Step 9 Questions: Planning Your Amends
These Step 9 questions help you plan each amends before you make it and look back at it afterward. Work through them for every name on your list, one name at a time. Question 4 is the one you never skip: if an amends could hurt anyone, you talk it over with a human sponsor or pastor first.
You can answer on paper or in the app. Either way, go over your plan with your sponsor before you go.
1. Which amends is easiest? Start there.
Look at your Step 8 list. Find a name where the harm is clear, the person is reachable, and nobody else could get hurt. That is your first amends.
Guidance: Starting easy isn’t avoiding the hard ones. It is building the habit and the courage you’ll need for them.
2. What exactly will you say? Rehearse it before you go.
Write it out. Keep it under a minute. A simple shape: what you did, that it was wrong, and a question about what you can do to make it right.
Guidance: Cut every sentence that starts with “but” or “because.” Don’t explain your drinking unless they ask. Rehearse out loud with your sponsor or in the app.
3. How might they respond? What will you do if they’re angry?
Picture three responses: warm, cold, and angry. Plan what you’ll do with each. With anger, the usual answer is to listen, not defend, and thank them for hearing you.
Guidance: Their response doesn’t decide whether you did your part. Some amends land badly and still matter.
4. Could any of your amends hurt someone else? Who have you talked it over with?
This is the safety question. Mark any amends that involves:
- money owed, especially large amounts
- the law, or anything that could have legal consequences
- an affair, or someone else’s private life
- a former partner
- anything that could cost your family their peace, income or safety
Each of those gets talked over with a human sponsor or pastor before you do anything. Write down who you talked to.
Guidance: The step itself says “except when to do so would injure them or others.” That clause protects other people. It is not a way out of amends you simply dread.
5. After an amends: how did it go?
Write a few lines. What happened? How did you feel? Is anything left to repay or change? Is this now a living amends, an ongoing change in how you treat them?
Guidance: Call someone afterward. Then pray the after-amends prayer.
Before you call Step 9 done
The two checks asked before the step is marked complete:
- Has every amends been made, started, or become a living amends?
- Did you talk the risky ones over with a human sponsor or pastor first?
A verse to read before you go
“If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.”
More Scripture is on the Step 9 verses page, and the book’s guidance is summarized on the Step 9 page. Next comes the daily habit of the Step 10 questions.
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