For years in Al-Anon, I understood Steps 8 and 9 the way most people do: “Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all” and “Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.”
I made my lists. I made calls I dreaded making. I sat across tables from people I’d hurt and said the hardest sentences of my life. That work mattered, and I don’t want to minimize it.
But it took me nearly two decades—and my training as a Human Architect—to realize there was a name missing from every list I ever made: my own.
I had spent years making amends to people I’d wronged while continuing, quietly, to wrong myself. I fed my body processed garbage and called it survival. I numbed feelings with Diet Coke and cigarettes and a wine club membership I didn’t examine too closely. I fit myself into a mold that made other people comfortable while my own soul went hungry. Nobody teaches you that self-neglect is a harm that requires amends too. I had to learn that the hard way, and now I want to make it easier for you.
Why Self-Neglect Belongs on Your Amends List
Here’s the truth I didn’t want to face for a long time: self-neglect is not a victimless choice. When you numb yourself, abandon your own needs, or shape-shift to fit in, you are harming someone. You’re just harming the one person our culture has taught you doesn’t count in that equation.
I spent years believing that putting myself last was a virtue. Good mothers do it. Good Christians do it. Good employees do it. But quietly abandoning yourself for the sake of everyone else’s comfort isn’t virtue; it’s a wound, and wounds left untended don’t heal on their own. They fester. They show up as resentment, exhaustion, and eventually as the kind of health crisis that forces you to pay attention whether you’re ready to or not.
If your table is an altar—and I believe it is—then so is your relationship with yourself. Every year you spent numbing, neglecting, or performing a version of yourself that wasn’t true was a year that altar went untended. Steps 8 and 9 exist to clean that altar and set it right again.
Step 8 Reframed: Making the List You’ve Never Made
Step 8 asks you to become willing to make amends. Most people skip straight past themselves when they build this list, because we’ve been trained to think of harm as something we do to others, not something we allow to happen to ourselves.
I want you to try something different. Take out a piece of paper and ask yourself honestly:
- Where have I neglected my body through food, rest, movement, or medical care I avoided?
- Where have I numbed feelings instead of feeling them through substances, screens, food, overworking, or people-pleasing?
- Where have I abandoned my own values or voice to keep the peace or fit in?
- Where have I spoken to myself in ways I would never allow someone to speak to my child or my best friend?
- Where have I delayed joy, rest, or care for myself, telling myself I’d get to it “someday”?
This isn’t an exercise in shame. It’s an honest inventory, the same non-judgmental accounting you’d bring to Step 10. You’re not building a case against yourself. You’re simply, finally, writing your own name on the list of people who deserve your amends.
Step 9 Reframed: What Amends to Yourself Actually Look Like
Step 9 is where the real transformation happens, because amends aren’t just apologies; they’re changed behavior. Making amends to yourself doesn’t mean journaling “I’m sorry” once and moving on. It means becoming a different kind of steward of your own life going forward.
Here’s what that’s looked like in my own journey:
Amends for self-neglect meant learning to cook and eat like I actually mattered. Not out of guilt or a diet mentality, but out of the same love I’d give to anyone I was responsible for feeding. My table became an altar again, one intentional meal at a time.
Amends for numbing meant sitting with feelings instead of drowning them. Putting down the cigarettes, examining the wine club membership, learning to feel grief instead of outrunning it. This was some of the hardest work of my life, and it’s ongoing.
Amends for fitting in meant learning to say what I actually believed, even when it cost me relationships or comfort. Every time I chose consumerism over simplicity, or silence over truth, I had been quietly wronging myself. Amends meant choosing differently, even when it was uncomfortable.
Amends for delayed joy meant actually getting back in the saddle, literally. For years, fear and physical decline had taken riding away from me. Reclaiming it wasn’t indulgent; it was restitution for years I’d told myself that joy could wait.
Notice that none of these amends involved a single conversation. Real amends to yourself, like real amends to anyone else, show up as sustained, changed action, not a one-time apology you can check off a list.
The Amends You Make Every Day
Just as Step 10 turned Step 9 into an ongoing practice rather than a one-time event, self-amends work the same way. Every day offers you a fresh opportunity to either continue the old pattern of self-neglect or to make it right, one small choice at a time.
This is where the P.A.U.S.E. framework and your daily Step 10 inventory become powerful allies. When you notice, in your evening inventory, that you spoke harshly to yourself or skipped caring for your body out of old habit, you have an immediate opportunity: promptly admit it, and then make the amends not through more self-criticism, but through the next choice. A kinder word. A nourishing meal. Ten minutes of rest you would have denied yourself a year ago.
Self-reconciliation isn’t a project with an end date. It’s a relationship you keep repairing and deepening, the same way any long-neglected relationship needs consistent care to heal rather than a single grand gesture.
Why This Work Restores Your Self-Worth
Self-worth doesn’t return because you decide to believe something nice about yourself. It returns through evidence—through the accumulated experience of treating yourself the way you’d treat someone you genuinely valued. Every amends you make to yourself is a small act of evidence-building: I matter enough to be fed well. I matter enough to feel my feelings instead of numbing them. I matter enough to tell the truth about who I am.
This is the deep work behind becoming a Next Level Human. You cannot build an authentic, sustainable identity on top of an unreconciled relationship with your own past. The self-neglect has to be named, grieved, and repaired, or it will keep quietly running the show underneath every goal you set and every version of yourself you try to build.
A Practice, Not a Performance
I won’t pretend this work is comfortable. Making amends to the people I’d harmed was hard, but in some ways, making amends to myself has been harder because there was no one across the table holding me accountable except me and God. But I can tell you this: healing your internal altar is some of the most sacred work you will ever do, and it changes everything downstream of it. Your relationships. Your health. Your capacity to actually receive the love and grace that’s been available to you all along.
You don’t owe the world a perfect track record of self-care to deserve amends. You simply owe yourself the willingness to finally add your own name to the list.
FAQ: Understanding Amends to Yourself
What are Steps 8 and 9 of the 12 Steps? Step 8 involves making a list of people harmed and becoming willing to make amends; Step 9 involves making direct amends wherever possible, unless doing so would cause further harm. Traditionally applied to relationships with others, these steps can also be applied to a person’s relationship with themselves.
Why is self-neglect considered a form of harm? Self-neglect—through numbing behaviors, self-criticism, chronic self-sacrifice, or ignoring one’s own needs—causes real, lasting damage to physical health, emotional wellbeing, and self-worth, even though it’s often culturally praised as selflessness or virtue.
How do you make amends to yourself? Amends to yourself involve honestly identifying patterns of self-neglect, then taking sustained, changed action rather than a single apology, such as nourishing your body, feeling emotions instead of numbing them, speaking to yourself with kindness, and honoring your own values and needs going forward.
Is making amends to yourself a one-time process? No. Like Step 10’s daily inventory, self-amends work is an ongoing practice. Old patterns of self-neglect can resurface, and each day offers a new opportunity to notice them and choose a different, more caring response.
