Amends and trauma recovery.

You don’t have to be thrilled with every decision you’ve ever made. I’m not. 

You don’t have to always like the person you are, or you have been. I don’t. 

No trauma survivor is perfect, because no human being is perfect. We all have things we wish we would have done differently. Decisions we really whiffed on. 

Speaking for myself, I struggle with memories of times when I treated people poorly. To use a not-so-clinical term, I could be a real asshole at times. 

(The fact that I’m using the past tense isn’t to say that I can’t be an asshole now— it’s to connote that the times I’m thinking of were in the past. I assure you, I, along with every human being who continues to live, continue to have the capacity to be an asshole.) 

I look back on times when I have not treated people in my life well, and, sure, I can see how my trauma and addiction issues have influenced my behavior— but that doesn’t excuse my behavior. 

There’s a reason why the Twelve Step recovery traction, for all its shortcomings, famously includes steps that involve taking a moral inventory of our behavior and making amends: because no matter how much we may have been suffering or struggling at any given time, we still are quite capable of making very human mistakes and missteps, especial when it comes to relating to the fellow humans. 

Trauma Brain will try to convince us that we ARE our mistakes and missteps— that we’re nothing BUT an asshole. 

That’s not true. 

Trauma Brain will sometimes do this jiujitsu move where it tries to convince us that because we know we’ve behaved poorly at times, it’s also probably the case that we’re to blame for the abuse, neglect, or other trauma we endured. 

That is also not true. 

A recovery program that does not include accounting for our less-than-ideal moments as humans is incomplete. Most everybody reading this has had moments when our pain has contributed to us not being our best self. 

But a recovery program that reduces us to those moments when we failed to be our best self is also incomplete. Because we’re more than those moments we wish we could take back. 

There’s this myth that trauma survivors use what happened to us as an “excuse” to behave badly— but if you have any significant contact with survivors, you know that’s absolutely not the case. 

The truth is, it’s most often the opposite: trauma survivors tend to take on way too much personal responsibly when it comes to our mistakes, and fail to account for how our pain or symptoms were impairing our judgment or bandwidth. 

If we’re going to take realistic responsibility for anything in our lives, we need to be crystal clear on what we could and couldn’t do in the moment. 

Did I have the capacity to treat the people in my life better than I did? I think so— but I also know that my trauma and addiction issues compromise my decision making and emotional availability at times. That’s not an excuse— that’s just reality. 

The truth is, we can both take responsibility for our choices, AND acknowledge the role trauma and other pain play in our poor choices. 

We can have compassion for the people we hurt— AND for ourselves. 

The reality is, to this day, I’m not entirely clear why I treated some people the way I did. I hate that I treated certain people the way I did. I permanently damaged friendships and relationships with people I very much value, as well as behaved poorly toward people I didn’t even know all that well. That happened. That was real. 

I have to live with that. Behavior has consequences, and we choose the consequence when we choose the behavior. 

But I can also acknowledge that I was exactly as vulnerable and/or compromised as I was. That, too, is real. And that, too, should be part of the story I tell myself about who I am. 

What we’re really talking about here is self-forgiveness. 

Contrary to what you may believe, self-forgiveness is not a “get out of jail free” card when it comes to past mistakes. 

But it is a “you don’t have to hate yourself forever” card.

It’s a card we have to learn to play in trauma recovery— because we’re not going to recover while actively hating ourselves. 

Easy does it. None of this is simple or easy. 

You just breathe; blink; focus— and do the next right thing.