Never Say You Are Sorry?
Member
Join Date: Jul 2012
Location: Manchester, UK
Posts: 1,111
Never JUST say "I am sorry".
Refusal to apologise, admit you're wrong or reflect is the domain of active alcoholics or people with a hardline personality disorder.
Not a healthy thing to be around.
P
Refusal to apologise, admit you're wrong or reflect is the domain of active alcoholics or people with a hardline personality disorder.
Not a healthy thing to be around.
P
12 Step Recovered Alcoholic
Join Date: Apr 2012
Location: New Zealand
Posts: 6,613
The big book puts it far better than I could:
"Yes, there is a long period of reconstruction ahead. We must take the lead. A remorseful mumbling that we are sorry won't fill the bill at all. We ought to sit down with the family and frankly analyze the past as we now see it, being very careful not to criticize them. Their defects may be glaring, but the chances are that our own actions are partly responsible. So we clean house with the family, asking each morning in meditation that our Creator show us the way of patience, tolerance, kindliness and love.
The spiritual life is not a theory. We have to live it. Unless one's family expresses a desire to live upon spiritual principles we think we ought not to urge them. We should not talk incessantly to them about spiritual matters. They will change in time. Our behavior will convince them more than our words. We must remember that ten or twenty years of drunkenness would make a skeptic out of anyone."
Denial in this area really has no place in recovery, though there are many, perhaps through fear, who would try and have everything swept under the carpet. But there is always some one around who will occasionally lift the corner of the rug and drag something out when it suits their purpose. That is the nature of sick relationships.
"Yes, there is a long period of reconstruction ahead. We must take the lead. A remorseful mumbling that we are sorry won't fill the bill at all. We ought to sit down with the family and frankly analyze the past as we now see it, being very careful not to criticize them. Their defects may be glaring, but the chances are that our own actions are partly responsible. So we clean house with the family, asking each morning in meditation that our Creator show us the way of patience, tolerance, kindliness and love.
The spiritual life is not a theory. We have to live it. Unless one's family expresses a desire to live upon spiritual principles we think we ought not to urge them. We should not talk incessantly to them about spiritual matters. They will change in time. Our behavior will convince them more than our words. We must remember that ten or twenty years of drunkenness would make a skeptic out of anyone."
Denial in this area really has no place in recovery, though there are many, perhaps through fear, who would try and have everything swept under the carpet. But there is always some one around who will occasionally lift the corner of the rug and drag something out when it suits their purpose. That is the nature of sick relationships.
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