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Step of the Month: Forgiveness around food

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10. Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

Even in recovery, many of us are still touchy around food. We aren’t defensive, so much as ready to blame ourselves. If we are one spoonful off or we’ve eaten something that might contain a food that’s not on our plan, we double over with guilt, shame, and remorse. The question is whether we’ll let those feelings overrun us, or whether we will simply resume our food plan. It can make all the difference.

With a slip or break in our abstinence, it’s natural to feel disappointment or anger. We feel that old sense of powerlessness, and because we have years of experience with shaming ourselves, our disease guides us into that old groove: I feel bad about eating, so now I want to eat again to dull the pain of having eaten in the first place. Depending on what and how we’ve eaten, we’ve reactivated the physical craving and mental obsession that has lain dormant for some time. How do we return them to slumber?

Of course, we must cease eating compulsively and return immediately to our food plan. But we also have to deal with the mental and spiritual parts of our disease. What’s going to turn off the obsession? What’s going to prevent it from turning back on again? How do we get back on the spiritual track? Fortunately Step 10 holds a practical answer to all these questions.

We know that the cycle of addictive behavior begins in our minds with some kind of activating thought. Usually a negative one. “I wish it had gone my way.” “I wish my husband/wife were different.” “I’m tired of this.” Step 10 rolls together Steps 4 through 9, so we first look back at what kind of thoughts could have triggered our eating, and then we inventory them just as we did in Step 4. We are looking for any chinks in our spiritual armor that allowed our disease to attack us. These are places where we may have held onto fear or resentment and not given them away to our HP. As we seek these weak spots, we must be ruthless in our inspection, but we must also take care not to pound on ourselves. It’s as much a lie to harshly judge ourselves as it is to harshly judge others. So, just the facts.

Once we’ve inventoried what’s been eating us, Step 10 tells us to do as we did in Steps 5 through 7. We ask our sponsor or a confidant to listen to us as we read off whatever inventory we have written. We then ask God to remove the objectionable thinking, and in so doing, we also let go of the negative judgments about ourselves. Remove means remove. God takes it, so we don’t hold onto it. We start putting one foot in front of the other just as we know how to do. That’s the essence of spiritual action, moving forward with trust that our Higher Power is keeping us safe so long as we continue to take spiritual action.

As we resume our walk down the spiritual highway, we may find it helpful to remind ourselves of what spiritual work may we have pushed aside during busy times, resisted all along, or simply forgotten? We ask God to help us add such actions to our OA Plan of Action so that we might avoid a food slip or relapse in the future.

Here’s some things we don’t do. We don’t walk around fretting that we’re going to eat again. Instead we just get back on our feet and keep walking. We don’t blame ourselves. Instead we use the experience as a learning moment, remembering that humility is another way of saying we are teachable. We don’t blame anyone else. Instead we remember that we are responsible for our own spiritual condition and take action to restore its solidity. We don’t say screw it and go off and eat again. Instead we remember that the program kept us food-sober for some time when we ourselves couldn’t, and we embrace OA principles more firmly.

In short, Step 10 is like our spiritual GPS. When we make a wrong turn with our food, we return to Step 10 for a course correction. It helps us recalibrate our route on the road to happy destiny so that we can enjoy our life again and keep a right-sized perspective on those moments when we temporarily lose our way.

10 ways to know if you are obsessing about food

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Are you really obsessed with food and powerless over it? Here are ten common forms of obsessive thinking about food that many OA members have experienced. If you’ve experienced these or similar thinking, you may be in the grip of the obsession with food.

1. Moments after finishing one meal, you begin thinking about the next

You arrive at work at 9:00, having just tossed down a quick breakfast. For the next several hours, you fixate on what you’ll get for lunch. The minutes tick away. You tell yourself you’ll wait until 1:00, but at 12:15, you say “screw it” and yank the takeout menu from the top drawer of your desk….

2. Anytime you have a strong feeling (happy, mad, sad, glad), you get the urge to eat

The Red Sox win! Time to eat. My daughter has filed for divorce. Time to eat. The cable is on the fritz again. Time to eat. My doctor called, and the diabetes hasn’t gotten as bad as I’d feared. Time to eat.

3. Food thoughts pop unbidden into your mind throughout the day and over time

The deadline for that report is the end of the day. You’re about halfway done. This section is just killing you. Then this thought: Oh, remember that time in Denver when I had that dessert with….

4. The same foods or food types dominate your thinking

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5. You rationalize food behaviors

“Just because my blood sugar is at dangerous levels doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have a little fun. My doctor is such wet blanket. He’d eat too if he had to deal with what I deal with. What’s one little bite going to do to me anyway. I’m making too much of this.”

6. Ultimately, you always lose the argument with yourself about your eating

  • Good Self: Don’t eat that last helping that’s in the dish. You know it’s just going to make you fatter.
  • Bad Self: But it’s good. You deserve a treat.
  • Good Self: Think about how much more exercise or dieting you’d have to do to get rid of it.
  • Bad Self: Like you’ve worried about it lately, anyway?
  • Good Self: And your knees always hurt, and your back hurts, and your neck hurts.
  • Bad Self: Exactly, so just have a bite and we’ll take away the pain for a few moments.

7. The idea of going without certain foods creates a visceral reaction of fear or anger

Something is upside down if life wouldn’t be worth living without a favorite food.

8. You often plan elaborate meals months in advance, sometimes even for fantasy meals that will never happen

And you’re not a chef, caterer, wedding planner, or other culinary or event-planning professional.

9. Passing a convenience store triggers you to stop and buy food

Our dealer is on every corner and even has signs inviting us in. But we don’t really need those signs because we know exactly where the store keeps the goodies we want need.

10. Pushing away a half-eaten plate seems utterly foreign

She’s not going to finish that? Is she ill? What planet is she from? If she’s not going to eat, maybe I can.

11. I’ll never get skinny—I might as well just keep eating my face off

There’s a lot truth here. We likely never will get the body we want when our mind constantly thinks about food. That’s because we can’t fix ourselves. We can’t outwit our own diseased minds.

This is just a selection of the kinds of thinking we hear about in OA meetings all the time. These old tapes run endlessly in our minds while we remain in the throes of compulsive eating.

But there is a solution.

The 12 Steps of OA provide relief from the daily slog of trying to think ourselves out of a disease that works through our own minds. With OA’s help we can eat like a normal person, one day at a time.

THE Cause versus Because

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Here’s an obvious statement: We OA members eat over our feelings. Our program literature tells us that the cycle of addictive behavior begins with a thought. We are activated before the first bite. A primary emotional trigger for addicts of any stripe is resentment.

The Big Book describes resentment as “the number one offender.” We eat because we are pissed off at the world, at people, at situations. When Bill Wilson and company put together the Big Book in the 1930s, they very carefully selected their words. They knew that the addicted brain manipulates us by turning our feelings into powerful language. So when they wrote down how they inventoried resentment, they used precise language that doesn’t give our brains wiggle room to make excuses.

Look at page 65 in the fourth edition of the Big Book. It lays out the first three columns of resentment inventory (the fourth column, or “turnaround” appears in the middle of page 67). The first column is headed “I’m Resentful At.” The second: “The Cause.” Notice they didn’t say “BEcause” but rather “The Cause.” There’s a world of difference.

Our addict minds are like little lawyers, always seeking to parse language in ways that justify or excuse our behaviors and let us keep eating. Among trial lawyers, there’s a well-known axiom about questioning a witness. Never ask why [unless you’ve personally coached the witness’ answer]. Lawyers frequently ask leading questions that begin with What, Who, When, Where, or How. These are all closed-ended questions with a single answer: “I saw Joe”; “I was cleaning the barn”; “8:19 PM”; “He opened the door with a lock pick.” But why is open-ended. It allows a witness to pontificate and deflect blame elsewhere. It allows opinion to enter the record. It may also give a witness license to build sympathy when sympathy is the opposite of what you want to elicit.

In a similar way, “because” is a weasel word for us addicts. We use it as a way to keep on destroying ourselves with food. Why do we eat? Because blah blah blah. If someone asked us why we were burnt up, we’d give them a litany of because statements. Insidiously, what “because” does is shift the blame to someone else.

Because Mom said I was fat, I am resentful.

This is far different from the language the Big Book recommends in that second column: “THE Cause.” To get grammatical for a second, “the” is the definite article. It indicates singularity or specificity. It reduces confusion and ambiguity. To use it in a sentence related to resent would sound like these examples

The cause of my resentment is Mom’s saying I was fat.

 

We can see that when we use “the cause” instead of “because” we turn a statement of blame into a statement of fact.

Here’s a big difference between these two ways of talking about resentment. “Because” creates slippery slopes. We’ve all heard someone talk about how their mind will create a chain of because statements that leads to eating:

Because Mom said I was fat, I must not be good enough. Because I’m not good enough, I feel pain. Because I feel pain, I need to get rid of it, so I eat.

The struck out text is a reminder of how over time our brains skip over the “reasoning” and go straight to the food. But “THE cause” doesn’t easily lead to that slippery slope.

Mom said I was fat, so I must not be good enough….

Here we can see that when we put “because” ahead of Mom, she bears the blame for our believing her. If we put “because” instead of “so” it wouldn’t even make sense. When we put “so” in front of “I,” we start to see that we are taking someone else’s words and turning them into a reason to eat. Why should we believe that we are not good enough just because Mom says we are fat? Unless we, of course, we, ourselves, are complicit in that belief?

We don’t have to be linguists for OA to work. But the folks who wrote the Big Book used “The Cause” instead of “Because” because they knew from personal experience that blaming the rest of the world for their drinking predicament didn’t work. We have to own our part of things. We’re the ones holding onto the hurts, big or tiny. We’re the ones eating ourselves to an early grave. After all, it’s our inventory, and no one else’s.

Step of the Month: Step 9, Labor Days

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9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.”

This weekend, we celebrate the idea that hard work is its own reward. This idea is woven throughout the 12 Steps, and they encourage us to remember the importance of hard work each and every day. Step 9, the famous making of amends, is very much included.

In North America, the US and Canada celebrate Labor Day this weekend. This is the working person’s holiday when we celebrate the historic achievements that workers have made to the advancement of society, the economy, culture, and prosperity. Of course, when we engaged in addictive behaviors, we did the opposite. We made every day about ourselves not about bettering the world we live in. We did little to advance anything but our own agenda, which was usually to keep things as they were because we feared change. Prosperity was a means by which we might acquire more food.

But as we worked the Steps of OA, we discovered that we hadn’t necessarily done hard work in our addiction, but that we definitely had made hard work of our lives when it wasn’t necessary. We tried to control the uncontrollable, and when that we didn’t work, we used food to medicate ourselves against fear, anger, and sadness.

Soon, we found we needed more and more food to medicate ourselves because our bodies quickly developed a high-level tolerance for our binge foods. Soon it was a difficult job to keep up with our cravings. So, we didn’t care whose toes we stepped on, whose needs we ignored, how bad we felt about ourselves, or what we had to do to satisfy the unsatisfiable. We were going to get our food, everyone else be damned.

Over the years, we accumulated a lot of soul-junk through our behaviors. As we placed food ahead of loved ones, they felt hurt. As we blamed others for our situation, they felt betrayed. As we tried to control our friends and family and coworkers to get our fearful way, they felt resentful at our know-it-all attitudes. As we marched slowly toward a food-based death, those who cared about us felt unlistened to and angry at our incredible selfishness. But we kept right on eating.

So now, we have some work to do in recovery. Our side of the street is littered not only with candy wrappers, chip bags, crumbs, blobs of sugary gum, soda bottles, and empty pastry boxes but also with the wreckage of the relationships we’ve warped with our addict behaviors. The broken promises are heaped up. Our harsh words are spray painted on the sidewalks. The lies we’ve spun hang over our side of the street like smog.

In the first seven Steps, we discovered all that our compulsive eating had done to to our life and our relationships. In Step 8, we listed specifically who we needed to straighten things out with. And now, in Step 9, we step out into that garbage-strewn street and go about the necessary clean-up. Making amends can be hard work. There are people we’d rather not see again. We don’t want to admit to them that we did what we did. And it doesn’t matter because if we don’t, because we’re screwed if we don’t make those amends.

We’re living a new kind of life in OA. We avoid behaviors that lead to us having to make amends. We make kindness, love, and tolerance our code. We know that if we don’t, we will return to the miserable existence we had before. Making amends is part of that code. The kind thing to do is humbly acknowledge our wrongs. The loving thing to do is set the situation right, and in so doing, perhaps help someone else exorcise a spiritual burden. The tolerant thing to do is clean up the mess we’ve made with everyone, even those who have done more harm to us than we have done to them. And when we do, the smog will clear, the piles will be gone, and we can finally invite people onto our side of the street without fear.

This hard work we do in Step 9 is, indeed, its own reward. With each amends we make, we move closer to our Higher Power. We remove another barrier between ourselves and others. We place ourselves in a position to be of increased service. We make contributions to the spiritual good of the world rather than self-centered withdrawals. And it feels good.

So as we consider how much the working people of our land have done to create the prosperous conditions in which we find ourselves in September of 2016, we might also consider Step 9. We might consider how through our labors with amends and the example we show of the power of recovery, our Higher Power is creating opportunities for peace, good will, and freedom from addictive behavior.

Strategies and tactics for eating out abstinently

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Most OA members are not nuns or monks cloistered away from the world. We have lives that are variously complicated, sociable, compressed, or festive. That means we sometimes, perhaps often, eat out. Whether that means at a sit-down restaurant/function, a take-out place, a holiday party, or grabbing something at the supermarket or corner store, we need strategies and tactics that are portable and flexible. Because no matter how determined we are to plan every single meal we eat, the day will come when life throws us a curveball, and we’ll need to eat out.

So let’s look at a couple general strategies as well as tactics for each of the situations mentioned above.

GENERAL STRATEGIES

  1. Trust and rely on our Higher Power: In outside-the-house situations, our addictive mind might tell us that it’s OK to bend the rules to a place where we’ve warped those rules into unrecognizable untruths about our food. We can’t trust our thinking, so we have to turn it over to HP and listen for the intuitive thoughts that will keep us on the beam. Prayer is our number 1 best move.
  2. Check our motives: As the Big Book suggests, we ask ourselves whether we have a good reason to be there. Are we really hoping to indulge our interest in jazzy, sexy foods: fats, salts, maybe flours? Are we seeking volume? Are we trying to rekindle old romantic feelings for food?
  3. Have OA’s tools at the ready: The 9 tools are totally portable thanks to smart phones. We can read literature, make calls, text, write in the form of email, and tell another member what our food will be for the meal.
  4. Remember it’s just one meal: If the worst thing happens and we can’t get something we like that meets our abstinence requirements, we won’t die from eating something we’re not crazy about.
  5. Don’t eat no matter what; no matter what don’t eat: No matter what social awkwardness could result, whether sending a meal back or measuring at the table, we need to be prepared to not eat a substance that will send us into a binge no matter how strange it might seem to others. We can always tell them we have a deadly allergy, because that’s the truth.

Now here’s a few suggestions our members have shared for particular outside-the-house situations.

RESTAURANTS

  1. Steer clear of triggering establishments: If we are asked our opinion on where to eat, we aren’t shy! For example, if we can’t eat pasta or pizza safely, we tell our fellow diners that we don’t want to go to an Italian restaurant!
  2. Check the menu ahead of time: The internet is a wonderful thing for OA members. We can read a menu beforehand, and walk in with a committed plan.
  3. Decide on how much to eat before arrival: Some members commit to eating what’s on their plate and nothing more. Or to only having an entree. Some may order a half portion or decide ahead to eat only half. One of our local members has a “One-third rule” where they leave one-third of the food behind.
  4. Bring a scale: Some members’ diseases lie to them about quantities. They may choose to bring a scale with them to be as honest as possible.
  5. Ask questions: We can’t afford to accidentally ingest our triggering substances (e.g. sugar, flour, salts, fats) or specific trigger foods. We ask waitpersons about ingredients. They’d rather us ask first than send something back.
  6. Have a worst-case scenario: What if a restaurant prepares something in a way you didn’t realize would be non-abstinent for you? Perhaps you can scrape off a sauce or coating. Or you could trade meals with someone else. Or you can simply send it back.

PARTIES

Many of the suggestions for restaurants apply to parties, of course. But many times, parties have a spread rather than a sit-down, a buffet-style smorgasbord of appetizers or even main courses, and this scenario presents its own set of difficulties.

  1. Decide what a serving is: When we’re talking about little plates, this gets shifty, especially for those of us prone to grazing. We can talk with our sponsor about what exactly a serving will mean.
  2. Only eat food that’s on our plate: We don’t eat anything directly from its serving dish, a classic grazing maneuver.
  3. Eat before attending: That way we won’t be hungry, and we eliminate a potential justification for eating.
  4. Arrive late or leave early: Reducing the length of our exposure reduces our risk

MEALS ON THE MOVE

Uh oh. We’re running late to an after-work appointment (maybe an OA meeting!) and we just got out of work. By the time the appointment is over and we get home we’ll be ravenous! Classic HALT territory. So we might decide to get something at a store on the way or a take-out place. With both hunger and lateness affecting us, it’s important to make wise decisions.

  1. Take a deep breath: It’s hard to make sound food decisions when our brains are running 100 miles an hour. Before we enter the store or take-out joint, take a big, deep breath or two to clear out the craziness for a moment.
  2. Update our food plan for the day: If we committed something different than this on-the-run meal, we tell our sponsor about the change so that we are still tethered to a source of support and accountability.
  3. Have an emergency backup meal idea: Some members have an emergency back-up plan just for situations like this. A reliable, abstinent, appropriately sized meal they can zip through most any store to get quickly. For example, we might choose to have a piece of fruit, an adequate serving of nuts (often available in bulk or in sleeves with specific amounts), and a bottle of water. Or if a local take-out place has an appropriately sized, abstinent item, we might fall back to it in emergencies.
  4. Pause to read labels: When we are in a major hurry, we might pick up something that seems abstinent at first glance, only to discover later to our horror that it wasn’t. For example, some companies put sugar on dry-roasted peanuts. It pays to take a few seconds to check the ingredients while we are still in the store to avoid disaster after.

There’s lots more ideas for ways to eat out safely and sanely. Restaurants are not opportunities to go all wild-west on our food, nor should we sit in them acting like we’d rather be anywhere else. We let our HP show us how to be in the situation, we listen and engage with others, and we remember that it’s one day at a time.

9 choices every OA needs to make every day

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We compulsive eaters are powerless against food. Once we take the first bite, we lose the power of choice in eating, as well as in many other aspects of our lives. We come undone when we eat compulsively, and our disease takes us on a nightmarish roller coaster we seem unable to step off of.

That means that in OA we have many, many important choices to make to keep ourselves on the path of sanity, clarity, and serenity. Here are some of the most important of those choices that OAs face every day.

1. Am I choosing to acknowledge the truth about my food addiction?

We food addicts are great at denial. We’ve been telling ourselves for years or decades that  we’re going to get our eating under control any day now. That this will be the last diet program we ever need. That if we just exercised, the weight would come off. That our doctor doesn’t know what he’s talking about. That the aching in our knees or back aren’t caused by our weight. Deep down inside, we know the truth, but we don’t want to admit it.

2. Am I choosing to consider this a killing disease?

So maybe we eat too much and can’t stop. So what? We’re probably just exaggerating the problem. We’re making too much of it. So maybe our A1C is nearing diabetic levels. Plenty of people live with diabetes. So maybe we’ve had chest pains from time to time. Could just be anxiety. So maybe we’ve wondered if life is worth continuing the way we’re going. Surely everyone thinks that at some point. A killing disease? Aren’t those OA people exaggerating?

No. We’re not.

3. Am I choosing to be in OA?

There’s a difference between being a member and being in OA. Claiming membership is very simple, and our Traditions tell us that the only requirement for membership in OA is a desire to stop eating compulsively. Being in OA means we are fully engaging with the program as best we can given our level of experience.

4. Am I choosing to attend meetings?

An old OA saying tells us that meetings are the first thing to go, and the food is the last thing to go. If life gets busy, are we making time to make meetings? Do we go even if we’re tired or would rather do something else? Those impulses to stay away one day at a time often indicate that we need a meeting much more than we realize. For newcomers unsure if they are in the right place or old-timers with only one foot in the door, our collective experience suggests that we might attend meetings until we are certain we are in the right place or until we are ready to drag the other foot back through into door.

5. Am I choosing abstinence?

Abstaining from our binge/trigger foods is one of the big points of OA. But abstinence is more than what we eat, it’s our mindset about our eating. It’s acting one day at a time on the belief that we won’t eat no matter what, and no matter what we won’t eat. It’s also using OA’s 9 tools and letting the fellowship support our abstinence instead of going it alone.

6. Am I choosing to do OA’s 12 Steps?

Many of us get scared by one or more of the Steps. We get hung up on the wording or hear internalize other people’s fear of them and stop in our tracks. But the Steps of OA are the program. They are what get us better. We must do them in order to recover, and they are not an a la carte menu. We do them, in order, and with the help of our God so that we can be well again. Without the Steps, we’re just doing another diet program.

7. Am I choosing to abide by and protect OA’s 12 Traditions?

 

The Traditions are to meetings what the Steps are to individual members. They are a set of principles for action that allow our organization to function safely and sanely. They also arise out of experience, not out of someone’s fanciful ideas. If we want OA to be around for us, we need to abide by and protect the Traditions as those before us have done. If not, then we will repeat the same mistakes that led to their creation in the first place! We need OA healthy and thriving so that we can be healthy and thriving. So we ask ourselves: Do I know the Traditions? Have I studied them? Am I willing to stand up for them when it’s time?

8. Am I choosing to help others who still suffer?

The most important person in OA is the newcomer. They are the lifeblood of OA. They also help our recoveries. When we help another, we get much of the benefit. Are we “too busy” to help someone? If so could that mean we are too busy to help ourselves? Self-sacrifice, as our OA literature reminds us, is part of this program.

9. Am I choosing to support OA by doing service?

Let’s be honest. Service is an issue in our area. Are we raising our hands, volunteering to do service of any sort when the call is issued? Do we speak when asked? Do we carry the bag or the key? Do we do the honor of serving our group as an Intergroup rep? Do we act as speaker seeker or treasurer for our meeting? Do we volunteer to support initiatives at the Intergroup level? We each have many helpful skills and talents that might support any number of helpful OA opportunities to carry the message to still-suffering compulsive eaters. We might ask ourselves why aren’t we doing service? What fear or resentment keeps us from saying yes? Why might we be content to let a small number of others do the work of OA for us?

OA is a program designed to help us make better choices with our food and our life. And these nine choices we make every day are crucial to our recovery.

Tradition of the Month: Controversy

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8. Overeaters Anonymous should remain forever nonprofessional, but our service centers may employ special workers.

 

Tradition 8 ain’t sexy. It seems like a throw-in. “Hey, guys, by the way, don’t hire anyone to carry the message or run the joint.” But Tradition 8 is vitally important to OA for reasons that become clear when we think about how controversies play out in the fellowship.

One such controversy that pops up from time to time is who is allowed to share during an OA meeting. Some meetings may create restrictions on sharing based on presumptions about a member’s quality of recovery. These restrictions may violate OA’s Traditions and bylaws, and that’s where things get testy—and where Tradition 8 saves us.

Unlike most organizations where all the power rests in the hands of a few (a CEO, a board, or a presiding committee), in OA, the power rests with the many. Our service structure looks like an upside down triangle, with meetings at the top, intergroups serving them, the regions serving the intergroups, and the World Service serving the regions. This structure is counterintuitive to a hierarchical society like ours that often opts for centralization as a means of creating economies of scale. But OA would have withered and died were that the case.

That said, those who take on increasing responsibility in our service structure are asked to deal with controversies like the example above. A member complains to the Intergroup about the situation. The Intergroup appeals to its Region trustee for guidance, and that trustee may well consult with World Service for expertise on interpreting whether the situation demands action. And when it does demand action, things get dicey. The Region trustee may tell the local Intergroup that this represents a violation of Traditions. The Intergroup can then inform the meeting that its practices are not sanctioned by OA. To be considered part of OA, a meeting must agree to abide by OA’s Traditions and bylaws, and if it is out of compliance, it’s reckoning time.

In the business, government, and non-profit worlds, showdowns like this are filled with game playing, leverage taking, and personal agendas. Professionals typically have competing incentives as they negotiate a situation: Is what’s best for the organization in my team’s best interests or my own? Will I get noticed for promotion if this thing comes out in our favor? How can I gain power of a rival in this situation? How can I avoid being fired?

Because OA is nonprofessional, we don’t have those kinds of worries. Wherever in the service structure we may find ourselves, from a meeting to the World Service, we are still just another bozo on the bus. We pray for the right answers, we seek common ground in the OA principles represented by the Steps and Traditions, and we leave aside petty questions of pride, position, and power.

In fact, nonprofessionalism allows us to take a more kindly view in our example situation. If we carry anger over the World, Region, or Intergroup-level service person asking us to consider changing our meeting format, we can ask ourselves whether we honestly believe they are trying to harm us or our meeting. Could they instead be trying to safeguard OA’s Traditions? Is it possible that we have a difference of opinion over which Tradition supersedes another? Are we all working toward the same goal of helping others? When we ask ourselves Who are they to tell us what to do?!, could the answer be that they are OA members just like us?

Is it possible that they have ulterior motives? Of course. Pride gets in everyone’s way. But when it comes to OA, what’s there to be gained by exercising power over an anarchic organization?

If those in the service structure were professionals, we’d be questioning their motivations constantly. We’d wonder what power game they were playing. We’d ask ourselves if they put OA principles after personal gain. When we asked ourselves Who are they to…?!, our answer would be someone from outside who doesn’t really get OA. But because OA service is done by us, without compensation, we can perhaps take a more charitable view of the matter and consider the other party’s perspective with an easier mind.

Step of the Month: Becoming willing

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8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

There are two parts to Step 8: make a list and become willing. We’ve talked extensively in a previous post about that list, so let’s focus more on the willingness. What we’re really becoming willing to do is ignore our pride and our fear.

Our pride may tell us that this is all too much. It will imagine forward into the ninth step. It may tell us that the process will feel humiliating, like begging forgiveness on our bended knees or like prostrating ourselves before another person. The Big Book gives sound advice. We are never to be “scraping or servile” it says. We are absolutely not making amends to gain forgiveness. That’s selfish thinking—as in What can I get from this encounter? In fact, we are not aiming to gain anything, only to do what we can to put as square as possible the relationships we’ve skewed through our behavior as food addicts.

Rather than listen to our pride and its imaginings of the future, we keep it in the present and just pray for willingness.

Our fear is more potent yet. It may tell us that making amends threatens our emotional or even physical well-being. Or that we just can’t do it. We are likely afraid of encountering anger, rejection, or bad feelings. We may also be afraid of letting the words fall from our mouths, for shattering the idea that we’ve been perfect or never wrong. Again, fear is projecting a future that is unlikely to occur. Most amends go smoothly, some go delightfully, and, yes, some don’t go well. It doesn’t matter. Right now, we are merely becoming willing to go through with them. If someone becomes angry at us, they have every right. After all, we harmed them!

Rather than listen to our fear and its imaginings of the future, we keep it in the present and just pray for willingness.

If we remain unwilling to commit to this path, we pray until we become willing. But we don’t need to sit passively by either, awaiting spiritual dew drops of willingness to fall onto our foreheads. Instead, we can talk to others about what’s blocking us. Having just put down the food, taken inventory, and had our defects of character removed, we can test the new clarity our HP has given us to consider the costs and benefits of moving forward or staying at Step 8. Let’s look at them.

 

STAYING PUT

Costs

  • I’ll eat again because I’m not growing spiritually and I’m not completing the program of action that’s known to work
  • My relationships won’t improve or change
  • I’ll still feel discomfort about the harms I’ve caused

Benefits

  • I won’t have to admit I’ve been or done wrong
  • I won’t have to face fears or anger and rejection
  • I won’t have to give up control of the situation

MOVING FORWARD

Costs

  • I’ll have to swallow my pride
  • I’ll have to summon courage from HP to face my fears
  • I’ll have to accept the outcome, whatever it may be

Benefits

  • I’ll be growing spiritually and taking out insurance against eating again
  • I’ll feel freedom from self-resentment about the harms I’ve done
  • My relationships and life circumstances will improve
  • I’ll feel self-esteem for following through on something difficult
  • Other peoples’ lives may change for the better because I’ve have broken the negative cycle between us

Seems pretty straightforward. We exchange a little discomfort for a truckload of blessings. This is exactly why the promises we read at most meetings are found in the ninth step—because we can’t get those promises without cleaning up our side of the street. Only then do we receive the entirety of the spiritual bounty that OA promises us.

Emotions are very, very powerful. They are often also misleading. As people in recovery, we understand that we’ve let our emotions run our lives into the ground. As we become willing to make amends in Step 8, we are reminding ourselves that our Higher Power runs the show, not our feelings. We still have our feelings, but we now have Steps 10 and 11 as well as the nine OA tools to safely deal with them. They needn’t block us from taking action that will save us instead of action—or inaction—that will kill us.

 

Permission to be powerless

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Once we walk through the doors of OA, we may think that we have made the big decision.  We have finally given up the ghost with food. Our compulsive eating has left our minds, emotions, and spirit battered and bruised. We tell ourselves we really mean it. After all, why else would we go to meetings?

As we read OA literature, listen at meetings, and talk to our fellows, we begin to understand the idea of powerlessness. We learn that we cannot control our own eating by an act of willpower. We cannot stop once we’ve started, and we cannot stop from starting. We need this program because we grasp the seriousness of the situation. And yet, many of us struggle for a long time with Step 1.

Of course, to some degree, the struggle to gain abstinence arises from the cycle of cravings we initiate any time we pick up that first bite. This physical manifestation of our disease demands more and more food. Yet, many of us will put down the food long enough to be relieved of the physical sensation of craving only to return to our old eating behaviors. We’ve all been in meetings where a member shares that they can’t explain why they threw a month, six months, a year or two of abstinence out the window.

The insidious idea that after some abstinence we can control our food is planted by our disease. It grows slowly over time. We may begin a period of abstinence as desperate as we’ve ever been, yet give it a little while, and we begin to feel and act as if we’ve been doing the trick all along by our lonesomes. We forget so quickly the lessons that our years of compulsive eating have taught us. Our periods of control are temporary as long as we’re running the show.

Why do we do this? Is it possible that we haven’t given ourselves permission to be powerless? That is, permission to admit to ourselves that when it comes to food addiction our best efforts aren’t, and will never be, good enough to beat the rap. We know it to be true intellectually, and we resist and resist and resist it. We refuse to admit that something as simple as eating has us defeated, even in the face of a lifetime of evidence. Perhaps we ultimately fear that if this thing has us beaten, then all our fears about our own worth or inadequacy are also true?

Good news: they aren’t, and we discover this when we do the Steps. But first we have to give ourselves permission to accept some hard truths. Not just intellectually, but all the way deep down inside. Not just between our ears but between our ribs. We need to take OA actions not because our sponsor suggests them but because we desperately feel we want to recover, not because we think we ought to. We give ourselves permission to embrace the outcome of recovery instead of the fear of what happens if we don’t recover. We give ourselves permission to succeed rather than to avoid failing.

The Big Book tells us that with an attitude of courage and faith, we cannot fail. We give ourselves permission to put our faith in the Steps rather than drive ourselves crazy in another vain attempt to white knuckle our way to the false promise of self-controlled eating.

We will never achieve self-control with food. But with OA’s help we can achieve something far better. We can have a life of purpose, contentedness, and gratitude instead of food obsession, anxiety, and shame. All we have to do is admit defeat so that we can begin to reclaim victory.

 

Is it possible that we don’t know what we think we know?

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Virtually anyone who has been in the program for any length of time will have experienced some variation on this situation:

“What are you struggling with?”

“I’m struggling with the God thing.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t believe in a god that cares about me.”

“But you believe in a Power greater than yourself?”

“Yes, but it’s not a god with a personality, it’s just nature, and nature doesn’t care about individuals.”

Some OAs are, in fact, trained as theologians or philosophers and could perhaps reply to this line of reasoning with a carefully wrought line of thinking. But even that might do no good. Why? Because the person in this situation believes they have God, the universe, and everything figured out. Some of us come into the rooms of OA with this belief because we’ve done a lot of thinking, reading, and talking about this matter. Much of it has been healthy reflection and good research, but nonetheless influenced by our illness, which uses our minds to keep us chained to food.

Let’s think for just a moment about how we who have been down this particular path have been thinking. Are we experts in matters of theology, philosophy, cosmology, psychology, neurology, and the other fields that might help us understand a higher power and the effect it might have on human will power? For that matter, even if we know the evidence, are we effective reasoners? Is our logical faculty sound, especially if we are in the food?

The fields in question are so vast that most of their experts spend a lifetime specializing in a single subdomain within them (or a subsubdomain). To believe that we can know all there is to know about any of them, let alone all of them is, perhaps, a form of either arrogance or ignorance. To further believe that as laypeople we are smart enough not to need a lifetime of training and expertise to figure out something so complex as the universe and the human mind is just as illogical as having blind faith in someone else’s definition of a higher power.

So faced with someone like our example above, we can ask them a single question: Is it possible that you don’t know what you think you know? Any reasonable person will answer that, of course, this is possible…that in fact it’s rather unlikely that any one of us knows all this. But we become unreasonable in the course of our illness. So be patient with the person you’ve asked this. Give them a moment to consider, or even a few days. Ask them again another time. Sometimes the power of a question like this needs a great deal of time to sink in.

Perhaps the reality for this type of thinker is that they are afraid the program won’t work for them. They may fear being forced to adopt something they do not believe in. They may fear failing because they don’t have a belief that can work for them. It may feel safer for them to be stuck where they are than to seek something that seems impossible to reach.

It is possible that this person needs only to know two things.

  1. They need only be open to the possibility that something out there might help them.
  2. That more will be revealed, if they do the Steps thoroughly.

We can’t say what will be revealed. It could be that they will engage with a Higher Power of the sort they didn’t think they could believe in. It could be that they will engage with a Higher Power of exactly the sort they did believe in but there perception of Whose power their diseased mind had limited. It could be something else altogether that they hadn’t imagined but that ultimately works for them.

Christopher Columbus believed the world was round and that by sailing westward, he’d eventually hit the East Indies. His opponents thought the world was flat. He discovered that he was partially right, but that there was land between Spain and the East Indies. But he couldn’t get any answer without first setting sail.