Giving It Back

While working the Steps with my sponsor, I began thinking about what it would mean to forgive my father, the alcoholic in my family. I knew that when the time came to address this part of my recovery, I wanted to do something significant—something I would remember, something that would carry weight for me.

My dad was the authority figure in our family. When he drank, he was intimidating and frightening—a force to be reckoned with. He used fear as a weapon to keep us in line, even when he wasn’t drinking. I grew up carrying the fear, chaos, and uncertainty of his alcoholism, along with a tremendous amount of resentment.

My dad quit drinking and began attending AA when I was fifteen, but the rest of us never received counseling for what we had experienced. The drinking stopped, but its impact on me did not. I carried shame, guilt, and trauma. I was reactive, often angry and frustrated, and lived in survival mode without understanding why. I hated feeling that way, and sometimes I hated myself for it.

As I worked the Steps, I began to understand that my freedom would require forgiveness. Not forgetting. Not excusing. Not pretending that what happened didn’t matter. Forgiveness, for me, meant releasing what I had been carrying for so long.

My dad had been dead for many years before I ever found ACA. So when I reached Step Nine, I had to wrestle with a question: How do I make amends to someone who is no longer here? My fellow travelers suggested I write him a letter.

So I did.

But I wanted to do more than put words on paper. I wanted to make amends in a way that felt meaningful—to acknowledge what had happened, recognize what I had carried, and finally give it back.

My dad was buried in a small family cemetery about three hours from my home. One morning, I drove there, taking my time and passing through the area where he had grown up. The cemetery is a historic site on a farm in the middle of nowhere, with generations of my family buried there.

I brought my Fourth Step inventory—the one I had painstakingly written and shared with my sponsor. I walked among the headstones, looking at the names of those who came before me and thinking about how family dysfunction, trauma, and unresolved pain can move from one generation to the next.

Then I sat beside my father’s grave and wrote three letters: one from my inner child, one from my inner teenager, and one from me as an adult. I gave voice to the different parts of myself and the ways my father’s alcoholism and behavior had affected each of them.

I read the letters to him. I cried.

Then I told my dad that I was giving it all back—the fear, guilt, shame, resentment, and burdens I had carried for so long.

They were never mine to own.

Never mine to carry.

I told him I would no longer carry them forward, and I would do everything I could not to pass them on to my children. I also acknowledged that I had caused hurt of my own and that I wanted to take responsibility for that.

I burned the letters and my Fourth Step inventory and buried them with him.

Forgiving my dad also meant allowing myself to see him as more than the worst things he had done. He had made some attempts to break the cycle he had inherited. I believe he did the best he could with the tools, knowledge, resources, and support he had at the time.

I don’t believe we can truly break a cycle until we have the tools to do something different. Before ACA, I tried my best, too. I simply didn’t have what I needed.

ACA gave me those tools.

That day, I released my father—and everything I had been carrying—to my Higher Power. I forgave him.

I couldn’t change the past. I couldn’t undo what happened. But I could choose what I would carry forward.

So I gave it back.

And I walked away lighter.