake. You can't just
pick things up as they were, pretending that the mistake didn't happen.
It did! And there isn't such a thing in life as a quick fix. You may
want to fix things up quickly. But that is really a bit of trying
to pretend that it didn't happen and that others weren't hurt by your
behavior.
Making amends means that you accept what you did, and more importantly,
you accept the effect it had on the other person. This means listening
to the other person, letting them talk their feelings out, and recognizing
their feelings as being true and real for them. It means putting themselves
in their shoes, something that can be very hard when you are wound
up with your own feelings.
It also requires patience. You can drop and break something in a
minute. It may take hours or days to repair it. And no matter how
great that "super glue" may be, it is never, exactly the same as it
was before. And people usually take even more time to heal than things.
Making amends means listening to the other person and finding out
what you can do, which will help that relationship to become right
again. This may not what first comes to your mind. For when you make
amends, you need to focus on the feelings of the person who was hurt,
not your own feelings, and that takes effort.
Making amends is one of the important steps in the AA program. It
is also the most important thing for all of us to focus on when we
have knowingly, or even unknowingly, hurt someone else. Yes we all
make mistakes. We can grow and learn from them, both within ourselves
and in our relationships with others, but only if we take the time,
effort and energy to make amends.
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