Tag Archives: live and let live

Tradition of the Month: #4 and how food and autonomy

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

What in the world does this Tradition have to do with our food? What does it have to do with maintaining our abstinence? As it turns out, plenty. Tradition Four has much in common with Steps Three, Six, Seven, and Ten. All these Steps help us address a key aspect of the cycle of addiction.

Let’s be specific. The wheel of addiction turns and turns and runs us over. Every time we eat compulsively, we start out to give ourselves ease and comfort about a feeling we have. The Big Book famously says these feelings are usually restlessness, irritability, and discontentedness. It also tells us that resentment, anger, and fear are root-level issues for us addicts. Once we have a feeling, we start obsessing about dampening that feeling. Then we go about the usual stages of compulsive eating: the first bite, physical cravings, remorse, and a resolution to never do it again, which we forsake as soon as we have another feeling. If we could only deal with the feelings when they arise, we’d have a puncher’s chance!

Now, in Step 3, we decide that we aren’t in control anymore, God is. We’re going to let HP call the shots. After we do inventory, we arrive at Steps 6 and 7, where we decide we are ready to have God remove what’s objectionable, and then ask for its removal. As we begin making amends, we also start the daily practice of Step 10, where we ask God to remove new resentments and to help us maintain the code of kindness, love, and tolerance toward others.

In other words, these Steps help us see that to recover, we must surrender control, ask to have our angry, fearful, and judging natures changed, and ask that we live in harmony with others as best we can. That is how our feelings become less dangerous to us.

Now comes Tradition 4. It’s basically telling us that, in terms of how meetings conduct themselves, our code is “Live and let live.” Which isn’t easy! Why not? Because we are used to doing the opposite of Steps 3, 6, 7, and 10. We try to control situations. We don’t want our defects of character removed because we either aren’t convinced we have any, or we think we can’t live successfully without them. We don’t live by the code of kindness, love, and tolerance because the world is mean and unfair to us, and it can go screw itself while we take from it what we’re owed.

Once we engage with recovery, we no longer have the luxury of sitting back and judging others (and their meetings) then gossiping about them. Even if we disagree with someone(s), we must do so with love and honesty. And not the kind of honesty that’s designed to spit in their eye while we share “our truth” with them.

Instead, we ask God to help us assess the situation. If we believe our meeting is going against Tradition, then we ask HP to give us the words to lovingly question whether the meeting is doing the right thing. If we believe another meeting is going against Tradition, we ask HP to show us whether their actions will harm other meetings or OA as a whole before we take any action. We discuss all of this with a trusted OA friend to make sure we’re not power driving.

If the meeting isn’t harming other meetings or OA as a whole, we have one important to do: nothing. It’s not our business to tell a meeting what to do. Nor is it our business to worry about it. Steps 3, 6, 7, and 10 basically tell us that the problem is with us, not with the other person(s). It’s out of our control, we need to be rid of the defects of character that we are engaging in the situation, and we need to be sure our conduct isn’t causing harm. With Tradition 4, we are putting the principles into action.

Release from worry. From anger. Ask how God will fix it. The answer may be that it doesn’t need fixing, we do. In which case, we’ve learned an ultra valuable lesson about our own natures, and we can ask God how to fix us so that our feelings don’t send us back to the food.

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.