Author Archives: seacoastoa

How to Get Started Sponsoring in OA

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Yesterday’s Sponsor Training was inspiring. If you weren’t able to make it, this recap can give you some ideas about your own sponsorship opportunities.

Speaker One: How to Get Someone Started with the Food

Our first speaker focused on step one, and especially on helping a new sponsee define their plan of eating and gain abstinence. Here are three key points that our first speaker made:

  1. Share what you eat and how you created your food plan
  2. Everyone gets to develop their own food plan, and our role is to support them as they implement it
  3. Honesty is the most vital and crucial thing a sponsee needs in step one, and it’s our job to point this out and help them find it.

Speaker Two: How to Guide Someone Through the Steps

Next, our second speaker shared how to guide a sponsee through the steps:

  1. Share up to the level of your experience with the steps
  2. Remind them that this is a program of action and that the steps are the program
  3. Don’t listen to the doubts inside that say “My program isn’t good enough.”

Sponsorship: A Getting-Started Guide

We also passed along a copy of OA’s official sponsoring guide as well as Sponsorship: A Getting-Started Guide. This locally produced collection of Seacoast OA members’  experiences with sponsoring is now available on our Recovery Resources page. Here’s three key ideas from it as well:

  1. Just do it! Get started right away whether you have doubts or not—it’s worth it!
  2. It takes courage to ask someone else for help: Tell sponsees what a privilege it is to work with them and that everything they say is confidential
  3. We’re there to be as helpful as we can, never to judge, chastise, or belittle.

Q&A

Finally, we wrapped up with a wonderful Q&A that everyone in the room contributed their experience to. Here are a few questions, answers, and comments you may find helpful:

Q: How do we best help someone who is slipping?

A: Be gentle, we OAs are filled with enough shame. Tell them that hope is far from lost, and perhaps try offering this OA nugget, “simply resume.” It’s important to also help them trace the root cause of the slip so they can see the warning signs next time. For chronic slips, you might also try working with them on OA’s “Been Slipping and Sliding” worksheet or its “Strong Abstinence Checklist.”

Q: What do I do when a sponsee is constantly making excuses?

A: Remind them that this is a deadly malady that requires us to work hard for the solution. But we must remember that the motivation must come from within a sponsee, not from us. We are there to pass along our experience, not to enforce our suggestions, and everyone arrives at recovery in their own time.

Q: Do we continue to sponsor someone after they have completed the twelve steps?

A: Even when we have worked through all twelve steps, we remain chronically ill people who need the help and support of others. If we are “full” perhaps this sponsee will now require less intensive work, opening some time for you to work with others.

Wrapping Up

Everyone in the room had three things we seemed to all agree on:

  1. We will not be perfect sponsors
  2. Another’s inability to recover is not our fault, and another’s success is not ours to claim but God’s
  3. We cannot play therapist, nutritionist, or doctor to a sponsee—it’s not good for them or us!

If you couldn’t make it, we missed you. We’ll be doing this again in the fall, and we hope to see you then, and hear your experiences, too!

Tradition of the Month: Our Primary Purpose

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5. Each group has but one primary purpose—to carry its message to the compulsive overeater who still suffers.

The fifth tradition reminds us to keep it simple, silly. When we get into grand planning and big ideas, we addictive personalities often go astray. We can overreach and find ourselves diverting our individual and collective energies away from what we do well and into what we think we might do well. And that gets us in trouble.

After all, we’re still living with the faulty mind that needed OA in the first place. When we write our fourth step inventory, we see how our mind can twist things around. We see how we can at different times be grandiose or unreliable, generous or selfish, well meaning or indifferent. With this kind of brain, we often take on projects we can’t deliver on, get resentful with our inability to complete them, and find ourselves frustrated that the fruits of our brainstorms don’t inspire commitment and devotion to our ideas in others. As the Big Books says, the addict is, “even in his best moments, a producer of confusion rather than harmony.”

As individual OA members, if we don’t make it simple, we’re simply not going to make it. The same is true with our meetings and at the intergroup level. In our individual lives, when we focus, laser like, on what our Higher Power guides us toward, we usually feel purposeful. Inside we probably feel calm, or at least we sense a lack of conflicting emotions. When we act out of selfish interest and ignore our Higher Power, we will likely feel torn—our spiritual Spidey Sense will tell us that we’re not aligned with God’s purpose.

As a meeting or an intergroup, whenever we work to carry the OA message of hope, we feel assured. We are doing the work our Higher Power has set out for our organization at every level. When our motives and activities align with this goal, locating the group conscience doesn’t feel like grasping for the walls in a dark room. Instead it sometimes feels as though the answer was apparent all along, and we merely had to confirm it. In situations such as this, divisive votes need not be taken because substantial unanimity will be obvious to all participants.

Many situations, typically minor ones, arise that test the fifth tradition, and almost always with the finest intentions. Perhaps a book produced by an outside organization appears on the literature table, photocopies of a trusted (non-OA) food plan circulate during meeting time, or someone requests the intergroup to place an outside event on its website. In none of these cases has anyone gone about trying to harm OA or its members. But in such cases, it is the duty of our members to gently ask whether our primary purpose is reflected in these actions.

As the above examples suggest, tradition five is closely related to tradition six, which tells us to avoid doing anything that aligns us with an outside enterprise. Tradition five, however, goes a little further, by alerting us to potential dangers with inside enterprises. It is not, for example, our job to dispense nutritional advice or to host workshops on how to eat well. Most of us may well have the same trigger foods and dietary needs from our food plans, but we are not a diet-and-calories club. Those clubs have their job to do, and OA has its, which is to carry the message of hope.

We can make it simple for ourselves, our groups, and OA when we focus on carrying the message. When we sense division among members, we might lean on tradition five and ask whether everything we are doing is leading to the single goal of getting this message to compulsive eaters.

Step of the Month: Step 5

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  1. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

Imagine that you’ve decided to clean out your house. There’s too much stuff in there bogging you down, covering every surface, stuffing every closet. You’re constantly reminded by the clutter that it’s time to pare down. When you finally do it, you realize that you need to determine what stays and what goes, so you make a list as you sort through all the stuff.

Once the list is made, you need to get rid of everything that’s not useful, so you pick up the phone book and call for a dump truck. Then you ask a friend to come by and help you carry all the dreck out of your house. The driver arrives and backs up to the house, and you and your friend load the items you are throwing out into the truck, one by one. As you go, you carefully tick them off your list.

That’s exactly where we are in step five. Just prior, in step four, we made our list of the damaging attitudes, behaviors, thoughts, and situations that have gotten in our way. They have weighed us down, and every time we think about our lives, they are there to remind of us why we have sought comfort in food. But the trick is that making a list of our ugliest characteristics isn’t the same as getting rid of them. We need to expose them to the light of day where they lose their potency. We need to share them with another, understanding person who will see our humanity instead of judging us. We need to share them with God to demonstrate our continuing willingness to let go of what has blocked us from a relationship with our Higher Power.

Reading out our inventory to another person and God is how we load up the psychic dump truck so that our emotional and spiritual junk can be taken away from us.

* * *

The Big Book tells us that “a solitary self-appraisal seldom suffices.” We must reveal our darkest secrets and our tiniest missteps if we want to recover. Why? Because we have used food to bury our feelings alive. All the resentments, fears, and self-loathing remain inside of us, squirming to get out. If we leave even one or two behind, we will soon feel the need to beat them back with food once again.

Were that the only benefit of step 5—to expose our worst thinking to the disinfecting power of sunlight—we would be much better off than before we reached OA. Yet there is a further benefit from this step that pushes us onward. The OA Twelve and Twelve tell us “Through the fifth-step process, we begin to see reality.” Our damaged thinking begins to right itself:

All our striving to get ahead has been useless. We are neither above nor below the rest of the human race; we’re a part of it, shaped by the same basic needs and desires as all our fellows. Those of us who have belittled ourselves or felt we were worse than others also gain a new perspective. In talking honestly with another person about ourselves, we begin to feel a sense of relief. Someone knows all about us and still accepts us unconditionally. (47).

So we disinfect our insides, and we change our attitude about ourselves and others. And even that’s not all. We also learn, by watching our sponsor, how to listen. We will be grateful for that person’s help and support and will look forward to a time when we can sit in their chair, listening to another’s inventory with the same compassion and identification we were given. It is yet more motivation to continue through these steps and achieve the fullest extent of the spiritual awakening promised in step twelve.

Depending on how much we’ve written, reading our fifth step may take an hour, hours, days, even a month or more. No matter how long, this quiet, intimate, sometimes sad, and not infrequently hilarious process takes, the benefits can last a happy, joyous, and free lifetime.

Tradition of the Month: #4 Autonomy

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  1. Each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or OA as a whole.

What’s this mean in our meetings? Well for starters, Bill W. explains it this way in the AA 12 and 12:

Autonomy is a ten-dollar word. But in relation to us, it means very simply that every AA group can manage its affairs exactly as it pleases, except when AA as a whole is threatened.

So we can all do pretty much whatever we want, however we want, right? Well not quite. After all, the traditions, themselves, represent guidelines of conduct for meetings just as the steps do for individuals. The OA 12 and 12 says it pretty clearly:

Groups which ignore one or more of the twelve traditions bring discord to the fellowship.

But how can it be the business of one group what another does when we are autonomous? Think, for example, of the kind of heated discussion that what would happen at an intergroup meeting or just over the phone among friends if a local meeting started insisting its members use the diet regimen of an outside organization. This isn’t so hard to imagine for many of our program elders who witnessed the schism of OA over food plans. To this day, the wounds of that time affect how long-time members view their progress through OA.

How do we deal with groups that stray a little off the reservation? “An infraction of an OA tradition does not result in a group being summarily ejected from the Fellowship,” says the OA 12 and 12, ”we might not have any OA Fellowship at all if that were the case!” Groups that consistently ignore a tradition are usually, the 12 and 12 reminds us, not doing so out of hostility to the traditions, but more likely out of ignorance of them. Those well versed in the traditions have a responsibility to bring the matter to the group’s attention at a business meeting, lest the meeting lose its connections to the traditions and cease being effective at helping its members find recovery.

But what about the group that flaunts the traditions? The one that tells the traditions to stick it in their ear? Again, the OA 12 and 12:

In extreme cases…the group may be dropped from OA meeting lists which are published by intergroups and other OA service bodies. However, the service body taking such an action should do so only after much soul-searching. It is far too easy to use the power of the majority against groups in in the minority.

In other words, even service bodies need to recognize that their actions affect other groups and OA as a whole! The traditions and the steps counsel patience and dialog, not carrots and sticks. The offending meeting is likely to disappear if it doesn’t stick to OA principles because those principles are founded on the hard-won experience of twelve-step groups worldwide—they represent the collective wisdom of 75 years of helping addicts recover.

What about in our personal lives? How does tradition four help us live happy, joyous, and free? The slogan “live and let live” is embodied in this tradition. If someone doesn’t do things the way we think they should, we don’t have to resent them or release our anger on ourselves or others (through food or misbehavior). We don’t control anyone, and when we think the next right step is demanded, we might pause and talk the matter over with a trustworthy person and our Higher Power before taking any action.

Morning not mourning

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One of our Unity Day speakers said OA is the difference between “Good morning, God,” and “Good God, it’s morning.” Many, perhaps all, of use can understand the sentiment.

We eat compulsively all day for what seems like the millionth time. We feel lousy about ourselves. We feel the hopelessness of our disease. We may feel we need to eat in order to get to sleep. We may cry ourselves to sleep. Our minds race as we lay, trying to still our thoughts—and finding we cannot.

Eventually we sleep, hoping the nightmare of our daytime lives as compulsive eaters will slip away for at least a few hours so we can have some peace. But many of us experience as much anxiety asleep as we do awake. We dream about our own shortcomings. We dream of impossible situations we can’t extricate ourselves from. The nightmare follows us in sleep, and some of us wake in the dark and find ourselves drawn to the kitchen or a secret stash to seek relief from our unconscious mind.

Then we wake up in the morning, and we start the whole cycle over again.

This is no way to live we tell ourselves. How long until this phase of our life stops? Or until we find the magic someone who has the cure for our mind? Or until we give up altogether. These awful mornings are symptomatic of the “black promises” or the “bedevilments” the Big Book describes on page 52:

“We were having trouble with personal relationships, we couldn’t control our emotional natures, we were a prey to misery and depression, we couldn’t make a living, we had a feeling of uselessness, we were full of fear, we were unhappy, we couldn’t seem to be of real help to other people….”

So different from the promises we read at most meetings from page 83–84 of the Big Book. There we are promised all of these things if we only commit ourselves to the 12 Steps:

  • freedom
  • happiness
  • a lack of regret
  • serenity
  • peace
  • usefulness
  • the disappearance of self-pity
  • loss of selfishness
  • interest in others
  • transformation of our outlook and attitude
  • intuitive problem-solving ability.

Who wouldn’t want those? The lie we tell ourselves is that we have them or presently will if just stick it out and act of our own willpower. But why keep fighting when OA reminds us that calling BS on our minds will open us up to be saved from this awful disease? The program tells us that, in being simply open to the idea of a Power greater than ourselves, honestly examining our thinking and our actions, and being willing to clean up the past and give service, we will realize that we are not what we think we are—we are actually spiritual deep down inside, and we are capable of being saved from this disease.

When we work the Steps and seek the solution, we will be freed from the compulsion to eat, from the walking nightmare of our life. When we wake in the morning, we will be able to say “Good morning, God” and mean it. We will see morning, not mourning, in our minds.

What Are the 12 Steps of Overeaters Anonymous?

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OA is a “12 Step program” that saves our lives from the insidious danger of compulsive eating. But what exactly does that mean? What are the Steps? Why are they important? What happens if we do them? Or don’t do them?

“Our Invitation to You” from the book Overeaters Anonymous (aka: The Brown Book), tells us that OA is “not a diet and calories club.” While many of us come into OA wanting a solution to the physical issues that our eating has caused us, our program literature tells us that our cravings for food are “but a symptom.” A diet-and-calories club won’t address the underlying emotional and spiritual issues that allow the disease of food addiction to prey so easily on us. But that’s exactly what the 12 Steps are designed to do. That’s why our primary purpose is “to abstain from compulsive overeating and to carry the message of recovery through the Twelve Steps of OA to those who still suffer.”

And so, what are those Twelve Steps? To put it as succinctly as possible, the Twelve Steps ARE the OA program of recovery. The Steps are simple but not easy. They require commitment, which we addicts often find in short supply, and they require facing the facts about how we’ve run our lives so far. Sometimes we’d rather duck the Steps altogether because we think the process of opening our hearts and hurts for healing will be more than we can stand. Probably every OA member has tried to get around the Steps at one time or another, and there are many tried-and-true ways to avoid them. Many of us have told ourselves that we don’t need the Steps to recover, we’ve gone to a different meeting where the Steps aren’t emphasized, fired the sponsor who recommended we start or finish them, told ourselves that the problem is our food plan and put all our attention on it, or we simply dropped out of OA and ate. But the pain of our disease brings us back to the Steps because we can’t live long or happily with the emotional and spiritual baggage that our disease uses to keep us enslaved to food and chained to our problems and our negative thinking. Once we know, there’s no not knowing.

So what happens if we do the 12 Steps? For one thing, we arrest our compulsive eating one day at a time. But that’s not even close to everything we get from the program. All of our program literature is filled with wonderful promises. We read a mere sampling at most meetings. Rather than repeat “The Promises,” which most meeting read, here’s some promises from the OA Twelve and Twelve:

From the isolation of food obsession we have emerged into a new world. Walking hand in hand with our friends and our Higher Power, we are now exploring this world, using the great spiritual principles embodied in the Twelve Steps as the map to guide our way…. (106)

We will be shown a way of life that is happy, joyous, and free, and in which we can finally be of true help to others. A definition of recovery is “to return to usefulness,” and that is another of the many benefits of the Steps.

We always have the option of not doing the Steps. They are a suggested program of recovery. But haven’t we already put ourselves through enough pain? If we don’t do them, we stay with the devil we know—our cravings, our bodies, our emotional pain, and the pain of being detached from anything spiritual. If we do them, and with an open mind and heart, we may find that the devil we don’t know is actually the Higher Power we didn’t realize we’d always wanted contact with. At the worst, we’ll have done some good work toward understanding who we are and what makes us tick.

Ultimately, a 12-Step program without the Steps is like a car without an engine. We might be on the road, but we’ll be stuck just where we are.

Announcing two exciting Seacoast OA events!

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Seacoast OA is excited to announce events in May and June that can help us all make progress with our programs. Everyone is welcome!

Sponsor training

First on Saturday, May 16th, we’ll be offering our first ever sponsor training workshop. This one-hour session will cover the basics of sponsoring. You’ll hear from two local members with experience sponsoring, receive official OA literature on sponsoring, get time time for  questions and answers, and more. The session is free and does not require advanced registration.

Who should attend:

  • People who want to start sponsoring
  • People whose sponsors have suggested they begin sponsoring
  • Sponsors and their sponsees
  • Anyone who wants to sharpen their sponsoring skills

Details:
Saturday, May 16th
10:30 to 11:30 AM, immediately following the 9:00 York meeting
York Hospital Medical Office Building, 16 Hospital Drive
Basement conference room
Please share this flyer with your groups

Workshop on Steps 4 through 9

Following up on our popular March workshop on Steps 1 through 3, this afternoon workshop takes us through the “action Steps.” Learn about what the 4th Step inventory is and how to give it away in Step 5; why the 6th and 7th Step are crucial to our recovery; and how to make amends to repair the relationships in your life. Bring a pen, a notebook, and your copy of The Big Book because we’ll be doing this important work together!

This workshop is free, but we ask that you register ahead of time so that we have a headcount for the room and any materials.

Details:
Saturday, June 13th
1:00 to 4:00 PM
Portsmouth Community Campus
100 Campus Drive, Portsmouth, NH
Directions are on this flyer, which we encourage you to share with your groups
Register by email

We’ll see you in May and June!!!

Because our lives depend on it

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Have you heard something like this at a meeting? “I work this program like my life depends on it.” Does it seem a little overwrought? I used to think so. But I only need to look at my own struggles with food to see that there’s more than one way this disease will kill me.

 

Our program is threefold: physical, emotional, and spiritual. That means we are trying to reverse our ultimately fatal diagnosis on three fronts.

 

The obvious is the physical. Whether we overeat or starve, we wear this disease. On the inside of our bodies, our compulsive eating makes a wreck of our health. Type II diabetes, heart disease, and COPD are three of the familiar physical complications of our disease. They are aided and abetted by a host of other symptoms that amplify our physical problem: degenerative joints, breathing issues, sleep apnea, high blood pressure, neuropathy, and many more. Compulsive eating kills us physically, sometimes quickly but most often slowly and painfully.

 

But we die a thousand emotional deaths before our bodies give out. The Big Book tells us that compulsive behavior is cyclical. Over and over again, we eat for ease and comfort, to numb our feelings. Life is too painful, or so our disease tells us. It tells us any number of lies: that life is too hard; that we aren’t worth it; that we must deny our feelings and medicate ourselves lest the feelings destroy us. We are no longer living but rather merely being. We kill our feelings every day until the bitter end, whenever it may come, because we hate ourselves too much or simply no longer care.

 

But at root of everything is spiritual death. Being disconnected from the spiritual, for whatever the reason, we cannot see anything but ourselves. We perceive the world only through our feelings, namely, our fear and our pain. We lose the ability to connect with others. We fight an increasingly desperate battle for control against ourselves, others, the world, and our disease. Deep down we know we can’t win. We know we don’t have the power. But because we have experienced a spiritual death, we have no other solution. We must slog on. Without a Higher Power, we have no sense of purpose beyond trying to stay ahead of our fears and our pain.

 

The loss of spirituality causes us to collapse into our pain. Once we collapse into our pain, it is simply a matter of time before we die physically.

 

But there is a solution.

 

OA allows us to arrest compulsive eating through the nine tools that support strong abstinence. We reverse our emotional zombie-like state by admitting that we can’t manage our lives, which wakes us up to the reality of what we’re doing. The remainder of OA’s twelve steps take us on a path of spiritual discovery that, when worked consistently and honestly, will ensure physical and emotional recovery one day at a time.

 

We can give ourselves the gift of life by simply working the program like our life depends on it. Because it does.

Reflections from Unity Day #3

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In two previous posts, we’ve dug into things our Unity Day speakers shared. Here’s another, this time a big hunk of hope.

“I don’t have to diet anymore,” one of our speakers said. “My clothes fit from one year to the next.” This was next to impossible to imagine when we were in the throes of our disease—when we ate compulsively, swore we wouldn’t again, and then found ourselves once more at the bottom of a bag, box, or bin of food. We couldn’t envision ourselves at a normal weight, let alone for a year or more.

But OA has allowed this miracle to happen. When we became abstinent, we began to release our excess weight. We saw progress. Sometimes this progress felt awkward because we weren’t used to being thinner. This feeling intensified when others, with the best of intentions, commented on how much better we looked. Buying clothes that fit our newly smaller bodies felt odd too. How many times in our pre-OA lives had we lost some weight and bought new clothing, only to find ourselves unable to wear it when we went back to the food?

Obviously, the idea of being able to wear our clothes one year to the next speaks powerfully about the physical aspect of our recovery. But when considered just a moment longer, and in light of our previous attempts to be rid of the weight, there’s something deeper going on. How does someone who could never lose weight or keep it off, who is addicted to food, now have the power to stay at a normal weight?

Part of the answer is that OA helps us with our emotions. The first bite never occurred in isolation. It could always be traced back to some feeling, some emotion, some discomfort that we had to get relief from. OA’s fellowship and meetings give us safe ways to speak about the highs and lows so that we don’t have to eat when we are, as the slogan goes, happy, mad, sad, or glad.

But our program stresses that this isn’t enough to keep us safe from our own addictive minds. Our literature reminds us that no human power can save us from the first bite. Without something more powerful than us in our lives, we are doomed to eat again. Why? Because people are people, and at some time human beings will fail us. In other words, we can’t trust ourselves or others with our recovery. None of us has the needed power to keep ourselves or others food-sober. If we did, we would have done it a long time ago!

Staying in our clothes year after year is a reflection of our ability to be open-minded about allowing a Higher Power into our lives. A Higher Power is the only thing that can keep us from that first awful bite. Our own willpower is not enough, but our Higher Power will augment our willpower so that we can avoid eating compulsively. If we ask for the help, that is. OA’s Twelve Steps are a proven method for going from the spiraling hopelessness of compulsive eating to the sureness that God will keep us in the same clothes year after year if we only step aside and let God run the show.

Once we invite God into our lives, the fellowship takes on new meaning. We look for ways to help other OA members, and we share the hope of our recovery. We demonstrate to others, by wearing the same clothes year after year, the power of our program.

OA Getting Started Guide

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Just a quick note that our latest meeting list now includes an OA Getting Started Guide. This one-pager is designed to help newcomers start making their way into recovery. It’s also potentially valuable for anyone in the program as a quick reminder for themselves, a handy reference for working with newcomers, or something to share with sponsees.

Remember that if you make copies or print out the meeting lists for your group that this is now a double-sided document.