It wasn’t until the later years of my long-term recovery when I realized that I made a lot of unnecessary amends. I put myself in overly vulnerable situations because while I did choose decent sponsorship over the years, 12 Step recovery does not offer trauma-informed guidance (as an oldtimers would say, “Nor was it meant to”).
Recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous calls for a kind of ripping-the-flesh from bone, rugged bootstrap individualistic honesty that can feel both fucking liberating and literally exposing.
As a gender non-conforming lesbian moving through AA’s church basements, spaces, where the tension is often heightened for queer folks, our healing is conflicted from the jump.
In order to heal the three-fold disease of alcoholism, the spiritual malady of mind, body, and spirit, we have to put our trauma and past aside so that we can “stick to the facts” and continue to work on implementing the tools and spiritual underpinnings of the program in order to practice a constant “deflation of ego.”
Before I really committed to recovery in 2011, I had gone to meetings in 2009. And even though I attended late night meetings, I felt like I walked into a Sunday worship situation. A lot of people smiling, talking about God, holding hands and praying — well, for this recovering Catholic (literal Catholic school girl my whole life, from Kindergarten to college graduation), and for someone who was a few years out from the closet, those meetings were the last place I wanted to be.
To be blunt, I would have rather died than be back there again.
The program’s language about surrender, moral inventory, and amends is meant to free us from the “wreckage of the past.” One of the co-founders of the program, Bill Wilson, wrote a series of short essays on the steps, in the AA 12-in-12 text. In the chapter on Step 9, he writes that the process does not unfold in a vacuum. It unfolds in rooms shaped by people, beliefs, and biases, some compassionate, some less so.
“There will be those who ought to be dealt with just as soon as we become reasonably confident that we can maintain our sobriety. There will be those to whom we can make only partial restitution, lest complete disclosures do them or others more harm than good. There will be other cases where action ought to be deferred, and still others in which by the very nature of the situation we shall never be able to make direct personal contact at all” (AAWS 83).
While drinking (and ++) we have done a great deal of damage. Making amends, in theory, is an act of repair. Making amends, in practice, is a very different occasion, “and in sharp contrast with those hangover mornings when we alternated between reviling ourselves and blaming the family (and everyone else) for our troubles” (84).
If making amends is about writing and righting wrongs: acknowledging harm, taking responsibility, and attempting to restore integrity where it was broken, what happens to the queer person in the program who has been advised “to go to these people, to tell them what AA is, and what we are trying to do,” asking us to translate our recovery into a language that does not recognize our humanity?
[Queer history in AA can be found under the guise of the program’s spiritual duty of the traditions and concepts, but true queer history is found beyond the institutional walls because systemic injustices “often manufacture plausible excuses for dodging these issues entirely” (85).]
We are often told to stop acting from a place of “terminal uniqueness” and to not stop thinking about ourselves and how this affects us, as “the alcoholic is an extreme example of self-will run riot” (AA Big Book 62).
Would lying to your family about your whereabouts, because telling people who don’t accept you, that you’re going to gay bars, where drinking to excess has become a coping mechanism and lying a survival strategy when you’re 20 years old?
The steps work, don’t get me wrong. But how effective is a repetition of harm under the guise of spiritual duty?
Sometimes making amends starts to feel less like a spiritual practice and more like a competitive sport. In meetings, because “we are not a glum lot” you’ll hear in shares (indirectly, and sometimes directly), who’s done more, who’s gone further, who’s willing to expose themselves the most in the name of “a searching and fearless moral inventory”.
There’s an unspoken hierarchy to thoroughness, where the people who claim to be the most “recovered” are often the ones pushing the hardest, holding up extreme vulnerability as the pinnacle of spiritual awakening.
But those same people, who proudly “unload a detailed account of extramarital adventuring,” or worse, can end up weaponizing the darker, non–trauma-informed corners of AA even though the programs suggests, “let’s try to avoid harming,” followed by a super-Christian axiom, “It does not lighten our burden when we recklessly make the crosses of others heavier” (AAWS 86).
Before the internet Big Book Thumpers come for me, let me say this before the verbal flogging begins: my writing this has nothing to do with asking the program to bend to me or to my needs. I’ve done the whole “take what you need and leave the rest” for my entire sobriety.
What I am writing and reflecting about is what was framed as rigor and commitment, how I learned the phrase “spiritual principles before personalities” to start to look a lot more like coercion, especially for those, like myself, who are queer or others who are already navigating marginalization.
“Suppose that this may continue to go undetected, if we say nothing.” Right?
When I did my first 5th Step, and took a look at my defects in 6 and 7, and made my list of amends in 8, and began the process of amends in 9, I can honestly tell you that I felt shame lift a bit. I started to feel a sense of purpose, but I was definitely not more aligned with who I wanted to be.
When I became a member and got sober, it was also like I became an evangelical Hunting Wives wannabe with the blue Big Book in hand. No offense, but I completely reverted, moving away from my L-Word/Shane androgynous aesthetic towards looking like a trad wife part of a bible study group with a secret under my skirt.
Even though I found love in/because of AA, my AA girlfriend was just as emotionally and spiritually Kumbaya-ed as the rest of our peers. — We used to wear rubber wristbands with the phrase “God Squad” on them. Doing the right thing according to these unsaid standards became very clear. And because I, as an addict, loved a good dopamine hit, this just fed the cycle of addiction in a completely different people-pleasing, self-silencing sort of way.
I can look back now and say that it was genuinely not any of my sponsors’ fault. How could it be? Like myself, they all were raised in AA without trauma-informed guidance, “we are not doctors and we don’t pretend to be,” so the whole amends thing can become quite precarious.
A sponsor is not a mental-health professional. While they might have mental health knowledge and lived experience, they often do not understand trauma themselves, power dynamics (which for many sponsors becomes a weird authoritarian power trip thing), and/or the realities of marginalization that may welcome blanket amends without discernment; “cost what it may?” (87).
Think about it. We come into recovery really holding onto our seats, trying to work on honesty, pushing ourselves toward complete willingness because we don’t want to die, and yet, in this “given set of conditions” as people (and as a community) who have experienced hatred, rejection, discrimination, objectification, and harm tied to our gender or sexual identities, being told to “clean our side of the street” when people just look at us as liars or attention-seekers really blurs into taking responsibility for wounds we never caused. That pain was never ours to own.
In those moments, now looking back, I feel disappointment and protection for my newly sobering self because the line between accountability and self-erasure was dangerously thin.
It wasn’t until I started to get a “few 24s” under my belt that I started to really peel back the layers of queerphobic trauma and internalized homophobia with “tools outside the program,” a.k.a. therapy. And when I started to do that work, as in like almost at ten years sober, and having the unique advantage of distance [from certain family members and “friends”] because of the COVID-19 pandemic . . .
I know that sounds a bit shitty and horrible to say, but the distance saved my life. And not in some over-the-top dramatic, all-at-once kind of way. But I even got a little distance from the churchy-AA meetings. I started to choose my people more wisely. In the quiet, disorienting pandemic era, I could finally hear my own thoughts without interruption.
I started to begin exploring my gender identity as a lesbian more and more. I started to separate what was mine from what had been handed to (and expected of) me. I realized that the proximity to singular-narrative institutions and tightly bound personal circles had made it much harder for me to distinguish my own voice and be fully out as a queer person.
During that early time of my sobriety, those voices insisted they knew better for me, and if I listened and “followed directions” and if I proved “the readiness to take the full consequences of [my] pasts, and to take responsibility for the well-being of others at the same time,” (87) I was rewarded, shown that they approved.
When in all reality, what I had taken as guidance, even under the well-intentioned advice or or suggestions from others, was riding on their own queerphobic agenda, where “unity” was dressed up as conformity.
I’ll never forget being invited to speak at a spiritual breakfast around my one-year soberversary. I all but had a nun-outfit on. I say that half-jokingly. But I wore a long dress, and covered my tattoos with a sweater, and had a cross around my neck. My long-hair was tied back in a bun, neat, and in place. I walked up to the podium with the blue book in hand, in front of a room of 300 fellow members.
I think back to her, how much I learned in one year’s time that belonging was made conditional on how closely I could approximate a version of myself that made them feel comfortable, comfortable enough that they didn’t need to change the language practices in meetings, or the pamphlets in the literature rack, that even though I was gay, it was about AA and not me, even if it meant abandoning parts of me that were never really part of the problem to begin with.
I could only start to see once I was far enough away from them all.
Over the years of sponsoring others and working on myself, I have learned that just as much as people reject queer identity, there are also people who reject the idea of alcoholism as a disease and instead frame it as a moral failing or a choice.
Imagine what it’s like sitting down to make amends to such individuals as 3 months sober, when you already have no idea how to make the differentiation between your ass and your elbow, and you are required in the act of making amends to make a “general admission of [y/our] defects” (84).
And I still come back to that earlier moment: myself, two months sober, invited to a tropical wedding, asked to stand beside someone as family, and saying no because I was afraid I wouldn’t make it through without drinking. I knew it in my gut that if I went, I would relapse so bad, that I chose my peace of mind first.
Was that selfish? Was it a failure to show up, or the first real attempt at protecting something fragile and unfinished? Especially when the same person, even now, refuses to accept me and calls me a liar, and shuns me for telling the truth, because why should I be honest “at the expense of others”? What exactly was I supposed to be proving, and to whom?
Making amends to such individuals can place us in an overly vulnerable position. But because this approach has always been done, revealing the very worst and taking ownership so we can “begin to look the world in the eye,” as “good, sober women” — it is in those very moments that our recovery is actually minimized, and even worse, our queer identity is totally invalidated.
No alcoholic or addict wants to do the things they’ve done, or the lengths they went to or the places to get drunk or use. We come into recovery looking at our feet, standing in the back of the meeting rooms, because we don’t want anyone to see us. We know people have been affected by our drinking. But, to be frank, we were the ones who have been most affected by it.
I had some really nice amends moments. And some not so nice. Not to mention how skeptical some friends and family were because I went from dancing in my bra at the gay bar to quoting King James bible (I know AA is not a religious program, but just stay with me here) and dropping the G word (God, not gay) left and right.
I learned how to sound like good AA and a good, sober woman.
And in many amends instances, instead of healing, the interactions reopened wounds, and I was left to take the blame for people who really hurt me and did wrong by me. This only reinforced self-hatred and shame.
For gender non-conforming lesbians, safety and discernment are not optional — they are essential. I’ve been robbed while drunk at Henrietta Hudson’s because I was passed out in a blackout at the bar. My father found me because my cousin called every gay bar in Manhattan, describing what I looked like to the bartenders. I had really good opportunities in sobriety to make amends and show gratitude, without practicing evasion.
I felt confident in sobriety and taking ownership for the stories that led me to the program. These experiences became lessons that I was able to pass down and share with others.
Yet, I return to one particular amends: being left at a diner in the middle of an amends is one of those stories. It lands clean on the surface: I showed up, I did the whole thing, told them honestly about what I was doing and why we were there, and I had no control that I drove almost two hours for the person to take one look at me and walk away. Yes, it was a painful reminder that willingness is enough, that the outcome was not mine to manage or own.
BUT, when I look back on it, and see the version of that amends as I understood it then, to how I understand it now, it was reckless. To sum up: the amends was for one of the guys that I had “dated” as an accessory because I was closeted and afraid to come out. And while we did not date very long (I think by day 3 I was already suffocating, because I knew I couldn’t keep up with the lie), the amends was a situation where complete disclosure of the damage did more harm to me than me finding the courage to show up with the right attitude for the sake of “willing to go to any lengths” for my sobriety.
For non-AAers, what I really mean to say is, there was no immediate sense of spiritual clarity in that moment; just more over-exposure and dangerous vulnerability. It had nothing to do with my drinking, but it did at the same time. You know? I felt really bad about myself and embarrassed, and it definitely kicked my own internalized homophobia back in gear.
When that kind of amends story gets passed on to a sponsee, of course it can function as guidance. It can loosen their grip on the idea that amends need to be received well to “count.” It can prepare newcomers for unpredictability, for disappointment, because let’s be real, for the most part, making amends sucks, even though there’s freedom and light at the end of the tunnel. In a very real sense, it’s useful for our sense of selves as alcoholics in recovery, but not very useful for queer folks who are trying to overcome those moments of our pasts.
Also, in the same breath, it also normalizes a level of susceptibility that is absolutely unsafe. When it’s framed without context — without acknowledging power, history, or identity, for a queer person, it becomes more about how much you’re expected to withstand in the name of growth.
I share all this because I am constantly thinking about recovery and growth and how some things get used as teaching tools, as if the harm becomes justified because it can be repurposed in some way. And maybe it was meaningful at that time, but that doesn’t mean it was benign.
I believe that without a trauma-informed lens, that kind of “being left in a diner” story can perpetuate the idea that our role is to show up, confess, absorb whatever comes back, and label it “progress, not perfection.” As queer people, we have already done so much emotional labor, we have always already been navigating exclusion and silencing, that these sort of risks can hurt us down the road of recovery because these conversations are not happening in the rooms.
So, where do I stand after writing on this? Well, I am sitting in that tension. Amends are helpful, and they can be harmful. They can open something up, or they can reopen something that never fully closed. And because we are desperate to get and stay sober, we are “quite willing to reveal the very worst” (84).
And maybe the most honest thing for me to say . . . is to let it all stay complicated. I know, vague. I mean, we are taught in recovery not to trust ourselves and our minds because we have a disease that is always lying to us and wants us dead. Problem here, noted.
As queer people, there were times that we (ourselves) were all we had. Are there exceptions?
To say: this happened, and I’m not entirely sure what to do with it, except that it changed how I think about amends, and about who gets to be safe in the process, I mean . . . we do have to be mindful when helping others get sober that the steps and making amends is not about retraumatization, even if these conversations “begin in a casual or natural way” (85).
If you’re still with me, thank you for hanging with me this long. I know, it’s an unpopular opinion. But just as much as we have to “right our wrongs,” our recovery experiences should [“must” — IYKYK] include the right to set boundaries, to choose not to make direct amends when doing so would cause harm to ourselves, and to redefine what accountability looks like in the context of actual lived experience and not measured against the “this is how it’s always been done” rule (not rule).
Queer people owe amends to ourselves. We do in fact live our lives differently from the general population of AA.
I am so grateful for discovering that there were actual queer meetings of AA (and I only found them out because of pandemic Zoom meetings). Refusing to perpetuate harm is not our agenda to change the program or its principles. We are just tired of exposing ourselves to further injury in the name of a rigid interpretation of the steps (which is a mirror to our political climate in American society today). “Are we going to be so rigidly righteous about making amends that we don’t care what happens . . .? (86).
We’ve sacrificed our sense of selves and safety enough for the sake of completeness and community in recovery, with family, friends, and so on.
Recovery should make more room so that authenticity and safety aren’t only relegated to those who are insulated by the socio-cultural domains of the institution.
There, I said it.
© Danielle Bacibianco 2026 | All rights reserved
Also available to read here: https://medium.com/@drbacibianco/healing-or-harm-the-unsaid-dangers-of-making-recovery-amends-without-trauma-informed-support-914e903cbdde