Most of us didn’t wake up every morning trying to hurt people. We weren’t sitting around planning how to disappoint our families, break promises, disappear, lie, or make people worry about us. A lot of the time, we had no intention of hurting anybody.
But good intentions don’t erase harm.
That can be uncomfortable to admit. We may want to explain what we meant, what we were going through, or why we did what we did. Those things may even be true. But Step Eight asks us to look at something simpler: Who was harmed by our actions?
There is a difference between saying, “I never meant to hurt you,” and being able to say, “I can see that I hurt you.” The first statement explains me. The second one begins to see you. Maybe willingness starts there. We don’t have to condemn ourselves or rewrite our entire past. We just become willing to see the effect we had on the people around us.
Is there a harm I have dismissed because I didn’t intend for it to happen?
