When we think about harm, we usually think about something we did. The lie we told, the money we took, the argument we started, or the promise we broke. But some of our harms came from the things we simply stopped doing.
We stopped showing up. We stopped answering the phone. We stopped being dependable. Responsibilities became somebody else’s problem. People learned not to count on us because experience taught them that they couldn’t. Sometimes we didn’t create a big dramatic disaster. We just slowly disappeared from the parts of life where we were needed.
Step Eight asks us to look at that kind of harm too. Not to make ourselves feel guilty, but to see the whole picture. There may be people on our list who were harmed less by what we did to them and more by what we failed to give them.
Recovery gives us the chance to become people who show up again. But first, we have to be willing to see the places where we didn’t.
Is there someone I harmed more by my absence than by my actions?
