From Saying Sorry to Staying Sorry: Breaking Harmful Patterns in Recovery

You don’t have a problem saying sorry; you have a problem staying sorry.

Step Ten, promptly admitting a wrong, is taken by many in the rooms as a requirement to make an immediate apology. We hear people in the rooms sharing their stories of how they gossiped, treated someone badly or otherwise committed a harm and the apologies that followed soon after.

But one fellow added something to the mix when he said, “I became angry with my wife this afternoon. I left the kitchen in a huff and went to the garage. After banging around my workbench for an hour, I finally cooled off and went back into the house and said to her, “I am sorry I lost my temper.” Her reply was hard to take, but I had to admit there was a lot of truth in it.

She said, “You never have a problem saying sorry, but you have a problem staying sorry. Your apologies will be much more credible if you don’t repeat the same patterns over and over. Just because someone disagrees with you doesn’t give you the right to blow your top. But this is your pattern. And saying you are sorry is good — don’t get me wrong. I accept your apology, as I have accepted all your other apologies for the same behaviours.”

“Wow, that felt like a two-by-four right up the side of my head. And, after a chat with my sponsor, I realized she was right. I had a pattern of angry responses to her and others. If someone disagreed with me, I would lose my cool. Sometimes it was a temper tantrum, sometimes I’d get all huffy, and sometimes I’d just pout. I hoped he would criticize my wife. But he had observed the same pattern as my wife and thought I should be grateful to her for pointing this out.

Once again, I learned that repetitive Step Ten admissions were a sign that I was powerless over the character defect causing the offence. And usually, at the same time, I could see that my life was less manageable. This then triggered the application of the Steps to that problem.

“With this understanding, I could address the problem and ask God to help me identify and remove the exact nature of this defect, manifested in this pattern of behaviour. It was only by going deep into the problem and my character that I could learn to “stay sorry,” which avoided having to “say sorry.”