* not bingeing, even if I eat a little more than I intended so I feel “full” instead of just sated–getting “full” is a lesson I take with me, that I need to respect the boundaries of my stomach better;
* not undereating, even if I’m sure I’m not hungry–I need a certain amount of food per day to function outside of the body image obsession and my stomach shrinks when I undereat, making it hard for me to not undereat the next day;
* avoiding food which leave a residual longing for more, even if I am physically full;
* eating foods which promote the mental clarity to make real progress in recovery.
a combination of eating enough so I don’t lose more weight but. My abstinence promotes mental clarity through experimentation; it supports my recovery by keeping my mind clear enough to get daily progress in recovery.

      I can’t have perfect abstinence, but the freedom to eat within those guidelines and the understanding that when I trip over a trigger food–that either (1) destroys my mental clarity by triggering character defects or irrational emotions I remember from my active addict state or (2) makes me long for more–it needs to be put aside. Like most compulsive eaters, I can binge on anything if I hit a perfect storm of emotional distress that I don’t want to do a recovered examination of the binge-longing’s source. When I reach an even keel, certain foods encourage the kind of serenity and sanity that promotes the use of the OA tools and the mental clarity to do even a little stepwork.
      Now, I am very clear on a few definitions of “a break in abstinence” would look like:

(1) If I am full yet continue eating anyway because I want food to soothe me emotionally–even if it causes physical agony;
(2) If I eat a whole container of something which has 5 or more servings contained in it (like a whole pie, a whole cake, a whole pizza, a whole bag of chips);
(3) If I eat a half-pound of any one food type or group in a sitting (even 50 calories of green beans is less than 6 ounces). A burger, for example, doesn’t count because it’s a combination an ounce or two of several kinds of food–bread, protein, vegetables, possibly dairy. A half-pound of peanut M&M’s is not considered a combination food because it’s candy;
(4) If I don’t eat at all over the span of a day, or only eat one, small meal, especially if I am hungry and avoid it because I am obsessed with losing weight.
     
      Those are easy.
      When I cut closer to my abstinence, I enter into the realm of “slips” instead of breaks. Eating something I didn’t realize would give me a longing for more is a slip, and I can slide that food into my trigger foods box. Missing a meal because I’m not hungry is a slip because I am not intending to undereat–I’m just trying to respect the hunger. Eating something that I didn’t realize messed with my mental clarity is a slip, and I slide that food into my trigger foods box (because it triggers the loss of mental clarity). Eating more than three servings of one kind of food over the span of a day, even if it fits in my food plan–like a certain type of crackers I get at the grocery store which I enjoy a little too much–is a slip, and I slide that food into my trigger foods box. Eating less than my daily allotted calories yet more than half of them (my anorexic plan minimum) is a slip, and I use that signal I am undereating as a sign that some negative emotion is eating me, instead.
      My food plan, as it rests, is one which encourages a day’s worth of sound nutrition plus access to non-nutritious pleasurable foods. I can eat good chocolate, for example, along with my balanced core diet, because good chocolate does not trigger the need for me to eat more. I enjoy it, and it’s over. Crappy chocolate? I can’t eat. Why? Because I am always looking for the ideal bite and am left with longing for that ideal bite . . . the stellar piece of chocolate in the unsatisfying load of ho-hum.
      In theory, I can even drink another strawberry shake, since I had about 5 minutes of longing for more until food satiety hit. Unfortunately, about 15 minutes after food satiety hit, whatever ingredients in the shake ended up making me addict-nuts. Not sure what was in it, but I lost mental clarity and was running on secondary emotions (I have the clarity back, now, after sleeping overnight). Therefore, I don’t want to eat a food that makes me feel insane again, so I won’t. My sanity is worth more than any potentially tasty calories. Excellent chocolate doesn’t trigger the loss of clarity like that strawberry shake did. Therefore, I wait out good chocolate, try new sources of it, and set those sources into the trigger box if I find myself either having longing or losing mental clarity. And I generally toss what’s left out the door with my family, who are not compulsive eaters–to eat or throw out however they see fit.
      What I do not do is diet punitively and call it abstinence. The whole point of abstinence, for me, is to learn more about my disease by trial-and-error and use what I know to keep recovery moving forward. If I eat a little too much in a meal and feel full instead of sated (I never get to that painful overfull feeling any more), I know for next time to eat less in a sitting. And these days, “a little too much” is half to a tenth of what I ate while in active addiction. In active addiction, I ate my food, some of my husband’s food, some of my kids’ food, then went home and kept grazing until I was numb. I don’t hit numbness, either, any more. I may feel a little raw and emotionally on edge because of something I ate disagreeing with my body chemistry, but I never get numb any more.
      Now, some people might look at what I wrote and scream that I have broken abstinence. Well, my abstinence is not theirs, same as the people whose abstinence doesn’t match mine don’t deserve me thinking, “That’s a break in abstinence!”
      If one gains weight on a food plan but keeps mental clarity? Still abstinent. If one has a three-a-day-plus-a-snack and eats three large meals and one large snack? Still abstinent. If one even uses the scale to regulate one’s eating (which I wouldn’t do because we gain and lose weight sometimes completely unrelated to how many calories we take in over a day) and they follow it? Still abstinent. We define our own abstinences based on what we want out of the physical part of the program and what mental clarity we want out of the mental and spiritual parts of the program.
     
      I do, however, have some thoughts about abstinence for people trying to find a consistent abstinence on their own. These have come from my own experience and from the experience of meetings, and I hope they can help someone looking for abstinence to nail down precisely what they need:

(1) Punitive diets tend to lead to breaks in abstinence. The reason that all those diets didn’t work before is because most diets are a one-size-fits-all plan. I remember doing a national diet company’s summer diet camp program in the 1980s, where the diet portion of the food plan (both in and out of camp) was 1,200 calories. That sustains a moderate-to-low active, 100-lb. person. This wouldn’t be a problem, except that we all are not 5’0″ and moderately active.
      I arrived at the national diet plan’s camp at 5’9″ (at the time) and 40 lbs. overweight by their estimation. I weighed 189 lbs. when I walked in; the company’s goal weight for me was 151 lbs.; I left the camp at 157-158 lbs. and 4 sizes smaller because I converted a lot of fat to a lot of muscle there. Working out at a camp for 8 hours a day and eating only 1,200 calories per day (which my body did not like one bit because I think it needed more nutrients to sustain me), I lost just over 20 lbs. in 4 weeks.
      Another girl at camp who arrived in the high 300-to-low-400 lb. range actually shed almost 60 lbs. the first week and continued to drop 20-30 lbs. weekly thereafter while I was there.
      Sounds amazing, right? Utopia for the diet crowd, right? Wrong. The people in charge of the camp ate with us, and (despite being overweight) they ate really well. So as we’re noshing our playing-card-sized chicken breast (oh, don’t get me started on the two days they served shoe-leather dry beef liver, despite the promise in the brochure in all caps– “NO LIVER!!!”) these people are eating two-inch-thick half-pound to whole pound steaks with all the trimmings. Okay, maybe not a pound of steak, but when you’re eating tiny amounts of diet food and someone walks out with a steak that you’d see in a steakhouse? It looks like something out of the Flintstones in terms of size.
      Resentments built. We unified under a hatred of these two people who were uncommitted to leading a weight camp–despite leading summer camps before. Even the camp counselors thought it was really bad form having the two eat differently than us, and to feast in these ludicrous quantities. After the resentments came the sneak eating.
      The new kids coming in would get hit up for any food they snuck in their luggage. On our weekly outings, some kids would either sneak-eat junk food on site or buy quantities of candy bars and hope they wouldn’t get caught smuggling them in. A lot of kids got caught and lost outing privileges.
      Me? I didn’t sneak eat because I didn’t want to lose my outing privileges and be publicly shamed to boot. No, I used another weight-loss staple: cigarettes. Yes, in the 1980s, cigarette machines were abound and carding for smokes was pretty lax. So I, at 14, and others at 14 and 15, would sneak out our windows and stand behind the dorms smoking in order to get through the food cravings between meals and snacks. The counselors who were there for weight loss did the same, and sometimes we crossed paths behind the dorm, huddling and talking and smoking.
      Punitive food plans don’t work.

(2) Successful abstinence from any of the eating disorders simply moves the food out of the way. We got into food control for a reason–our lives were completely unmanageable before food came into the picture. Once the food is out of the way, we can see the source of the addiction. That’s when we can get the best stepwork done. Read any stories about it, and one can see that people who adopt abstinence by Step Three seem to manage cravings better.
      However, one still has to keep progressing in recovery to keep that abstinence. Moving the food out of the way gives an OA member the mental clarity needed to examine the addiction from a new perspective, what I call “recovery mind”. That duality of thought is probably the greatest strength we have in OA. When we can see the insanity of the addiction, we can turn from indulging in it through practice.
      It doesn’t take long, either. Most people who start a food plan–any food plan–and who remove the worst binge offenders to an off-limits trigger-foods list have said they hit their first taste of real clarity between week one and week two of their food plan. The moment the clarity hits, the secrets that addiction has kept us blind to are suddenly visible. We learn in leaps and bounds about how we eat in addiction and put those things aside. As eating sanely takes hold, we hit our first taste of serenity a few weeks later. It may only be for a few minutes, but it happens.
      Mental clarity allows OA members to keep practicing abstinence while working the steps. It can be fast or slow going, but once we get tracked into recovery because of the removal of food control, we have the ability to change our old ways of thinking–both intellectually and spiritually. We start breaking down the old messages. And if we work the steps to the best of our abilities (not perfectly, best of our personal abilities), we will find that abstinence gets easier because we’re not burdened by what made us eat.

(3) The OA tools really do help maintain abstinence. Using any food plan starts the process of finding the mental clarity to stop eating at others or to punish ourselves for the bad feelings we have toward others and the resulting guilt at having bad feelings toward others. Reading literature reminds us we are not alone and exposes how the addiction tailored itself to us, specifically. Writing allows us to get our secrets out of our heads and to a place we can see them. Sponsorship, meetings, and telephone keep us in communication with other OA members. They get us out of that isolation by keeping us in contact with people who think like we do about food and by encouraging us to expose our secrets in order to live with the vigorous honestly necessary to maintain abstinence. We are as sick as our secrets, and if we are willing to shine a spotlight on them, they cannot make us eat any more. Service commits us to the program by giving us a taste of purpose. Even accepting a phone call is service, and what is said during the call often gives us insight into our own recovery and addiction. Last, anonymity allows us to be brutally honest with ourselves about this addiction and teaches us trust of others. It’s hard for us to trust, as addicts. We’ve been failed so often that the only thing we believe we can trust is food–not even ourselves. By giving the gift of anonymity by not gossiping about our meeting outside of meeting, we serve our fellow compulsive eaters. Also, we can have some amazingly strong meetings which advance everyone’s recovery and sustain abstinence for the rest of the day. I, personally, eat because of my secrets. When I am brutally honest and lay it all out into the open, the feelings I am struggling with often vanish because it’s out there. It’s done. I’m not hoarding events which made me feel bad, whipping them up into these crazy and complex situations which used to drive me straight into the food.

(4) The only food plan that works is the one which is tailored to the individual. I’ve said before that our stories are all the same, but only the details are different. The program works because it is a solid lattice upon which we can grow our personal recoveries.
      Our addictions were tailored to us . . . why not our recoveries? By Step Three, we are asked to find a Higher Power of our own conception from within. We are told there is no one way to do Step Four, often being told, “It doesn’t matter how you do it, as long as you do it”. Step Five can be done in many ways, as long as another person who we intuitively know will accept all of us (part of why it can take so long to find someone to read it to) is available to listen. It can be a reading of everything just to purge it, or it can be a discussion which opens up new resentments and new ideas on how the addiction has gripped us over time. Our character defects we expose in Steps Six and Seven are individual to us, even if we have overlapping ones. And Steps Eight and Nine are all about walking to people humbly and asking for forgiveness for harms we have done them. Steps Ten through Twelve are also personalized–some people do spot-checks and amends during the day and others do an end-of-day inventory then make amends at the soonest opportunity. Step Eleven’s daily communication with a Higher Power can be done many different ways. And Step Twelve, reaching out to others who share our addiction, is as individual as our personalities.
      So, why would we think our abstinence should be one-size-fits-all? For example, some people thrive on structured diet plans because they need the organization. Some people like to plan day-by-day. Some people like to eat three structured meals, with or without daily snacks. Some people find that five or six small meals keeps them mentally sound because they don’t have sugar crashes. Some people have dietary restrictions due to medical issues.
      For me, I wanted to learn how to eat at the end of a healthy weight. So, I prepared a calorie-based food plan which honestly keeps me to three meals per day with or without a snack. I am learning about proper portion control, about respecting my hunger, and I am especially learning how emotions affect my desire to graze. I can have a craving (which normal eaters have, so cravings are not evil), and I will often wait a day or two to see if it was a binge craving or if it was a normal craving. Binge cravings don’t last for days, or, if they do, they are always partnered with anxiety. I definitely won’t eat something that starts calling to me; it gets dropped into the trigger food box for the day while I seek out the emotional source of it through writing or communicating with others.
      My point is that when one breaks abstinence, it’s a signal that something in that food plan was inherently broken. I’m not saying one won’t struggle with one’s abstinence at times, but if the food plan is so restrictive that we get so angry we punish ourselves to prove we cannot be tamed by that food plan? It’s the wrong food plan.
      Examine what did work and keep that. Consider what might have been the problem–Was it too loose? Too restrictive? Did it bring up unmanageable emotions that didn’t bring up the red flags to either send it up to Higher Power or learn something about one’s addiction? For me, my food plan allows me to see how my addiction sneaks in through the cracks between the windows and under the doors. And my food plan lets me catch it. I need enough looseness in my food plan to be able to respect my hunger–which doesn’t come at 7 a.m., 12 noon, and 6 p.m. like clockwork. If I had time-based meals, I would be obsessing about them and would binge at those meals because I would be terrified of being deprived.
      My food plan encourages me to ask if I am actually hungry. And if the answer is no, I know it’s not a physical desire to eat but a mental one. And if it’s a mental desire to eat? That is my addiction sneaking up on me.
      My food plan also keeps me on a balanced diet, overall. I eat whole grains, dairy, fruit, vegetables (more than I would if I was just eating 3 meals a day–I neglect my veg given the chance), and proteins. I need that balanced foundation to think clearly. And I have just enough spare calories to eat anything I want. Those spare calories are where I find my trigger foods most often, and I have learned a lot about my addiction from my food plan.
      But it fits me, mostly. While, yes, I have bumped up the calories because I need to maintain my weight, I have found that the new freedom in my increased maximum caloric intake is showing me more places where I can learn about myself. For example, I considered only drinking half of that shake last night then decided to drink it all. Though I am sliding it aside because of the post-eating emotional hypersensitivity that happened later in the evening, I did learn that I am definitely more comfortable when I eat much less. I would have been physically happier with 8 oz. instead of 15 oz. of it (despite being pretty sure the post-shake crazies would have come anyway). I learned. I’m moving on. Still abstinent because I did not leave my food plan, nor did I go back for a second shake and follow it up with a classic binge or grazing last night. When the meal was over, it was over. I considered eating more vegetables to balance the drink, but I didn’t because I was full. Eating after I was full? That would have been a break in my abstinence, because I would have been eating for a reason besides sating hunger after my body was saying very clearly that it wanted no more food.
     
      This . . . is a long, long post. I’m ready to end it. As I have written before, this is not officially an OA stance but my own views based on my own experience and the experience, strength, and hope of others. If what I wrote gets a person thinking about their own food plan and whether or not it encourages their abstinence? That’s fine. If a person reads this and is offended because they want to be in OA simply to lose weight, and screw that spirituality mumbo-jumbo? That’s fine, too.
      It’s out there, and it’s the truth I have learned for myself. Yes, I present it as strong opinion sometimes because I am an addict and I love my own opinion very, very much (it keeps me from dealing with my own problems ). However, my opinion is just that–an opinion. It is not authoritative and it should not be taken as such. I’m just a compulsive eater exposing personal experience that some may find helpful and others may not. This is how I lost 120 lbs. since June of 2009 and a confirmable 105 lbs. through my own food plan and abstinence. And, as I try to understand what abstinence means to me (outside of “refraining from compulsive eating”, which I cannot do perfectly since I sometimes realize I ate a serving of something emotionally after the fact–though I can keep from the one-continuous-meal grazing and hard-bingeing until I was physically immobile and mentally dazed which I used to do), I want to share it. There’s no hard-and-fast definition of abstinence; we still have to eat, despite food being our addict substance.
      But this is how I estimate that I was able to somehow stay abstinent for a whole bunch of just-for-todays, how my abstinence seems to be chugging along today (though I do need to eat breakfast, despite it being late morning, now), and how the miracle of eating 2,000 calories somehow sent me through my ideal weight right into more food control issues. I am thankful for that, because I have my best recovery in adversity.
      I am here to learn and grow, to make progress as a human being. Food addiction gets in the way of that. Therefore, I get to practice on a daily basis the use of abstinence–as I define it today–to keep my mind clear enough to at least make progress on my journey of recovery through the 12 Steps.
      My name is Jess, and I am a food control addict and approval addict. And I am loquacious as the Dickens. Or maybe as Dickens, himself, since he was paid by the word and it shows.
      Meh, I like to write. It helps me get out of my head and expose the often laughable weirdness that is my addiction. And I do laugh about it, because I got drawn from that ocean of addiction and lived to tell the tale. And every day I don’t jump back in to those deadly waters is a day worth a smile or laugh. I am alive today, imperfectly human and right where I am supposed to be. That alone brings me such happiness that I want to laugh out loud.

* Fear keeps you healthy and alive by warning you that you’re in danger;
* Fear invites us to act, to advance and grow, thereby making a change that aligns with reality and nature;
* Fear motivates us to try harder in order to have a successful outcome;
* And fear is the only way to develop the character asset of courage.
     
      That’s pretty cool to me. That feeling which has frozen me in my tracks for so long is actually just an alarm to let me know I’ve intuited an opportunity–sniffed out a prize worth seeking out. Whether it’s keeping me alive in order to grow or taking a chance no matter what the outcome, or even developing the character asset of courage . . . fear signals that I’ve been given a gold-embossed invitation that it’s time to go with the flow, to surrender that fear and take a leap of faith. Not only does it say that it’s time to change, it gives me the physical enhancements of a higher awareness and the potential energy to make a change if I use that energy.
      So fear is a good thing, despite the feelings of a tight chest and stomach, or even nausea.
     
     
Anger
     
      I personally hate anger because I perceive that it goes against my desire to love (Ah, the irony of being angry that I have to feel anger is not lost on me). Anger, however, can be seen as an opportunity to love by using that burst of energy I’ve just been given to create instead of destroy.
      In me, anger is triggered when I perceive an injustice. Life isn’t fair. Sometimes it is unfair in my favor; sometimes, not. When it’s not fair and not in my favor (or the favor of people I care about)? Then I get angry.
      Anger, like fear, gives a burst of awareness and energy, just like fear. Anger tells me, “Something is innately wrong, and I want to change it, damn it!” How I use that energy and awareness is up to me.
      I think nearly everyone knows how to destroy in anger. As children, we’ve thrown tantrums. We’ve kicked over block towers. We’ve hit, we’ve kicked, we’ve punched, and we’ve flailed our little arms and legs in order to expend this energy chaotically. That seems to be the default. However, if we haven’t learned to channel it productively or have been taught to quash it? We are left bereft of using it as anything but a destructive force.
      Anger seems to be a pretty good creator of resentments. We re-feel unresolved anger, and the energy boost once again is triggered. We feel guilt when we act out our anger in non-productive ways, often longing to go back and change what we did . . . even if we have no idea how we could have done it differently.
      Well, anger is simply another alert, just like fear is. But instead of fear telling us to move out of the way or take a risk to manage what is about to go wrong, anger alerts us to what is wrong now, today, in this moment. It lets us know that change we do not like at all has happened, and we have an opportunity to do something about it.
      So, how do I use anger positively, then? I want to have a tantrum. I want to tear apart the thing that changed, undo it completely, make it go away already! To use anger positively, I have to first appreciate that I have been given the awareness of an undesired change and have received the energy to do something about it. For me, writing is a wonderful outlet. I pour my anger out onto a page. This not only reduces my anger enough that I can use what’s left to fuel change, this also makes me aware of what I can use that leftover fuel for. Anger says, “Whether or not you know what to do, get up and do something!” Taking the time out to write out my anger at the change actually allows my head to start working on what actions I can take. Yes, it may not work as I wanted, but I have expended the energy. I have put it into something I believe in. Through anger, I have respected myself enough to fight for what I believe in (or what others believe in), and I can take from it the feeling of satisfaction that I poured that potential energy in making a change. Nothing happens in a vacuum, and the use of anger positively will make a difference. It may not make the precise difference we want to see today, but if we believe in the possibilities that anything can happen in this reality? We can let the good work we’ve just done go, let the Rube Goldberg machine our energy kicked off do its thing. Simply by listening to anger’s command for us to act then choosing creative order instead of destructive chaos, we have made positive change that will filter back into our lives. In other words, our use of the anger to create instead of destroy may inspire, down the line, someone else who has the power to make a real change.
      Considering that when we use our anger to flail and break stuff, it leads others to have triggered anger because we just used our energy to make something unfair happen to them? The use of anger’s raw power to create can also trigger others to use their anger to create, as well. And, the more people rowing the skiff with that directed power and the determination to use it? The more likely we cross the finish line and land in the victory lane. Or circle. Or wherever crew teams end up when they get first place.
      And, if one is really in a situation where one can’t act for the greater good? Get on a treadmill and run it off; get into the gym and push weights until the energy is gone. The raw power of anger can be used positively to create a healthier body through physical action and a healthier mind through the practice of using anger’s raw force for creative instead of destructive purposes. The benefit of practicing this new use of anger’s burst of energy means that it will get easier and easier to turn toward the creative until that becomes our default.
      In other words, we’ll become one of those people we wish we were . . . a person who rolls up his or her sleeves, gets that determined look in his or her eye, and single-mindedly works for fairness. Definitely an improvement over a person who rampages and strikes terror in people until others finally decide it’s enough and uses prison or a mental institution to remove their problem with our chaotic actions.
     
     
Sadness
     
      Endings are part of nature, part of reality. Our lives up to this point, if we really sit down and examine them, are a series of endings. Our gestations ended, and we were born. Our infancies ended and we became children. Our childhoods ended and we became adolescents. Our adolescences ended, and we became adults. Jobs ended and we got new ones (or, in this economy, have been challenged to take risks because no jobs are available to us). Relationships ended, and we found new people to date or marry. Friendships ended, and we found new people to make friends with. We’ve moved from rooms or our childhood homes to new rooms in that house or new places to live. And if we’ve been pet owners in our lives, those pets have died (as is natural for living things to do) and we got new ones to shower love and care on.
      Note that everything I put up there has had something after it. Why? Because nature has dropped the gift of paradox into loss–for every loss we experience, we find a new beginning out of the ashes. Always. Even when we don’t move on from loss, our lives are still changed; we still have experienced a new beginning.
      That’s where grief comes in. The purpose of healthy grief is to learn to live again, to start a new chapter in our lives without the thing we just lost. Now, as an addict, grief isn’t something I learned to manage. I still look backwards and try to will my childhood to have been normal. But life did move on for me anyway. I grew up, left my parents’ home, got married (and divorced), got remarried, and now I have a son who is turning 18 this month. I will be a grandparent some day; perhaps I will even meet my great-grandchildren. And I will face the end of my life, just as I will face the ends of the lives of the irreplaceable people which populate it.
      My own grandparents are gone. My father’s step-father died when I was still in college, and I felt the loss of this kind and wonderful man intensely when I visited my father’s mother in the weeks after he was gone–expecting him to walk out of the back bedroom to greet me with a smile and hug. My mother’s mother died while I was pregnant with my first son; my mother’s father died while I was pregnant with my second. My father’s mother was the first person to hold my son after we left the hospital; we went straight there upon discharge. My second son still had the new-baby smell–that saltwater scent I never realized my first son had because I was distracted by my obsession to get us out of the hospital then deal with keeping an infant alive in the middle of a snowy January. Well, and to deal with the unexpected life change when I became a mother for the first time–which I was not ready for emotionally, physically, or mentally. Anyway, my father’s father died after both my sons were here. He made choices in his life which left him outside of my children’s lives, for his wife of many years decided that my first son was going to take his love from her (as opposed to the sane understanding that love is not finite, but she was beautiful, not reasonable). So, he never knew my second son, and when he died and I was told? I had no reaction. And when I was told I wasn’t invited to the funeral? I was okay with it, since the funeral was about his wife. She was already grieving his loss, and I had no emotional connection with him any more. I didn’t care to be there, so she could perceive that I ruined her big day as a grieving widow. I’d already been hurt enough that my grandfather felt he had to sneak around behind her back to see my toddler son for the final time he did. Considering his affairs were part of the reason I feel my father wasn’t emotionally available to me as a child. My father’s father wasn’t emotionally available to my father, so how could my father learn to be emotionally available to me.
      Yes, I have some resentments, but somehow I mourned bits and pieces of my life properly, even as I was left emotionally frozen in time by other parts I still cannot accept and won’t mourn to this day.
      I logically know that birth, life, and death are part of reality for all living things. Perfection-seeking, however, has left me settled in the past as I try to undo it. Yes, I actually will go backwards into memory and try to will it different. Which is silly, since I appreciate what I have a lot more. I just wish I had not lost all of those years because I didn’t know or didn’t want to accept what I was doing to myself.
      But, I have been drawn from that slow death, recovered from the addiction–in that I am not currently acting out the addiction. By no means am I “recovered” in the program. I am in recovery for the rest of my life; even upon my last breath on this planet will I never say I am “recovered”. There is no finish line to recovery for me, because that would mean that I assume I can learn everything there is to learn. That’s a pretty grandiose attitude for someone who’s trying to be humble. Plus, if I was revived and lived an extra day, week, month, or year past that initial “last breath” moment, I would have the possibility to learn more. So, if I died today, I would be in complete understanding that learning opportunities were waiting tomorrow–ad infinitum.
      Anyway, loss is an opportunity to learn to love. By going through the healthy process of grieving and learning to live again after the loss, I am showing myself love by acknowledging that the often-bizarre emotions and actions of the grieving process are normal. Loss is an opportunity to practice acceptance and humility in the face of the Universal Constant of impermanence. Things change, and I change along with them. I will not exist eternally, but I can grow for as long as I have left. In fact, the growth is, in itself, an ending-and-beginning process. I cannot go back to a time when I didn’t know that new thing; I can’t unlearn what I have learned. I may not practice it, and that is my choice. It is all of our choices.
      So, loss is an opportunity to be part of reality, of acknowledging that everything has a beginning and an end. But I can take with me that every loss is an opportunity. The qualities of a person I admired can become part of me; that person may not physically be present, but they will live on. I can share memories of that person with people who never knew them, potentially inspiring the listener to pursue those qualities in themselves. Loss simply is another word for change, and since change is generally considered a good thing, loss can be considered a good thing as well.
      Emotionally, loss brings with it the gifts of vulnerability, compassion, empathy, and love. When we grieve our losses in a healthy way, we are compassionate to ourselves. When we are ready to accept the compassion of others, we can be vulnerable with them. The loss, itself, allows us to know what another person who faces the loss after us is going through and use what helped us (or avoid what we wish others had avoided with us) in order to be compassionate when they come to us, vulnerable. Most of all, we get an opportunity to experience love.
      For me, love is an elusive concept which has shown up as obsession, romantic passion, approval-seeking, and enmeshment with others. I wander through my past sometimes, asking myself, “Was this love? I think it might have been,” when I am met with a memory of pure acceptance for who I was at the time by another human being. I have touched love; they’re like little dandelion fairies of my memory floating on the wind sometimes. I squint to see the detail as they float away and become white blurs until I cannot see them at all. But just like sending a wish out on the dandelion fairies as I blow them from the stem, it often feels like love is as elusive and fleeting as that.
      I have learned a few things about what love is like from people who appear to have experienced it. But there is no definition, no steps I can take to get my certificate in “Being a Loving Person”. It’s trial and error, and when I find myself bonded to someone and trust them and am willing to forgive the harms they do me only because they were unintentional (a person saying “I didn’t mean to” is much different than knowing that they didn’t mean to; the repetition of harms with the wide-eyed apologetic excuse-making is my own personal addict-minded forte), I tend to believe that I’ve found real love there. And I have no words for it, only a sense that the person supports me growing into whoever I am going to become and that the person forgives my backslides when I get overwhelmed.
      In other words, when I am accepted as an imperfect human being (even if some of my actions aren’t acceptable to that person) because that is the way of being human, I feel love.

     
      Well, I’ve written for a few hours now, and I’m ready to go do anything else. I think what I was meant to learn today is here. Now I get to let it go to my Higher Power, so it can be processed behind-the-scenes and brought back to me in whatever incarnation or life example or learning opportunity I am being given.
      My eating is weird, but it’s still within parameters. I ate more for breakfast than normal, but I didn’t feel sated until I ate it. I didn’t walk away feeling bloated or underfed, so that’s good. I guess sometimes I want something tiny, and other days I want a full meal. And this is buggering with my sense of strictness on myself, where I tell myself that if I don’t eat within very precise rules, I am not abstinent.
      But I am eating within my food plan and I don’t feel like I’ve overeaten and I don’t feel like I ate emotionally then left the table wanting to eat more because I felt bad. I dunno. I guess as I learn more about the difference between a food plan and abstinence (abstaining from . . . the addiction? Does that mean if I eat one chocolate chip because I feel sad, I broke abstinence?), I guess what I do will change, as well.
      Ugh, give it to my HP already, Jess! An answer is always forthcoming, even if I don’t particularly like it.
      My name is Jess, and I am a food addict, a food-restricter, and an approval-seeker. Man, that’s exhausting to think about . . . all that energy to punitively binge, or to punitively diet, or to keep my eyes scanning for the one person who can fix me. Thank goodness for program; I’m beginning to think that the unpleasant task of going back in my life and reviewing my resentments really isn’t all that daunting. After all, if I have enough energy to kick up chaos all around me in order to keep people away? I probably have enough energy to process the negative emotions which will surface as I do my Fourth Step and turn a negative experience into a positive one.

      I had a real emotion today, from a real place.

      I was in a store, watching a child and mother with a cart. And it was about to go bad, because Mommy was trying to control the toddler pushing the cart, and said toddler (we’re talking two or three) was being a toddler. But I smiled, hoping that Mommy and the Big Boy Pushing the Cart because he wanted to be a helper and a Big Boy for Mommy could reconcile this before it went bad.
      It went bad. I wasn’t paying attention until all of a sudden, this little angel-faced baby was on the floor wailing, “Owie!”, and when he got up he held his baby cheek. No accusations, but Mom was upset, angry, withdrawn emotionally, wanting this toddler to act like an adult and get over to where she had left him on the floor–about ten feet away. In the middle of a walking area.
      She leaned close and again my view was obscured as I will swear she did it again. I couldn’t see; I wanted to walk out of the horror and yell at her, tell her to stop abusing her child in the store, already.
      It came on me like a storm, that feeling of helplessness. That feeling of being a small child. And I took off my glasses, turned to my husband, and buried my face in his shoulder. He asked if I was okay, and I finally was vulnerable in this childhood pain and my own childhood tears to shake my head and actually say the words, “No. I’m not okay.”
      As we walked away (seeing as I had not witnessed what happened), I got mad in my helplessness and despair and near-shouted that my father had beaten me in public in order to get me to behave, that children should not have to live with that pain. The fear of that child’s future rested deep in my heart, and I wept for it. I wept for him. I wept for me, also, because I could not go back in this big body and stop what happened to me decades ago.
      I’m not sure if the confession is true or not. I have had my toes stepped on, my ears pinched, but I do not recall being hit in public. It could be so deep or so early that I cannot recall the pictures, the recorded memory. It could be true, though I did not have a memory come up with it.
      My husband was supportive through it, despite my fear of having embarrassed him in a store by having me break down into tears. It did pass very quickly, as I have been told in book after book that raw and real emotions do, and I was left shaken. What I felt? That wasn’t a secondary emotion, drama piled on top of a childhood pain to mask it.
      That was a childhood pain climbing up into my arms and heart, begging me to listen. And I listened, and I grieved with my inner baby, my inner pain, my self-hatred for being that woman and yelling at my own son in a store when reality veered out of control. And I am sick, for I touched evil in my lifetime, and I was it.
      How do we reconcile with this? No one walked to this woman, no one corrected her. No one confronted her. All I kept thinking was, “Food addict, food addict, food addict,” when I looked at this obese woman whose despair was written in her face and whose own pain burdened her so much that her shoulders were hunched for the weight of it. I wept because I was faced with something I was not ready for and, being raw because of a book which exposed both hope and agony, I was open to the little hurt me tugging on my arm and putting her hands up to have the adult me hold her close to my heart and protect her from the woman. Yes, a human being inches shorter than me, wearing the same pain I do every day, who would never consider going after the tall woman who probably would be ready to kick her ass if she tried to pinch my cheek in order to get me to stop crying in the store, too, (because my hurt, little child is no dummy–she knows she has a super-big body at her disposal that it can flail and kick and hit with and cause adult harm to others with when she’s mad) . . . yes, that human being intimidated me. Scared me. Brought the curling up in the corner and putting the hands up to stop the hurt tiny child out without warning.
      In a store.
      I thought I had my walls up. I really did. And having that real emotion surface so violently was also terrifying. But . . . it was beautiful in a way, too. Because even though I was weeping in a store? I was weeping in a store. I felt a real emotion from a real place. And it did not smash me into a billion pieces. It did not turn me into dust. I did not blow away. It washed over me and showed me that I am going to survive returning to the place these things all started, and I will learn to trust that I can rely on myself as the adult in my life who can care for me . . . who can not only learn to love but to love me.
      And I realize that I can honor the promise that child made to my adult self . . . that child who turned to food to protect my core, who chose food as a placeholder for something that could never be taught to her because her parents weren’t taught it by their parents who weren’t taught it (ad infinitum), who was potentially even the great hope of becoming a teacher of love to those two adults who tried to find it outside themselves. That child promised me that if I could survive to adulthood, I would not have to ever be hurt like that again. Just survive, Jessie. Just survive to eighteen, and you’ll be okay.
      Well, it took twenty-one years longer than I expected because of the wake of destruction left behind. The walls I put up were strong; the longing to have an external source rescue me (because I practiced that throughout my childhood) and break the walls down for me has lasted wordlessly within me. “If someone really loves me,” the adult and child Jess said together, “they will break down the walls.” But I picked men who were insubstantial, who were (as Geneen Roth explained in When Food is Love) chocolate. And when I miraculously tripped over a man who was a substantial and life-giving meal of encouraging me to grow and learn and change, somehow we endured. We have endured for almost 15 years together, almost 14 of it married to each other. My body knew what it needed; my mind and soul did, too. And even though I kept turning toward the insubstantial statement approval of those chocolate men even after my spouse had arrived, always looking for the high of the drama because I was afraid to be vulnerable because I thought I would disapparate or that my spouse could not want me because other men did not (which in turn made me hide from men because I wanted my substantial husband more than the approval of insubstantial men–my first taste that something was seriously wrong with me and I needed to put real walls between me and those insubstantial men who might someday ask for a kiss or a hug or, God forbid, sex), I kept the faith that some day, if I kept my hand out of those cookie jars, I could lose that desire to be desirable, to be made whole by someone. Anyone.
      In other words, I went on an approval diet because I knew what made me feel healthy. My spouse makes me feel healthy. Now that I am working recovery, I am thankful for that social anorexia, for the physical walls, for eating real chocolate instead of choosing to seek personal completion through what I consider to be a shallow approval criteria only chocolate men would be willing to provide (a substantial man would not do that because it’s not in his make-up). I saw that red-hot burner on the stovetop, and I did not reach for it because I knew what would happen if I did. And I was rewarded by the relief that I turned to food. Yeah, I am relieved that my compulsive overeating was there for me, protected me from something I could never have reconciled with.
      I was thinking about what I wrote earlier today, when I was desperate for Geneen Roth’s Matt not to hurt her as I read about the intense vulnerability I empathized with. And I realized that I wanted it to be a rescue fantasy come true, a soul to heal her soul. A woman who I believed was better than me because she was so honest and loving as she helped women just like me learn to leave an abusive relationship with food. I wanted her to have an external solution to an internal problem so perhaps, if I were good enough and copied her well enough, I could have it, too.
      As I considered what I wrote, it struck me that it was me I didn’t want to hurt. Me. That I wanted to hear that someone who thought and felt like me could get the dream. That she would be rescued from her pain, that he broke through the walls, that he healed her. Why? Because it would feed into my belief that I, too, could have that. It’s an addict belief, one that I’ve held fast to from the moment I started believing Prince Charming was out there to kiss me awake from this slumber of food and love addiction. I wanted to have hope that it could happen to me, that I could have the results without doing the work, myself.
      Nope.
      But it is better this way, because it settles me into the very real truth that I am the only person who can get in deep enough to actually see the hurt. These are my memories, my experiences, and only I have access to them. My spouse can only hear what I say about them, see the tears coming from the little girl who has been suppressed for years because of the fear of being hurt yet again. He can’t come in and experience my life through my eyes. He can’t heal that hurt because he can’t get in to get to it, and he probably couldn’t do a damned thing if he were able to. No, the person who has to do it is me–something I know to be true through program. There are no easy outs through the pain, but at least the path is simple and straightforward.
     
      And admitting any of this hurts, but truth heals. We are only as sick as our secrets, program tells us. And if I am unwilling to be honest with myself and with others, if I am unwilling to see my part in it, and if I am unwilling to make the amends my natural self wants me to make in order to cleanse myself of these sludgy secrets that bog down my every spiritual advance . . . if I am unwilling to reveal my own lifetime of pain and hurt and the drama and pain and hurt I created in order to avoid feeling the real stuff? Then I can never recover, and this body which has enjoyed the results of me sticking to a food plan for over a year will some day be sitting on a couch hugging a family-sized bag of something, stomach painfully overstretched, body wearing a wall of obesity in order to keep the hurts out . . . or to keep it buried beneath a hundred or more pounds of excess weight.
     
      Still Jess, still a food addict, still a love addict. And I feel raw and don’t know what to do with it because my recovered mind is celebrating just as my addict mind is running around trying to patch up the hole where that very real feeling escaped from.

      I am having a pretty good day in recovery so far. My cold is still hanging on (damn that freaking nico-ddiction!), but I hoe by this time next year I will have found a meeting which I can get to so I can deal with the trifecta.

      Even sitting in meeting at Nic-Anon would be Even sitting in meeting at Nic-Anon would be better than facing off with a potential bronchitis diagnosis in 2011. In my twenties, when I smoked all the time (a half-pack per day to a whole pack per day as opposed to 1/4 pack per day, which is what I do now), I had bronchitis or walking pneumonia yearly. Seriously. If I had not been born when I was, I would be dead by now of my stupid addictions. So I am very thankful to have had modern medicine so I could get to a place in my life when I can work my addictions out using a program that works for me. Personally, I am not worried that the founders of the program weren’t saints. They were experimenting with trying to find a cure for alcoholism. I’m not even sure they realized anything about cross-addiction, though three generations later, we are entirely aware of it. I mean, in the Big Book, they sort-of encourage food addiction to keep one out of alcoholic trouble (the candy by the bedside table).
      I think that by taking the core program and applying the most basic parts of it as it applies to me have made all the difference in the world. While I still bristle at the use of Him and He and the Thee/Thy/Thou stuff, that’s something I appreciate being able to work through program. After all, when G-d became The Father–a punitive and mean-spirited deity who would toss me into Hell if I made a mistake–It became just like the people in my life who had power over me. I was sorry for screwing up, but I could not stop. I didn’t fail G-d, nor did G-d fail me. The visions of other people got in the way because it was supposed to be G-d’s word. But it came down through imperfect people, just like the 12-Step program came down through addicts. People lay their human rules down to keep society as polite as possible then use G-d as the hammer. I mean, I never grokkked how the whole “Thou Shalt Not Kill” commandment worked with the times that G-d was on the side of the victors of wars. And how the beloved people of the texts had human failings yet were still beloved yet I could not be.
      This doesn’t mean religion cannot be the framework for a beautiful path of faith. I think religion works well for some, as long as they step outside the boundaries of the writers long enough to have a personal relationship with G-d. The message is good; the manifestation of the message just sometimes gets muddled by the messengers. Ugh, and don’t get me started on the whole Devil thing. If G-d is all powerful, all knowing, and all-loving, then how can the Devil even exist? I mean, that’s pretty freaking sadistic of G-d to choose to put a vicious manifestation in the path of people so we can prove ourselves worthy.
      That was my freaking childhood and most of my adulthood–the obsessive need to prove myself worthy so I get the cash-n-prizes of approval from G-d, itself. Or, if G-d decides to be vindictive, I get tossed in the Lake of Fire anyway. That version of G-d? Is a total douchebag which is not all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving. I mean, causing people such amounts of pain to be tortured by a fallen angel is really a jerky thing to do, and it allows people to not take responsibility for themselves by excusing their behavior as being done by Lucifer.
      Now, some people take the beauty of faith and don’t worry about Lucifer because they’re enjoying their closeness with a loving, forgiving G-d–what I consider true faith. I can grok the free-will concept, where I can choose a peaceful life or I can choose a life of addict Hell on earth. I can even understand taking on the aspects of faith, hope, and charity and make them part of me because they align with my natural self. But being in a tug-of-war for my soul? That’s just . . . weird.
      Too human. My Higher Power isn’t even remotely human (it has no will for me, because will is a human condition). It is beyond comprehension (as an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving deity should be). And only I can know if what I am doing goes against my natural self because I feel out of alignment with reality. I feel like I am trying to escape or I am trying to control reality. Well, that ain’t happening while I am still getting up in the morning to tread the Earth yet one more day. And while I’m here, I might as well make the effort to stop making myself miserable by realigning my life to what brings me serenity and self-knowledge and a willpower I never thought I could possess. Wherever that “Deeper Love” (Thanks Aretha!) comes from? Should not matter to anyone else. I call it my Higher Power, and if it bothers people that I do, then it does.
      I can still smile at you in the grocery store, greet you politely and wish you a good day, hold doors, and offer help. Does it matter that I considered it sourced from the Universe? Does how I express the ability to eat sanely, act decently, and grow as a human being change as soon as I mention that I have a Higher Power? If so, why? I am serious. Why does it matter to anyone but me? I’m not trying to convert anyone into 12-Step programs. I’m just saying that I feel fortunate that I found something that seems to work for me, and–just like I have with religious texts–I have discarded many of the messengers’ ego-driven text in order to get to the core of the process. I have the program, even if I don’t follow the book slavishly and treat it like a religious text–the only path to salvation as long as I worship each word.
      Heh. So much for my day in recovery. But it’s okay. Judgmentalism and condemnation are character defects I get to work on this lifetime. Never said I was a saint as soon as I “found program”. I just found free will in the program–the ability to choose to grow as a human being or to avoid responsibility for my life. To face reality (good and bad) or to completely freak out because “li-i-i-ife isn’t fa-a-a-a-a-air!” (ie., not unfair to my benefit). Life isn’t supposed to be fair or unfair. Life is life. Fairness is a filter we apply on it in order to decide if the outcome is favorable for us. It is, in essence, a judgment and condemnation (since people rarely complain when the outcome is favorable to them). And deciding fairness is not only trying to take control of something I have no business trying to control (making me G-d in my own estimation), it also places restrictions on reality as it is. I can’t notice the small miracles in my life if I’m navel-gazing. Got to keep my eyes open and looking around, right? I’ve stared at my belly button long enough. I know what it looks like, already.
      Heh. Maybe that is recovery, after all. I am imperfect. I still judge people, places, and situations . . . but I am aware I am. That awareness that I don’t like that I do that because it keeps me in my head instead of in reality means that I will work it in recovery. I expect it will take time to untangle those knots in my psyche. I have hope, however, that some day I will be less judgmental over the day. Discerning of what I want to bring in my life and am ready to work toward, yes. Judgmentally condemning of reality, not so much.
     
      My name is Jess, I am a food, approval, and nicotine addict, and I realize I can’t get to my morning OA meeting because I’ve been journaling. I ought to call my sponsor right now, to let her know I will be missing it. I have other things to do today, which is okay, too. I enjoyed writing, and that was good. Responsibility for choices. That’s what it’s all about for me.

      What is love?

      If one reads the lyrics of Haddaway’s song, it’s pretty clear that what he’s expressing is an addicted form of love. But it doesn’t answer what love is.
      I’ve read as much as I can about love, and I am afraid I’m doing it wrong. Isn’t that funny? To be afraid that I am not expressing love in a healthy way. I am actually googling healthy love to figure it out (trying to divine a spiritual answer from an intellectual pursuit). I hope that what I have found gives me at least a foundation to start from:

      “Healthy love is unconditional in that it is given, as much as it is received, without being forced by those involved. There is no need to expect any payback, because when it is given freely from your heart or soul, in turn it engenders universal gratitude that spreads through you like warm, sweet honey. It has nothing to do with age, gender, hobbies, social status, wealth, religion or occupation. This type of love is not superficial, but comes from deep within your heart and soul. You willingly want to share a deeper, richer part of your being. Healthy love has boundaries that are honoured, respected and adhered to by all concerned. There is no ownership in which one tries to dominate the other. It does not require proving yourself to anybody and it leaves you free to remain your true self. Displays of power or jealousy are non-existent. There is mutual respect for each other in which you have consideration for each other’s differences. You resist trying to change the other person to emulate you or to become a vision of how you may think they should be. It is only natural that you wish the other person to grow and succeed in all areas of their life and in all ways – mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually, even if it means living apart. Healthy love generates individual space, where each can do what pleases them without harbouring any feelings of guilt, selfishness, remorse, sacrifice or regret.” (from the article “Healthy Love” on stason.org)
     
      So, basically, it appears that love is endeavoring to be a safe person toward others (and myself). And to do that, I also have to recognize what is unhealthy love.
      When I use another person’s faults to make myself feel superior? Not love. When I beg for approval by lowering myself before a person? Not love. It cannot be one-sided. Obsession can, sexual desire can. Love is mutual and is respectful of boundaries. Love is acceptance–not changing another person to suit me or not changing myself to suit someone else. Love encompasses the spiritual gratitude of having that person as part of my life without a need to receive recompense for my time and effort. Love is knowing when it’s time to let an unhealthy relationship with a person go, and the gratitude if something changes and I can strike up a healthy relationship with that person.
      In other words, love is a mutual safe relationship with a person. So, I guess if I keep working on the emotions practice and remember that love isn’t a fleeting emotion but a spiritual state of existence, I may be able to learn how I express love in my individual way.
      It would be nice if love were an actual algebra or physics or even chemistry formula. Maybe I could insert my height and weight and age and get answers out of that. But it doesn’t work like that. Love is a spiritual journey, not an intellectual pursuit. I guess I knew this, since everything I quoted above makes all of the sense in the world. It’s not selfish to preserve one’s self in a relationship. And love thrives on growth and evolution. Trusting others will accept it is just part of the process, and accepting that others sometimes will not is also part of the process.
      I hate the idea of losing friends. Of course, I don’t have to “lose” them, but I do owe it to myself not to submit to the chaos. I do tend to go chilly instead of compassionate when a person enters the “danger” zone–definitely something I need to work on. Compassion for unsafe people coupled with the understanding that change has to come from within (Hey, I’m an unsafe person most of the time, still, and I know that if I really want to know love, I need to practice being a safe person toward myself and others). That’s the footwork in the real world I need to do.
      For some reason, practicing being a safe person is just not getting into my head. I forget what I’m supposed to do. It’s not like I don’t nod and think, “Oh, yeah,” when I look at the list of safe person practice. It just doesn’t stick like a lot of my spiritual growth has. I guess I’m not entirely ready for this lesson, and it’s time to send it up to my Higher Power. It’s entirely possible other things must slide into place for me to internalize those positive rules of life.
      One big thing I have to give up to my HP and do footwork on is feeling threatened by or superior to unsafe people. That judgmental attitude actually keeps me unsafe to others! The belief in a pecking order of humanity is seated deep within me. I can turn to my recovery and know that I am no better or worse than any person on the planet. I am equally imperfect, and to judge myself better or worse based on character traits and actions by myself and others is a disservice. I have the potential to grow every day, just like everyone else. I have the capacity to feel emotions, just like everyone else. I choose how I want to live (even if it makes me miserable), just like everyone else. Well, what aligns with me? What were my goals when I started OA?
      I remember saying I wanted to be healthy when I went in. I may have started with the concept that I wanted to be physically healthy, but I also had a deep-down desire to have a sense of completeness and the mental capacity not to give into my compulsive tendencies in order to smooth life over or make it more dramatic. I knew something was wrong with how I thought, and I wanted to discard those old messages I carry around in my head. I admit I wanted the results to be easy and immediate, not simple and over a lifetime of todays.
      I know that if I really, really choose to surrender, I can have that immediately and it can be easy. I am so afraid to lose myself that I am reluctant to give up what I identify as my Self. I know following the path of that false self I built up over time has made me miserable. Eating compulsively may feel like control (eating what I want when I want it), but when I want to stop, I cannot. Presenting myself as inferior to others may feel like the only way to get people’s love, but it is manipulation which opens me up to manipulation. I resent when normal people don’t appear to appreciate what I think I am doing for them–building them up by knocking myself down. Taking a superior stance is just as bad, because I take on the attitude that I know better than they do about their lives. What do I know? I can’t climb inside their heads and experience their memories of their lives. And, reasonably, if I could get into someone’s head, that would be using their knowledge of what they know is best for them to advise them.
      I think I fear that if I lose judgmentalism, I will lose myself to manipulations of others. After all, if I can’t discern right versus wrong action, how am I supposed to do it for myself? That is such a glaring fallacy, however, that I cannot ignore it.
      Just because I stop judging people (and, of course, advising them because I am sure I know how they should live their lives better than they do) does not mean I have to live like they do. This involves trusting I know what’s best for my life. My life choices may not align with theirs, to the point that I get frustrated and annoyed at the person for not being precisely what I want right then (ie., demanding they be perfect), but why does that have to stop me from being empathetic, kind, and polite? Why must there be a black-and-white ruling on something that is not black-and-white at all? Why must there be condemnation in order to turn a person away from what I consider “bad”? I mean, the inherent dysfunctional thinking that I can use the character defective trait of condemnation to decide if a person is “good” or “bad” is glaring and obvious.
      I get angry at myself for condemning people. I hate that it is a fault I cannot seem to shake, that frustration with people triggers it so easily. I hate conflict, and I would rather walk away callously than get hurt yet again by someone. But how can I condemn people when I am imperfect, also?
      I feel taken advantage of by someone I call (well, called) a friend. This person really isn’t a friend because my boundaries and my growth aren’t respected. My knee-jerk reaction is to turn my back on this person, because interaction with this person agitates me regularly. I avoid until I cannot, which makes it worse. I long for this person to see the benefits of taking on the challenge of spiritual growth so I can celebrate this person’s change. Instead, I am left angry and feeling violated. And I am worried about hurting this person’s feelings–something the serenity prayer clearly tells me is not my fault if I do what I can to be respectful. The problem is that I question whether or not I was respectful because I am generally frustrated in my dealing with this person. I want to rant about how this person will commit to something then flake completely. Yet isn’t this how I deal with my OA sponsor? I am at a loss.
      Perhaps this person’s weaknesses are unforgivable to me because these weaknesses are unforgivable in myself. I resent myself when I forget or just don’t want to do something. This is so agitating! I hate having this in my own personality! And I am trying to change it, though recently I am flaking because I am ill.
      I’m getting up to take care of my responsibilities, sick or not. I have obligations I need to complete, and if I do them, maybe I can feel better about relaxing after getting them done.
      I am so tired. HP help me, this is a bad day and I need spiritual guidance (and some “spiritual hugs”) right now because I am feeling really weak. Which, of course, is the best time to go to my HP and my sponsors and my co-addicts. Weakness is what binds us together, as we read in OA. And from reaching my hand out to others instead of trying to do this all myself, I will find the strength of two, then many, along with the spiritual strength provided to me when I believe that my presence on this planet has some value–otherwise I wouldn’t be here in recovery trying to become a decent human being.
      And no, I don’t expect I will ever entirely kill that judgmental, condemning part of me. It’s part of my history, part of the foundation of me, even if it’s part of that “false self” built to protect me from once-real and now perceived hurts. I am not the special exception to the rule; I am going to be hurt and disappointed, bruised and banged around, in life. I will also know contentment and joy, love and happiness, in the small miracles that reality seems to sprinkle all around. But I will learn an alternative to it, so when I am tempted to get my righteous ire up and condemn people for being as imperfect as I am, I can step back and find the recovered and kind way to approach the situation.
     
      My name is Jess, and I am a food addict and approval addict. Today, I am ill and I am angry at a person. Both will pass if I let them. The illness is telling me, “Slow down,” and the anger is telling me that something deep inside me has triggered a deeply held anger relating to betrayal of trust and the reliance on people so I can keep my word. No wonder I gravitate toward trying to control everything myself; the people I have historically chosen to associate with and call friends have those habits I loathe in myself.
      Not any more. The people who I deal with these days rise to the commitments and make sure that if they cannot be somewhere or do something, they let someone know ahead of time. That is what I want to strive for in my own life. I cannot be perfect in keeping all of my commitments (no one can), but I can do my best to make sure that I am aware of them and will either fulfill them as soon as possible or will apologize and consider whether or not I overextended myself yet again.
      The spiritual walk seems almost just to have begun, and I have no idea where I am going. But I know the path is where I need to travel in order to live the life I am supposed to be living. It may never be “normal”, but it will be recovered–a mindful state of kindness and commitment to myself and others after living for so long in the self-imposed oubliette of addiction.

      After spending weeks doing intellectual pursuit of spiritual ideas by reading and listening at meetings, I’ve found that it’s time to sit quietly with what I’ve learned so far and listen for understanding.

      Over the next two days, I am going to rest, partially because I have a cold (physical self-care), and partially because I have been keeping myself so distracted with the process of recovery input that I haven’t slowed down enough to listen to the parts that apply to my personal journey of recovery.
      The problem I have had over the last year or so is that I consistently return to what I know. The intellectual pursuit of anything and everything is where I’ve been taught my answers lie. When I pursue something intellectually, I am seeking others’ opinions of what I should do (inferiority). But really, I should be seeking help. The difference between opinion and help is that intellectual opinion can be thrown aside by grandiosity and help is the intuited knowledge from within me which allows me to understand right action in a given situation (humility).
      The hardest part is that I have made a habit of being busy in order to avoid slowing down in order to actually open myself up to the possibilities. Busying action can exhaust me, and it eventually ends up with me spinning my wheels and getting stuck as I wait for pushbutton enlightenment from a word or sentence which speaks to me. What I have to learn, I have intuited, involves taking the time to self-care. Not to deny that I need to slow down and respect my body’s need to physically recover from the illness.
      Busyness I have been involved in recently has been the daily weighing process. I was jolted surprised when, today, the scale told me I was 158.6 lbs.–a weight I never thought I would see again in my wildest imagination. I can come up with myriad reasons why I think my scale is wrong. Also, many things can happen between today and the official monthly weigh-in tomorrow. But today, I weighed in and was under 160 lbs. for the first time since my bout with anorexia in college. The only other time was through a nationally recognized diet program. And, now that I got to that weight, I have lost 125 lbs. since June of 2009.
      That frightened me as well as exhilarated me. I don’t feel thin. I definitely don’t feel that I look like I did the last time, though that can be explained by loose skin and less lean muscle mass since last time. The most important thing? It is a distraction, a busy-ness which gets between me and listening to my Higher Power. Between checking my BMI and considering my food plan, I got a mini-bout of obsessive behavior.
      I need to sit in the quiet and understand what’s going on in my heart, not my head. I need to open myself to the intuitive, to still my mind enough to hear. To understand what I have learned over the last two weeks and how it applies to how I live my life–not the measurements of the body I occupy.
      My name is Jess, and I am a food addict and approval addict seeking self care over the next couple of days. My body is tired because of the illness, so I am going to rest in the quiet and respect the message that I need to let myself heal. I’ve ignored it (for the most part) over the past few days, and I have steadily gotten worse. Self-care seems to be the first practice of the intuitive–knowing what my body needs and listening, then taking action.

      Intellectually, I know that enlightenment comes from the heart, not the head. The irony is that I used intellectual pursuit to find something that really should be gut instinct.

      I trust my mind (head) more than my emotions (heart). Logic, however, fails me because the human element comes into play every single time. That human element is the emotional content which can warp my intellectual pursuits, which has led me into despair and addiction. My head insists cause-and-effect and logic trees will always work. The chaos of emotion, however, makes sure that it doesn’t work that way. Reality has a randomness generator built in, which can skew theoretically reproducible results.
      The pursuit of perfection follows lines which were built based on something akin to the development of cargo cults. By taking faith-based texts as intellectual truths (therein lies the problem) instead of heart-based truths, I was able to build messages based on events. For example, the New Testament implies Christ was perfect–G-d in human form. To live like Christ is to be perfect in human form (though his violent freak-out at the moneylenders in the temple always confused me; a man of peace getting his righteous ire up and causing destruction of property went against the other things I had learned about Christ). The natural state has id drives which are overcome by the superego. No one really discussed how the Christ got past those biological drives (well, one person did, but it was a work of parody: Lamb by Christopher Moore) and was able to achieve perfection that way.
      Well, I assumed that if I had the intent, I could completely avoid my biological drives. I was a little girl when I started; the nature of sexuality was alien to me. When unwelcome puberty hit, I was all-at-once overwhelmed.
      The frailties of the humans I gave authority over me also came into play. I assumed intellectual perfection of them, despite their glaring failures which I chose to ignore. By ignoring the failures and putting those people up on high pedestals, I did a disservice to them and to me. But obedience was the order of the day, as was intense punishment for slights against those imperfect (and often addicted) people. Intuiting those people were wrong about me in the depths of my heart yet intellectually knowing that they knew better than me because of expansive educations in comparison to me made me begin to martyr myself. As time went on, I gained intellectual knowledge. And with that came grandiosity and the associated impatience with people who could not understand what I was expressing. Those people were more in tune with their emotional intelligence, so they could turn away from my (often broken) logic pathing.
      In comes manipulation, the use of my intellectual knowledge to see patterns and emulate emotional content in order to influence others. Seriously. I was denying those fallible emotions by then. I just wanted what I wanted, and emotions got in the way. Remove the emotions, I reasoned, and I could get what I needed.
      Wrong.
      Instead, I became wide open to the suggestion of others as my need to connect to other human beings appeared to grow (though I think it was sustained; it just looked bigger because I was emotionally anorexic). I chose to be open to it all in order to get what I needed. But since I wasn’t being honest in my emotions, since I did not grow up with a sense of emotional growth and stability in my home situation, I turned toward sources all around me to define that basic need: love. What I got was a sense that I could only be loved if I were thin (taught to me by peer pressure), and that the intense romanticism of fiction books, television, and film was love. It makes logical sense, if you consider that actual love cannot be quantified or even qualified. I’ve read a lot of texts regarding “love”, and I have found that there is no concrete definition. I have, however, found clear expressions of romantic passion which were called love. I gravitated toward the defined quantity, and that became “love”. I chased it and found it to be empty. So I assumed I was doing it wrong. After all, these fictionalized characters were getting happily-ever-afters. But the stories in book, film, and television are a snapshot. In many romantic stories, the endpoint is the grand and glorious wedding.
      I find I am not alone in my thinking. A lot of people seem to focus on weddings as the exclamation points of their lives, assuming that getting into a church in thousands of dollars of lace and flowers and cake and ribbons and rented tuxedos will assure them a lifetime of joy and glory equal to the ritual. The more intense the wedding, the more assured the “Happily Ever After”.
      In reality, I’ve seen the opposite happen. With such a grand celebration, the let down is equally huge. Moving into real life from the intense event leaves one feeling empty. Those emotions from that day cannot be maintained for decades without exhausting people. The hard work of learning to live as a partner, not an individual, is the process of real love. It’s hard to do when a culture says, “Intensity is how love is measured.” But from what I have read on “real” love, it’s a slow growth process. It’s the development of honesty with and trust of another person. Passion does not demand trust or honesty. Passion comes on fast (love at first sight). And passion fades because it is exhausting. And then, because the passion has to fade so real life can be lived? People believe they have fallen out of love and get divorced, hoping the next big wedding will be the solution.
     
      What I just wrote above are intellectual observations of an intuitive state. Intellectually, I see what happened and believe I can build a logic tree which can help me avoid those things. Intellectually, I can be an exception to those rules if I can learn the alchemy of true and real love.
      The problem lies in that love is not part of the logic tree. The experiment cannot be replicated. I could try to follow another’s life precisely the same yet find I get different results. That’s where the logic fails every time. Love is illogical and requires emotions and a trust in the intuitive. A leap of faith that the other person is leaping with you.
      I am finding that the intellectual pursuit of recovery is the same thing. While I do admit that getting information from many sources is good (because it introduces me to concepts which can adjust the logic pathing I have installed in my brain), it can only go so far. I have to take that leap of faith. I have to, at some point, release that pile of new information and let the spiritual awakening happen in its own time.
      Fear of weakness makes me want to have the answer as soon as I read the new information. The fallacy of doing that: (1) I am giving authority of my life over me to someone else, (2) I am trying to control my life and reality instead of sliding into my place in reality, and (3) I am intellectualizing something that can only be intuited by letting go of the distraction of intellectual pursuit of the answers.
      I balk at the intuited understanding that my emotions will heal me; intellectually, I have seen how emotions have devastated my life. I also see, both intellectually and intuitively, that I was not approaching the emotions as something to pass through. Emotions, also, should not be the source of my decisions, especially if they are the secondary emotions (generally rage, anxiety, and paralyzing terror) which come from denying the primary emotions.
      Again, this is intellectualizing something that should be intuited. I don’t trust that intuition not to be insanity (it has been before, when I’ve trusted my gut instinct as filtered through the addiction). I suppose because I missed out on the life skills education the first go-’round, that intellectual pursuit has merit. But it cannot be the end-all-be-all of that pursuit–which it has been for the last few weeks.
      I’ve gotten a bunch of new information in which I believe can be used by my intuitive self to live a recovered life. Now I have to “let it go to my Higher Power”, release it completely, and let reality churn it until my intuitive uses the information to create flashes of common sense, ie. enlightenment. During this time, what applies to me will be brought into my life, as intuitive awareness changes how I approach the world. And again, I am chasing this logically, trying to find an explanation of the inexplicable.
      Letting this go is key right now. That means I have to walk the laboratory of reality, of the world, and keep my eyes and ears and heart open. If I spot an emotion inside me, it’s time to slow down and experience it fully and fearlessly. There are secrets hidden inside those emotions, things I have locked away in order to survive. Self-truths are revealed when I slow down and accept them . . . despite the terror that, this time, I will receive something which will break me mentally.
      There’s a place in my heart which says, “That’s not true.” In fact, an intuitive message came up:
     
      What is revealed at any given time is revealed because I am ready to process it. The things which I am not ready for are still tucked away, hidden so deep that I won’t have to face them until their time to be revealed is at hand. I unlock whatever I have the keys for, whatever I am ready to experience with the amount of recovery I have at this moment.

      My secrets are like that old candy I dually loved and hated as a child–Atomic Fireballs. Any person who’s had one will remember the intensely physically painful (often unendurable) cinnamon exterior one has to pass through to get to the cooling center. The emotions are the painful exterior of those preserved experiences, the thorny defenses of the delicate memory or experience or lesson within. I have defended my vulnerabilities with pain in order to keep me from them. As the most critically judgmental person of me that I know, defending those vulnerabilities from the one person (me) who has full access to my core was probably a survival mechanism. I’d tear those memories apart, intellectually. Hell, I probably already did, which is why they have intrusion countermeasures in order to keep my pain-avoidant addict self from touching them.
      The power of recovery, for me, is trusting that I can experience the emotions yet have the strength, guidance, and willpower sourced from within by my Higher Power (the reality which says, in essence, that yesterday is simply a series of memories, not the situations, places, and people out of my control which unavoidably will affect my life, today).
      From that recovered belief comes the peace that by letting residual feelings burble up to the surface as an unintended trigger brings them forward (in addiction, the pain and the resulting pushing back down brings up that inner critic’s messages that feelings are bad and going through them is dangerous).
      The healing process involves opening myself to experiencing the past emotions to their illogical ends and respecting and accepting what is protected within. By pushing aside that reactionary need to deny my emotions as soon as I get the first hints of anxiety that something important to my recovery is surfacing (even if it’s just an opportunity to work my Fourth Step inventory more rigorously), I am honoring the natural and human process of even having emotions. As I go through the emotions completely, they pass. They have every single time so far, possibly because I am trusting that reality is right: Feelings pass because it is normal not to dwell in or deny emotions. This practice does several things:

(1) I learn to experience emotions in a healthy way–instead of deny them. Denial means I have to suffer the insanity of having them burble up when they’re triggered and pushing them back down before I feel them. Acceptance means I am practicing being human instead of a robot in a skin suit;

(2) I gain insight into my past. Patterns are revealed, resentments are brought up to be worked through the Steps;

(3) and, through practice, I begin to trust that my intuitive self is not broken. That I am not innately broken. That I, as a human, am a confident, emotionally intelligent, logically and linguistically intelligent, and honest person.

      In other words, the rewards I reap from trusting the spiritual and intellectual and intuitive revelations are that I can live in this body in today. I don’t have to run toward yesterday or tomorrow. I am here, I am aware of my surroundings, and I am learning both intuitively and intellectually at any given moment. I am part of the process of change, not a free radical insistent on staying frozen in the past as reality presses hard on me to adjust to what has already changed.
      If I need an unchanging constant? Then I can accept that change is it. I am growing older every day, making choices each day which will affect change in the fog-veiled tomorrow. I don’t know what the result will be (my cause-and-effect logic pathing having failed me quite a lot because reality does not work that way), but I do know that as long as I am intellectually and intuitively open, I can get through it.
      I survived my childhood. I survived just over two decades of adulthood. Despite my constant self-loathing and sense I was a drain on the universe, something deep within me kept me alive. Something deep within myself considered me redeemable enough to even start looking for solutions–from reality television competitive weight loss to LAP-BAND surgery to Overeaters Anonymous.
      I chose Overeaters Anonymous because it was the simplest do-it-now, attainable solution. The rewards, so far, have been staggering. And I thank whoever penned, “Our Invitation to You” for putting in my head that I was there to change not only my physical fitness but my mental and spiritual fitness as well. Something clicked along the way, that I would have to work the spiritual and the mental recoveries to maintain long-lasting physical recovery. The mental and spiritual recovery will return me back to the rooms from relapse (if I go that way), because I am a redeemable and imperfect human being. I have the same innate value as everyone out there. My life has purpose, even if it us just to exist in order to show others that their lives have purpose, too. I still don’t entirely know my purpose, but I don’t think it matters. In fact, I think perhaps not entirely knowing it is probably a greater gift. Not knowing means that I can approach it intuitively, not intellectually. I can’t kill that sense of purpose with study and giving authority over myself to others who I consider “figured it out.”
     
      My name is Jess, and I am a food addict and approval addict. I am innately attracted to finding logical answers to every question put out there. However, sometimes the answer does not logically follow the question. Sometimes the answer to the question, “What do you get when you multiply six by nine?” is forty-two (thanks to the late Douglas Adams for putting logic into perspective, that it can only take us so far as we seek the answer to life, the universe, and everything).

      I had a really great talk with someone after meeting about Step Three. I talked about what it means to me to release my will to my Higher Power, and I wanted to put it down here, since I did have this struggle early in recovery, myself.

      The first three steps are integral in recovery. Without truly doing Step Three, it is said, recovery can’t happen. But in reading the wording, it can be terrifying and it does appear cultish in some ways. I have, however, realized through reading conference-approved literature that I am not supposed to be a brainless automaton, a will-free puppet of my Higher Power.
      Step Three states: “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.” The Islamo-Judeo-Christian concept of a male deity aside, even within it we are using some sense of responsible choice to make a conscious decision. But it can be intimidating, because it sounds like that’s the last time we get to be ourselves.
      In action, that’s actually not what I’ve seen happen. Step Eleven sort-of follows up that relationship by pointing out that I am seeking guidance, not complete mind-control by a Higher Power: “Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.” Again, I set aside the sex pronoun (my Higher Power isn’t a paternal figure to me; by limiting my Higher Power using a sex pronoun, it becomes someone else’s version of G-d, and that’s talked about in the Big Book as being antithetical to the recovery process), I can look at this and see where I am to take an active role in my own recovery.
      First of all, I don’t have to pray to a Higher Power or listen to it. However, the intuitive self within, what I call my Natural Self or Natural Child, seems to need a signal boost to be heard over the addiction’s constant broadcasting. I actively seek spiritual knowledge, in essence learning to know myself. In the stillness, I can intuit the common sense that aligns to the peaceful and secure life I want to live.
      My Higher Power also doesn’t have a will. That implies my Higher Power makes all my decisions for me, and I am a jerk if I don’t listen and deserve any bad things coming to me. My own parents had wills for me then set me off to find the power to carry their wills for me out. The connection of authority over my very thoughts to my approval addiction makes the concept of giving my personal will to an external source completely opposite to the goal of recovery.
      So, my Higher Power has no will for me, but it does offer me the power to carry out a life of sanity in reality. When I act like a petulant child and want what I want when I want it, I find my life goes badly as I try to maneuver and manipulate people into their places on the chessboard of my life. Well, people are guided by their own internal compasses, and I can’t keep them static–just like no one can keep me static. Plus, trying to control others is exhausting, even if they were willing to stay put in order to let me push them around according to my changing addict-will.
      That said, I feel like my connection to a Higher Power is a conduit to an infinite Wiki-style source of common sense. For example, “If acting out addict behaviors makes me miserable and causes pain, then don’t do it.” Through meditation and reading conference and non-conference literature (I consider the conference-approved-only thing to be silly, since I’ve found a lot of insight outside of conference-approved literature and some confusion within it), I am learning more about myself than I ever have before. And, by focusing my attention away from the affliction and toward a life outside of the affliction, I find relief from the obsessions on a daily (though sometimes just hourly or minute-by-minute) basis.
      I also am aware that I can choose, at any point in time, to return to full-blown addiction. It’s not hard. In fact, it’s my default state to turn toward the easy, though temporary, quick-fix behavior. There is a price to pay when I do that, one I am unwilling to live with because the misery and out-of-control feelings and behaviors aren’t compatible with the life of internal peace I want to live–and do live when I align my actions with my natural self.
      Even in writing what I have in the few previous paragraphs, I think I’ve shown that I’m not a puppet of a Higher Power. I am aware I have a choice–recovery or addiction. The ability to choose, I think, is potentially where people have trouble with the whole “turn the will over” thing. I consider I had no willpower at all when it came to my active addiction because I had no choice. There was no alternative. I was reacting using a set of rules I was often entirely unaware of.
      Take my last uncontrolled binge, for example. I was sitting on a couch with a bag of candy and my hand seemed to move on its own, stuffing my mouth full as I chewed and swallowed, chewed and swallowed. I felt nausea because of the sugar rush and the chemical preservatives and the volume of candy I was putting into my body. Those signals should have made me stop, because I felt serious physical discomfort. And that voice was in my head, screaming at my hand to stop as it kept unwrapping and stuffing, unwrapping and stuffing. My hand would not follow my conscious command to stop. Whatever part of myself drove the addiction ignored my conscious will. I did not even spit it out. My mouth was ignoring that conscious will, as well. That was powerlessness to the extreme, a complete lack of will. I had turned my will over to food, and I had no choice. And that is how I defined “turning over my will and life” to something when I walked into the door of my first OA meeting–despite my internal addict throwing up everything (fear people would not understand, fear they would reject me, fear that I was going to try this, too, and fail just as I had before) to keep me from sitting down in a meeting. Well, my internal addict was wrong, and whatever guided me toward the room–despite the desire to run away and go to a store and buy the snack aisle out of the grocery store to numb the fear away–kept me strong enough. Simple messages like, “It’s only an hour” and “Just listen and see if maybe this doesn’t help a little” and “Maybe someone will understand what I’m talking about”. All three were true, and I left the room with hope, not fleeing in fear and despair.
      The strangest part about “giving my will to my HP” is that I am empowered to make informed decisions. I also have, for a pretty good string of 24-hours, respected the boundaries of my food plan. Sometimes it had to do with getting the shiny. Being part of a recovery chip group helped me build a habit that I am now maintaining without the need for a token of my effort. Sometimes just knowing I would be getting a chip at the next meeting was enough to slow me down in that day and take each 24-hour period slowly and with deliberation. I wanted my shiny coin, damn it. Eventually, it was less about the coin–though getting that heavy one year coin was a landmark moment for me because I was able to look back over the year and realize that coin was not a mark of graduation but the first marker just near the trailhead of an amazing journey to come . . . one step at a time. That coin represented more than just being able to diet for a year. That coin represented moments of serenity, of learning so much about my addiction, and of even realizing my food addiction was sourced from my approval addiction (though it had no name until the last couple of weeks). And, as month thirteen started, I did not lament the loss of receiving coins on the first meeting after the fourteenth of the month. And this month, I’m so settled in the daily process of learning to live outside of addiction by turning my attention toward my mental and spiritual recoveries, that I am aware the day is coming up but I don’t need the shiny to appreciate what 14 months of clarity has done for me.
      From an outsider’s point of view, I had the willpower to lose 120 lbs., to deal with my neediness, and to start being less of a control freak and unwanted-advice giver. I’m not perfect, but I’m only a year out from the first day I surrendered to my food plan and got a shiny 24-hour coin for my troubles. Words like, “I don’t know what tomorrow holds and I don’t know where I’ll be, but at least I know it will be an adventure and a learning opportunity” are coming out of this mouth. The one which had few nice things to say about anyone last year–especially me. I am disappointed that the reality of weight loss (which I was warned about!) isn’t what I expected–addicts are always the exceptions to every rule and deserve special consideration because we (1) need a hand up because we’re so much worse off or (2) need the respect that we deserve because we are so much better than the rest of the world. That was a consequence of losing so much weight in 18 months and honestly being 40 and not having as elastic skin as I did at 26, when I did this last. I have a choice, now–give up because I didn’t emerge airbrushed perfection or accept that my body reflects the life I have lived and that the extra skin is a reminder that I am not having to inject insulin and combat uncontrollable cravings for food which would send me to the ER and possibly my grave. I have my limbs, my fingers, my toes. If I return to the addiction, I will very possibly have to have those amputated. A little extra skin on my stomach and toosh and thighs is a very, very small price to pay. My mobility is not impacted by it, and honestly, a pair of pantyhose fixes it pretty-much completely when I’m dressed. I have a spouse who accepts me as I am, because I am going to be around longer and be a nicer person to be around as I do it. The only thing left in this equation is me and the desire to give up because I don’t want to accept reality. Well, I consciously choose to do what is needed to learn to accept reality and appreciate what I have instead of mourn what I don’t. I woke up this morning and I was able to run down a flight of stairs to take the dog outside. I have the ability to get around, to fit in chairs, to dress out of the stores I never thought I would walk into for clothing again. Hell, for a couple months after I left the size range of the store I regularly shopped, I still thought of it as where I needed to go to buy clothes. I even drove there once, got out of my car, then got back in because I was two sizes too small for their smallest pants. And I knew it because I had two pairs of their smallest pants and they had to be safety-pinned in order to keep the waist at my waist.
      For a person who is supposedly the puppet of a Higher Power, wandering around in a brainless daze? I certainly feel I’m more aware of my surroundings and more involved in my own life than a person who has surrendered my willpower to a higher authority and a 12-Step Cult leader (we have no leaders–people seem to forget that part in the Traditions when they call the program a cult). This comes, then, from my concept of footwork being used in concert with that will surrender and my understanding of the Serenity Prayer.
      Footwork is the conscious action I take to make my life better. While I do turn toward my Higher Power to gain appreciation for a life of acceptance in reality, a life of acceptance of the consequences of my choices, and the intuitive guidance I am looking for to align myself with how I want to live, I am still responsible to walk around the world and make those plans and daily decisions. I am responsible for the outcome of my choices. I am responsible for how I deal with situations and the lessons I can take from ones that go akimbo.
      The Serenity Prayer gives me the guidance to understand what I need to let go of (ie. not compulsively obsess over until I am standing in front of the snack aisle debating if I want the regular or family size addict’s-single-serving portion) and what I can take an active role to change. And it does ask for the ability to figure out the difference between the two. After months and months of saying the prayer yet not understanding it, I was given a moment of enlightenment from one of my daily readers. That changed a lot about how I approach recovery.
      I cannot change others’ actions, reactions, or opinions–even if I’ve been a decent person to them. Things outside of that situation led that person into the interaction with me. What came before and what they’re dealing with inside them is not something I can do anything about.
      However, I can change my actions, reactions, and opinions. I can endeavor to be pleasant and polite and not react impulsively and make potential conflict situations worse. I can take the time to change how I approach the world. I can choose to relieve myself of the responsibility to run the show. My inner addict thinks I can control everyone and everything and make my own life perfect by manipulating people into doing what I want (they’ll do something or not do it by their own choice–my input has very little influence on their decisions) or terrorizing them into doing what I want.
      If I approach the same situation with a mind toward recovery, I accept that now may not be the right time for it. I also accept that maybe what I think I want right then isn’t the best thing for me. I mean, I spent my lifetime thinking eating whatever I wanted whenever I wanted was the best thing for me. I spent my life thinking pursuing attention from men was the best thing for me. I spent quite a long time thinking that the emotional turmoil of the drama I created both in my head and in reality was living, that the harm I caused others wasn’t my problem. I took a leap of faith sticking it out in OA, and I have been rewarded with things I never could have imagined. I’ve had people dropped into my life when I needed them; I’ve had experiences that have given me insight and have taught me a lot about myself and how I want to live; I’ve been able to go places I would have avoided if I were still isolating in the dark of my home stuffing my face and wishing the romantic drama of the film characters or television characters was my personal drama.
      I have faith in reality. It’s a life where I don’t have to orchestrate the lives of everyone around me. Even better, each interaction with people is an opportunity to learn about a new person. Every person I interact with may hold a pearl of wisdom from my Higher Power (ie. a bit of intuitive common sense applicable to my situation right then). Every person may hold an opportunity to remind me why I don’t want to go back to a life of addiction. When a person is completely out-of-control in public and taking it out on people–like I used to–I remember being like that and I am immediately thankful that I have the ability to shift mental gears and choose a peaceful path through an interaction.
      No, I’m not perfect at it. I do have behaviors which are sourced from the addiction. The fear and anxiety, the irritability and frustration, the blaming and the advice-bullying (trying to force my opinion on others) . . . I still act in compulsion sometimes. However, I am also not doing it as often as I used to, and I spend more time daily not feeling the need to manipulate people into approving of me. I feel calm and ready to accept what’s happening.
      Yep, I still go into crisis mode when the affliction is tearing me up. It also takes a while to recover after I’ve been sliding into micromanage-the-world mode and toward a break in abstinence. I know I’m dealing with my addict self when I feel blocked; in recovery, I choose to do what I can then let it all shake out–because that is reality. I can twist myself into horrible knots and tangles, and it still shakes out anyway. Most often, it turns out unfavorable when I approach things from a place of obsessive control-freaking.
      So, I guess though the step makes it sound like I am choosing to be a marionette of my Higher Power, I’ve found that I have more freedom to make real choices . . . even the life-changing choice to maintain recovery or return to the addiction. Where I don’t get a say in the decision-making process? Is where my skin ends. I may say something that will make someone think differently, but that is up to them. It is not my responsibility to get them to see my way. I mean, my way is often not right for most people, anyway!
      So, I give my will to control the world in exchange for the ability to learn and actively participate with everyone else here on equal footing. If that’s a person’s definition of showing extreme willpower, then that’s how they see it. Me? It’s surrendering to reality and accepting that I am on a lifelong journey of personal discovery through actively changing how I interact within the world–understanding that the outcome of any given situation may not be how I, personally, would have chosen it to be but understanding also that perhaps the only reason I had that unfavorable interaction was so I could progress on my journey into a life set in reality (not fantasy).
      And that is what surrendering my will to my Higher Power looks like.
      My name is Jess, and I am a food and approval addict. I’m pleased that I’m starting to let more things out of my control go and that when I face something I am frustrated by, I consider the positives of why things are like that. It’s a calmer way to live, and I like having a calmer life.

      Oh, and as an aside, I have decided that instead of making New Year’s Resolutions this year, I’m going to make New Year’s Recovery list. The things which I struggle to control and wish to learn acceptance over in 2011 will be on that list. I may not find recovery on those things, but by exposing them I can make progress on them. I’ve learned that daily practice of recovered behaviors makes them part of my life eventually as the new way of thinking becomes part of me. If I can turn toward that new thought and those new actions more readily, then I truly believe I have achieved the progress I am supposed to have in 2011. And even a little forward motion is better than stagnation.

      Part of living where I do is the freedom to use firearms both for personal defense and for sport. There are many common-sense rules: Treat every weapon as if it’s loaded, never point it toward something you don’t want to destroy (ie. don’t point it at people, even unloaded), always know what’s behind your target (you are responsible for damage any slugs do to people and things), and never, ever put your finger inside the trigger guard (the ring around the trigger) unless you plan on making the conscious decision to fire the weapon right then.

      I had to unlearn bad movie habits, but I have. If I travel with a weapon, it has no clip in it and no round chambered, and it’s in a locked case. I don’t open carry; when I start carrying daily, it will be with a concealed carry permit–and only after I’ve taken days of permit-related classes and a class on keeping control of it. I refuse to carry daily without a complete education. When I carry a weapon which I intend to use for sport, the barrel either faces down the range or (if I’m outside at a sport-shooting facility) up toward the sky or down toward the ground. Never leveled. Never loaded. And when I am ready to discharge it at a target (knowing what’s behind the target and how the load/slug will act once discharged), I rest my extended index finger along the barrel of the gun as I prepare to discharge the firearm. Only when I have made the conscious decision to discharge the firearm (after a ritual cleansing and calming breath) do I move my finger into the trigger guard.
      With the effort and care I take while preparing to use a pistol or rifle or shotgun, why do I take such a laissez-faire attitude with my emotions? They can do as much lasting harm. A callous attitude can affect a person’s future. Threatening or manipulative behavior can trash a person’s sense of safety around me. I walk around with chambered emotions, wave them around wildly–especially toward others, don’t consider the unintended targets who may be affected by my behavior. The worst is that I don’t keep my finger out of my emotional trigger guard. I am always ready to fire my addict behavior. Always.
      I hope this awareness that I can take care with firearms means that I can be as conscious of my emotions. I have real experience with taking care not to cause harm with a firearm. I can take that real experience and learn to do the same with my emotions.
     
      I have been doing research on rebuilding my body image into one where I won’t turn instinctively toward the character-defective thoughts stemming from the beliefs “I know”. Many of those beliefs are ones I acquired while searching for a sense of self in youth. I have a sense of myself, and it’s not good.
      At the core of me, surrounded by tangled thorny brambles of self-hating messages, is unacceptability. I am not good enough.
      With it, and equally defended by painful messages and experiences, are perfectionism and approval-seeking (an innate distrust that I could know what’s best for me) and a disdain for emotions (self-control, to me, means not experiencing my emotions and being mature and cold about things–which usually leads to some sort of explosive breakdown). I am naturally pain aversive, so getting in there and untangling the defenses to those is problematic.
      Of course, there seems to be another way. Those thorny messages are like a living plant, and they require me to focus on them. Something I have learned over the months in OA is that even when I am trying to kill off those things, my focus is like a grow lamp for this thicket. With one hand I slash at them, yet with the other I am feeding, watering, pruning, and caring for them. Atrophy has been the only successful means so far; to do this, I need to create a new focus, completely turning my back on what is there. My past is filled with the care of those things; my today does not have to be.
      I think the most damaging pattern I have is looking for the “Don’t” rules without having a list of “Do” guidelines. If I’m not perfect, that’s okay for today. Even having a discrete list of things to turn toward–as opposed to ranging around trying to find the opposite of those “Don’t” rules.
      By focusing on where I came from, the “Don’t” rules, I am still watching over them. They’re in the front of my mind.
      For example, my food plan has no “Don’t” foods. Now, yes, there are trigger foods which I avoid because I am pain-averse. But my food plan accepts that if those trigger foods ever stop triggering me, I can add them back into my food plan. It’s a series of “Yes, but not right now” messages, and I am able to use that to identify foods and behaviors and emotions which connect to an active binge trigger. When I start to feel a need to comfort myself with eating (emotional trigger), I slow down and take the time to consciously eat what I’ve chosen. I stay away from certain foods which I can only think about eating in quantity. I see behaviors which encourage autopilot eating (my big triggered behavior, where I don’t get sated because the food is gone before I realize I ate it) and I set up limits just for the day–staying aware that tomorrow will be different. Not perfectly, but this is a growth process. At the end of the day even if I want more, the boundary of the food plan stops me at that fence. And, I recognize the binge desires require me to step outside of the moment of affliction to see the source. There is a learning opportunity, to the point some days I hope I have binge twinges in order to learn what my cause-and-effect triggers are so I can work them in recovery. Even if it’s just practicing letting something go to my Higher Power, I have an opportunity to practice recovery for that day. It takes the stress of having binge cravings and makes them positive, and that lack of shame and guilt for even having them (because each craving is an opportunity to progress spiritually and mentally) makes dealing with them that much easier. The cravings aren’t a mistake; they are part of the addiction which will always be with me. However, if I can understand the affliction better, I can understand how to create a path in recovery in any other direction. It doesn’t even have to be the 180-degree opposite. Just any direction that isn’t the affliction, and that gives me infinity-minus-one possibilities to try. In fact, it’s better I don’t focus on going the 180-degree opposite. I look over my shoulder and focus on being 180 degrees off, which keeps my eyes on that affliction. And if I am acknowledging it, then the affliction still has a strong hold on me. If it has a hold on me, when I get tired I will take the easy downhill path toward it some day.
     
      So, what can I do to work on my body image? Well, I know that I consider my body is unacceptable because it does not conform to one of the limited standards–all of which involve anorexic thinness. Some involve the anorexic body type plus curve-building surgery–fake boobs, fake butt.
      I have an aversion to unnecessary surgery. I walked into OA to avoid laparoscopy. I get the oogie-boogies at the idea of having things within my body which don’t belong there. I got freaked out sometimes when I was pregnant and felt a human being moving inside my body. I often talked about feeling like I had an alien inside of me, a la the sci-fi horror movie series. Pregnancy is temporary, and the positive result of having a child at the end of it made that temporary discomfort endurable (though barely–one of my overdue sons arrived very early in the morning of the day I was going to have labor medically started, and labor on my other (4 1/2-week overdue!) son was induced on the second try. So the idea of having breast augmentation and potentially toosh augmentation is a total no-go. That would make me insane. Considering that I still would not fit clothing right because of my height, I cannot see the advantage of doing that over simply getting well-designed ladies’ undergarments.
      The other thing, which I was told about many pounds ago, is the loose skin I have because I dropped 120 lbs. after going through two pregnancies and maintaining the higher weight for almost 2 decades. My spouse went ahead and researched the skin tucking surgery, and he showed me the results. There tends to be some scarring. Experience has shown me that the results wouldn’t meet my fantasy ideal anyway. I have used lotions, but not skin firming lotions. I also have more work to do on increasing and firming my muscle mass. So I have alternatives before turning toward that elective surgery (which apparently costs about as much as my car is worth–I’d rather have a replacement car than a body that I still wouldn’t be showing off), and I also have the understanding that (1) the one person who sees me undressed likes me just as I am and (2) any recovered or “normal” potential mate–should that one person who sees me undressed and likes me as I am decides not to do either–would forgive my imperfections because those scars means I’ve lived.
      In other words, my body is a visible and real expression of my recovery. The stretch marks from pregnancy and weight gain are just part of my story. And if a person can’t accept my physical form as it is (like my spouse does, though he agrees that I probably would have a better quality of life putting enough muscle between my skin and my bones so that I can sit or sleep without the pain of having poky bones everywhere), then that person who wants me to conform to a societal standard is unsafe to me.
      So, the first body image practice is to appreciate my body is a monument to survival and recovery. The second is that I’m 40, and nature is doing what nature does. The third is that I don’t have so much excess skin that I have to get the surgery; if I had a weight loss of 200 to 300 lbs., that would make sense to have it done because the extra skin would get in the way of daily functioning. Right now, it’s all about the vanity, and I don’t need surgery to assuage my vanity and try to pretend I’m in my 20s instead of 40. I earned my laugh lines and my stretch marks on a life of experience. Each imperfection testifies that I lived an imperfect life and that I still plan to, aligning with reality instead of trying to achieve perfection and still finding myself unacceptable and imperfect at the end of the day. Since part of my goal of recovery is to be real, to accept myself as I am aligns with reality. Instead of mourning imperfection, I can best serve my self-care needs by celebrating what my body can do now that I am 120 lbs. lighter. And it can do a lot–even with the small amount of extra skin I do possess. I have a choice to approach this in recovery or in love-and-approval addiction. Therefore, building a more functional body is the goal, and cosmetic surgery isn’t part of it.
      So, letting go to my HP the desire to quick-fix through surgery is a means to practice recovered thinking about my body acceptability. It encourages my self-acceptance and self-care by considering what’s more important to me. The ability to function is more important to me than having a body which is aesthetic to some (just as my current body is aesthetic to others), so removing myself from the arbitrary acceptance of others helps practice that trust that I know what’s best for me and removes the need to have 100% acceptance by the world–an unattainable goal, just like perfection is.
      To work on my broken messages, I need to take an honest look at what I admire about people. Somehow I ended up healthy enough to consider what’s inside others is more important than what’s outside. That’s where long-run social success begins for me. That recovery work involves simply working with my HP and others in and out of my programs to establish what I consider valuable qualities. Once I have a list, I can start asking myself, “What behaviors do people with these qualities possess? What actions do they take?” It’s like consciously smiling at people instead of frowning–if I smile, eventually my internal attitude matches my external actions. My adjusted attitude ends up making the smile natural instead of forced.
      I also need to accept that the media is trying to barter with me. That is not a “safe” relationship. The promise of future acceptance if I align to perceived beauty creates a constant state of seeking approval and a constant feeling of unacceptability as I am. I am doing “safe” practice, and turning away from those messages that I am inadequate as I am is “safe” and self-caring behavior. As long as the media does this, I can’t be its friend. By simply not investing in the relationship, the negative messages don’t get through because I don’t hear or see them.
      I need to broaden my horizons in order to learn what I know through recovery–beauty is arbitrary from person to person. If I can’t satisfy one other person completely (rendering me perfect until that person’s ideas of beauty change), the only person who’s left to satisfy is me. Whenever I rely on an external human source to fuel my self-acceptance, I get imperfect pretty quickly as resentments build and I obsess over aligning with someone simply to keep them around. Seeking external approval means I will never achieve the confidence necessary to function to the best of my ability because my confidence would rely on another person not changing (as people inevitably do). I still do this actively, and I hope the realization that external approval erodes my potential confidence (something I admire in others and want to possess, personally) will guide me into a life outside of approval-seeking. For now, the awareness of the reality that I cannot achieve the realistic goal of self-confidence if I choose not to rely on myself and the action of giving that desire to be rescued to my HP are the starting points of real, internal change. Through recovery, I have begun to accept as a personal truism: Change is natural and healthy. To align with that, I cannot stagnate in another person’s view of perfection until they change. Then I would have to panic-adapt in order to regain that “perfection” status again. That’s an exhausting process, one that keeps me from living.
      I like the tip I got from one particular website: Treat myself like I would my own best friend. That’s one of those common-sense genius things which I had not even considered. I mean, it makes sense, right? And it never really crossed my mind (or if it did, it glanced right off of those negative self-concepts and messages). But, in recovery, I am open to trying it out. For example, if my best friend wanted an obnoxiously bright, rainbow hat and scarf set for a trip to somewhere cold, I’d make it for her. Well, who not for me? I’ve looked at the yarn and coveted it then turned away because I didn’t feel it was necessary. That I didn’t really deserve it because other people deserved my efforts. Well, maybe it is necessary. Maybe I should be making me that scarf and hat set for my own trip. It would make me happy, and since I work to make my friends happy without a need for reimbursement? Maybe I ought to start treating myself with the same respect. I don’t belittle my friends for what they look like; I should not do so to myself. I talk about their achievements, about their strengths. I should do that for myself. I point out their beauties, not their imperfections. Okay, I do that sometimes, and that’s part of the judgmental mind shift I wrote about yesterday (Yay learning about myself so I can actualize change!). There are so many things I can do to change those self-abusive patterns. Like all good addicts, I keep on trashing myself long after others have stopped. It’s like I’m saying, “See? I am respecting you by maintaining your beliefs about me! Look how I am being a good friend!” That. Is. Batshit. Nuts. So, I get to think about how I would treat someone who was not me, list what I would and actually do for them, then do it for myself.
      I also can wear clothing that fits properly. It’s odd that this would be something positive, but I see the logic. I want to be a size six, and I’m not in most clothes. And in all of them, it’s a little tight. The physical discomfort of squeezing into the smaller size to assuage my vanity ends up making me feel out-of-sorts and self-conscious. I don’t have to show the tag to anyone, and I would have to tell people “I am a size six” for them to know. Of course, that size 6 looks bad on me, and I show off desperation to be acceptable when I beg for attention for the fact I can zip up and squeeze into those pants). Right now, size 10 is comfortable, size 8 is snug, and size 6 is painfully tight (in some designers). I could probably do a size 4 in some designers, but I would be stretching the fabric like mad. Instead, the confidence of wearing a good-fitting pair of pants with long-enough legs and a high-enough waist and wearing a blouse which fits equally well would turn my mind from what I was wearing as I traversed the day. If I’m outside my head in my clothes, if I’m not concentrating on sucking in my gut or going home and manically exercising to slide down another size, if I’m not concentrating on the size and how I look in it instead of how comfortable I am and how capable I am to function as I want to? Then I am growing that necessary self-confidence to experience life outside of my approval-seeking obsession. My goal is that first 24 hours outside of approval-seeking obsession, and giving myself a strong tool in wearing good-fitting clothing (so I’m not obsessed with how I look) is a very recovered attitude to take.
      Doing that safe person practice is also a great idea. Being straightforward and avoiding the bartering of manipulation is part of that. Coming up in one of my daily OA readers (yes, I read ahead, and I already admitted this) is a quote from a speaker about actively loving others while not worrying if others love me back. That’s hard to do, but opening myself to rigorous yet kind honesty as a lifestyle is worth it. I want to be reliable, and by studying and practicing that safe person list until I internalize it is a kindness to myself and to others. Reliability is a value I prize in others. I can achieve it, too, if I work to make it part of my daily recovery practice. I can’t imagine not having self-confidence if I can trust myself to be reliable. Unreliability is a huge character defect I indulge in on a daily basis. I even warn people of impending unreliability in order to rationalize it and excuse it. It’s easier to flake, and it takes conscious effort to decide to be reliable. But, with practice, it will become easier . . . just like it became easier to practice safe firearms handling as I worked to learn how to manage it.
      The next part is acceptance. I need to accept that we all come in different sizes and shapes, that each of us has an unique combination of qualities which extend farther than our bodies. A gift that I can give myself is to accept my womanhood. I am a real woman, with a real woman body. I have stretch marks from my real pregnancies. I am shaped like a woman at 40. I have laugh lines around my eyes. I cry when I am emotional; I communicate my emotions. I need to be kind to myself, to be mindful of my femininity. I have already accepted that more weight loss would cause more problems for me and potentially leave me less woman-shaped. Definitely less soft. When I distill myself to a number on a tag, I deny my womanhood.
      It can be hard, since I regularly end up towering over men when I am in public. I try to keep a little farther away, since I don’t want them feeling uncomfortable having a woman four-to-six inches taller than them looming. While I am just under two inches taller than the average U.S. man in my ethnological group, that’s the average height for men. I see a lot of men at and over 6 feet tall, which means that someone has to balance it out. And I loom over these guys on the other end of the height spectrum.
      I slouch, I try to minimize the perception of my height, and I end up looking as insecure as I feel. Even if I am thinking I am doing it to make them feel better, that’s approval-seeking. I cannot control how a guy shorter than me will feel or react to my height. And, as the Serenity Prayer reminds me, it’s not my job to. My job is to accept me as I am and to stand up straight so I don’t end up with back and shoulder problems and headaches from hunching like an Igor. I’m six feet tall, and contorting myself to appear smaller doesn’t work. Just like squeezing myself into the sixes. I cannot change my height like I cannot change that I am comfortable today in a 10 (even if I want to be in a six, despite the price of losing my feminine shape).
      I think the last thing is being present and accounted for. What in life am I missing out on as I obsess about me. And it’s not even good obsessing, either! I mean, if I was cocky and “screw you if you can’t accept me!”, that would at least be somewhat logical despite being equally delusional. No, I corner myself in my own mind and beat myself up. So not only am I missing out on life, I am making myself feel worse about myself and less likely to risk going out into reality and potentially having a good time.
      I’m actually smiling right now, amused that I would choose to protect myself from the bad things that could happen to me in reality by drawing myself into my own head–where I actually make bad things happen. One would think the potential of having something good happen to me is preferable to the tried-and-true 100% negative experience I have when I’m in my head. And if I actually go outside with a good attitude? Good things will happen to me along with bad things. However, with a good attitude, the bad things tend to get minimized (just like the good things get minimized when I have a bad attitude). Simply by shifting my own perception (something that Serenity Prayer says I can do, if I am willing to be courageous enough to do it), I will actually perceive good things being attracted toward me.
      Like is said in the skit from “Stan Freberg Modestly Presents The United States of America (Part One”, when Columbus reaches the new world and discovers the indigenous people on the beach, who claim they discovered Columbus instead: “It’s all how you look at it.”
      Well, I’ve written a short-story’s worth (or chapter’s worth, if you’re into novels more) of journal entry, it’s time to put this down and get to the business of living.
      My name is Jess and I am a food and approval addict. I am working a mental shift, and even now I am seeing patterns of thought which I expect will be popping up throughout my Fourth Step. Each time I work toward a shift in conscious thought about my experiences, I become more willing to sit down and face the emotions which will arise. But as I do, I can record the emotions and see how they may have triggered past experiences. Once I identify triggers, I can spot them and do recovery work before they become full-blown acting out of character defects. And every defect I have has a source which also possesses a character strength. Once I can identify the defects, the sources, and the strengths, I can start consciously shifting those defective behaviors, thoughts, and attitudes into recovered behaviors, thoughts, and attitudes.
      I look forward to it, for I have a lifetime of memories to sort through which I can use in order to create a life free of the afflictions of compulsive food control and approval obsession.

      I, like many women, have a really bad body image. This bad body image is both symptom and cause of my approval addiction. Well, it’s time to make a real change.

      I worry about being abandoned, left alone in the world. I don’t trust anyone, including myself. This causes problems. I want the approval of men I don’t know, and I struggle with the cultural norms which I can never achieve. The interesting thing is that although I possess some of the “secret” qualities men find attractive in women (from being curvy an “woman”-shaped to not wearing make-up to having a few wrinkles) and possess or can achieve internal qualities (the article states, as examples, “confidence, depth, intelligence, and straightforwardness”), I don’t even want to be concerned about not making the grade in society. Approval goals are in constant conflict. What do men want? What do women want?
      Well, it’s not supposed to be what other people want. The Serenity Prayer tells me I cannot change them, only they can. The Serenity Prayer tells me I only need the courage to change what I can . . . and that is me. So, that’s what I am doing. And I agree with the men from the second article. I want to have confidence, depth, intelligence and straightforwardness for myself, though not in order to attract men. Those qualities are ones I admire in people.
      Well, I consider I have enough intelligence to keep learning. My life of experience–good and bad–gives me depth. I am developing straightforwardness, rigorous honest with kindness and an ability to be a safe person in all of my dealings.
      What I lack is the confidence to trust that I am acceptable as I am to other human beings. This puts me in the unpleasant position of trying to rebuild a positive body image and look at my judgmental character defective behavior–where I judge people based on the criteria that I judge myself on.
      That’s going to be a lot of work, because I have to break into the cache of my mind and hack at the hidden codes, the things that I heard and integrated into myself. From “You don’t want to be fat and ugly all of your life” (which was told me when I reached puberty 40 lbs. overweight) to the rejections by girls I thought were my friends (I was told I could not be part of a triad of friends when I was five or six, something which broke my heart as the two girls walked away, their backs to me) and rejection by boys and men I liked once I reached puberty and started having changing feelings and thoughts in my changing body. Even G-d rejected me for my imperfections, according to the church I attended from six to twelve. My sins, as I racked them up, were heaped on a man who was crucified. According to what I was taught in the church, every spiritual punishment I deserved for hurting G-d inadvertently was assumed by the Christ. Every mistake I made brought suffering to a being who I learned loved me unconditionally. And I knew the hurt caused by others; I lived it every day with my parents. I could do nothing but despair my imperfections, because they caused pain to a perfect being (as I was taught). Then I turned away from that because I could face it no longer. Those were horrible burdens to lay on a sensitive child. Horrible burdens.
      I remember, in youth and especially adolescence, the pain I felt when people died in accidents–especially plane crashes. I felt responsible even though I was not there to stop the crashes, was not there to die in them. I took the burden of others’ suffering on myself, and I lost my mind in the process. Perhaps that was part of the pursuit of perfection, to suffer as I was taught Jesus did. I have no idea what the source was for that intense guilt for not being able to stop the pain. I thought of the families of those people lost forever, of the loves they would not have. I thought of the tears, of the pain of the loss those families endured . . . especially when the deaths were senseless. The Lockerbie crash, which killed 270 people when I was in my freshman year of college, tore me apart. The people who died when the 680 freeway in Oakland pancaked during the 1989 earthquake in San Francisco–sparing some and crushing almost 70 others–devastated me. I wept for the people whose names I never knew, who I felt deserved to live more than I did because they weren’t wastes of human life like I believed I was.
      This has passed, in time. I did not blame myself for 9/11, but I was 30 at the time and had at least taken on a sense that since I did not perform the act and I would never consider something so inhuman and horrific, I was not the person culpable. And, now that I am in recovery, I am able to understand that I am responsible for my actions, my choices. I am not responsible for the reactions of others. I can only change my attitudes and my beliefs in order to live a life in alignment with my true self.
      I’ve talked about that a lot here, though I am not sure I have actually gone into what my natural self is like. I enjoy being a teacher and a student. I consider intelligence and wisdom to be gifts which are to be evolved and encouraged–not squandered. I have enough intelligence to learn, and that’s what I can do. I have enough wisdom to start understanding some very important truths about being human and about reality. My natural self is affectionate and kind. I am quiet and meditative sometimes, yet I love to play and laugh loudly other times. I enjoy observing people’s kindness; I am attracted to traditions which encourage love on the mundane and spiritual planes. I love to heal through safe touches, like hugs and touches on the shoulder, and sometimes even a gentle hand on someone’s back. I feel emotions deeply, and they can overwhelm me. I believed others when they said it was a weakness. It’s not.
      To be joyful when others wish to share their joy, to weep when others share their pain, to even be angry when an injustice is done to someone . . . all of these things are manifestations of the precious gift of “being there”.
      No one should have to feel alone in the world. People spend a lot of time navel-gazing, focused on their own pains. They want others to know their pain, to actually listen, to acknowledge that they are not invisible. I may not know their pain, precisely, but I do know that people need people. Let me amend that: People need safe people. Yes, some people prefer alone time, but we are naturally social animals. And I don’t mean going clubbing on the weekend, getting drunk and taking digital snaps to be uploaded on Monday morning with frenemies.
      An experience I had when I was in college sticks with me. I was part of another triad of friends–though more of a teeter-totter relationship based on one woman. Her other friend was “fun”; I wasn’t (Though I was a drinker, I don’t like other mind-altering substances and would not use them). Her other friend partied and was exciting; I wanted to be like that, but I was already so self-conscious. After being asked to make friends with the “fun” girl by the fulcrum girl, I tried to encourage the other girl to like me; I could not get through. The two of them got boyfriends; I had none. I was officially out after fun girl gave fulcrum girl an ultimatum–her or me. History repeated itself, and the fulcrum girl walked away with the fun girl. I had to take a week off of school to recover from the devastation of this betrayal. I left both of them alone completely when I got back into school and life and church again (this was not long after I had gotten out of the cult; it’s possible the back-to-back blows and miserable choices I made in the span of a month knocked me down. But I got back up again, through a strength I know was not my own).
      Weeks later, the fulcrum girl sat with me in the stairwell of the dorm. The fun friend had betrayed both fulcrum girl and her own boyfriend by having sex with fulcrum girl’s boyfriend (in a public place on campus). I listened. We were friendly after that, but never friends. But I listened, not to prove I was better than fulcrum girl or “fun” girl. Fulcrum girl was in pain and she needed someone to listen. So, I did. Later, I did get into my personal grandiosity (being an addict, that’s what I did) and was vainly pride-filled that I was a better friend. That fulcrum girl had made the wrong choice, and she knew it. But it didn’t matter in the moment when she was suffering, and that is something I am humbly grateful I was able to do in that moment. It was an HP moment, even though I did not see it. I had suffered a betrayal that would make most people walk away, yet I still had empathy. I still hope that fulcrum girl is okay, that she ended up with a decent guy. She was a nice girl, in general, who seemed to attract broken people. As for the fun girl? I hope the same for her, too. The mistakes I made while trying to feel alive has led me into SLAA, to try to come to terms with the past and accept that my experiences are to be learned from–not to berate and shame myself over.
     
      I’m not sure how much of a betrayal it is to tell this story here. I assume since it’s not entirely unique to have things like this happen (I’ve made choices I regret with no thought to the people I harmed–I wanted what I wanted when I wanted it). There’s always amends and pulling this down off the internet, though considering that only a handful of people were even involved in it and most of them probably figured it was just part of being in college, it’s likely long gone from their lives. But I wanted an example of being in an HP moment before I had my HP, of how an addict will react after-the-fact.
      So, anyway, body image. There are some pretty good suggestions out there, and I plan to consider them and listen to the OA Conference speaker on body image. I consider that I have many resources to draw from.
      This course of my recovery on this seems to be a well-lit path already. To deal with my judgment issue, I need to observe and become aware as I travel the day. Once I know it, I can turn my attention toward the triggers. Then I can start surrendering what I have learned to my Higher Power, to have returned to me options and answers and growth opportunities to practice on.
      Regarding the body image issue, I will consider what is out there about recovering a good body image. If I have new messages and actions I can turn to (thereby turning from the obsession with my inadequacy), I won’t just have the addict thinking to turn to in crisis. That’s all I have now. My confidence is non-existent. Sure, I can be cocky, but it’s bravado to cover the feeling of inadequacy. It will take time, but my Higher Power (reality) has me waking up morning after morning, chaining yet one more 24 hours of food abstinence and getting me closer to my first day of withdrawal from my love and approval addictions.
      I have hope that, with sincere and vigilant footwork, I can start to live minutes, then hours, then days outside of my approval obsession. I have hope that, even though it will not be perfect, I can at least live days of real serenity filled with the peaceful confidence that I am right with who I am supposed to be, just as I am.
      My name is Jess, and I am a food and approval addict. Lots of work ahead of me, though I am ready to let my HP take on a lot of things right now. I’ve had a lot of forward movement in recovery, from a few childhood revelations to reaching into my approval addiction and finding its core is a fear of being alone.
      As long as a meeting door is open, I won’t be alone. SLAA has been around longer than my love and sex addictions (though not my approval addiction); OA has been around longer than any of my addictions. I have faith all of the doors won’t close in my lifetime. And if they did, it would free me up for the 12 Step smoking program and the adult children programs. As long as there are 12 Step programs? If at least one meeting door is open, then I will never, ever be alone.

      Woo! Less than a month left in Holiday Eating Season!

      My very early youth was a mix of wonderful and awful memories. When I was very young and unaware of my weight problems (I was always promised my “baby fat” would go away naturally), I had some pretty good memories. Not all connected with food.
      The weeks leading to Christmas tended to hold most of the good memories of my childhood. I suppose the better natures of the people I cared about came out then. Not sure why, but that’s when I felt the most connected to family, friends, and spirituality. Whatever happened between Thanksgiving and my birthday, there was a shift. Excitement, hope. Something changed, though I do not really know what.
      While Christmas ended up a holiday I loathed in my adolescence and adulthood (likely because the days of awe quality were left behind by 1980), it once was a magical time for me.
      I am not sure where our traditions began, though my sisters might remember better. I have two memories that resurface around the holidays every year–St. Nicholas’s Eve and Advent. These traditions make sense, considering that I’m three-quarters German. My history on one side was once-upon-a-time Lutheran for generations.
      I do not know the source of my parents’ temporary practice of Advent. I know we did not do it by the time I was 10.
      Advent, for those unfamiliar with it, is the countdown to Christmas. For the four Sundays leading up to Christmas (and even daily, in some traditions) a candle is lit to represent the coming of the Christ Child. In Lutheranism, Advent is the beginning of the Biblical cycle, which starts with the life of Christ. Anyhoo, there are meanings for each of the candles, and I think we used the “modern” meanings of Hope, Love, Joy, and Peace. It is one of my good childhood memories–seeing my mother happy. I mean actually happy.
      We used red candles. I don’t recall the lighting of the pillar candle on Christmas Eve night, but I do remember it.
      It’s possible I ended up connecting to Hannukah because it reflected my early childhood celebration of the spiritual.
      This brings me to a childhood fantasy coming full circle. I’ve written about it before. I had a fantasy of being a switched-at-birth story, where my real parents were waiting for me and watching for me. My fantasy mother loved me unconditionally, and her sadness at losing me was equal to her joy in the fantasy of my arrival at my fantasy family’s doorstep. She sat at a storm-paned window in an old city in Europe, waiting for my return. And I fantasized running toward the wood-doored home in the dark of a misty night, where the door would be opened and I would be welcomed in to a fire-warmed home.
      It never got much farther than that. But the imagery has stuck since early childhood. I don’t recall when that fantasy started, but I think the creation of this escape is pivotal to when I started to succumb to the approval addiction then ended up succumbing to the food obsession. I am not sure when I went from overeater to compulsive overeater.
      As a child, somewhere along the line I got two messages: I had to naturally know how to be perfect, and I had to submit to authority. I look at those, now, and see them as innately conflicting messages. The achievement of perfection would require me to have complete knowledge of myself and reality. By pushing me to pursue perfection, my inner voice would be required to be perfect as well. Yet I was a child and “knew” nothing. Every person older than me was an authority. Parents, grandparents, teachers, ministers . . . all of those adults were supposed to know better than me. I was forced to submit through physical pain as a corrective measure to align with my father’s vision; I was forced to submit through fear as a corrective measure to align with others’ views. Since many of these views conflicted, I was left unable to know which authority could lead me to perfection.
      Somewhere along that route, I figured that to achieve perfection would mean that everyone loved me. If all people loved me, I reasoned, then I would have achieved perfection. Not sure where that message came from, but it is as broken as the onus to achieve perfection where all others failed (save for Jesus, who I was told was “perfect”) by being saved by an authority figure. My princess complex grew then, as well as disturbing views on the role of women. The archetypes of strong women combined yet conflicted with the archetypes of submissive ones. I was at last left considering that my only chance would be to become a modern-day Helen of Troy–whose beauty was supernatural and drove men to possess her. I used what I thought was beauty, the archetypes of models and actresses. These underweight and bird-framed women, mannequins for clothing designers, were the standard of beauty I measured myself against. And, as I grew taller and bigger-boned, the dainty qualities I assumed I would possess as my birthright never manifested. As each day passed, I lost hope in achieving this unachievable goal.
      I gave up in action, though my mind was still on achieving perfection through submission. In other words, I was relying on a Prince Charming to make a Happily Ever After for me.
      What I find more devastating is that I found mean who wanted to rescue me, but they couldn’t fix my problem. The profundity of the Serenity Prayer escaped me even to a few months ago. No one can control the world around them; everyone can change the world within them; the sooner one accepts it, the sooner one will put the effort in the right place. The right place, for me, is revealing those inner messages to myself. I learn my own secrets, dissect them into their component parts, then let them go and find an alternative way of living.
      So, here is my core:
      (1) I believe that the reward of achieving perfection means I will be worthy of the love my parents cannot give because they are ill;
      (2) I believe that if I have enough people (ie. ALL of them) pointing out that I am deserving of love, they will convince my parents that I am lovable and that I can be trusted with their love.
      In recovered thinking, I have to use acceptance (despite hating the crap out of its fundamental opposite concepts:
      (1) I am human and cannot achieve perfection, but I can achieve alignment to my natural self;
      (2) To be humble means that I accept others as being different but the same as me–imperfect human beings.
     
      Now, yes, there are things some people do which are so antithetical to my inner self that I am shocked into abject horror by the behavior. Sexualizing children? I find that horrific, and it makes me nauseous. Forcing one’s will on me? I find that unacceptable, since it assumes I am going to remove my humility and choose to be humiliated in order to be “a good girl”. Those things require my action–from using legal recourse to refusing to use a convenience (like flying on airplanes) because my rights to be safe about my person are violated by those full-body scanners. I have the ability to make choices which align with the way I want to live. There is a level of accepting things as they are (predators exist, and the TSA is treating their responsibility as power abuse), and then there is footwork (I will choose to halt a predation by notifying the police and any child protective agencies and physically getting between the predator and the child if I become aware of a predation event, and I choose not to travel by airplane). In other words, there is acceptance of what I cannot change and there is courage to change what I can.
      At this point, I am preparing to close the gap between that little girl who I was, once, and me, today. My Fourth Step feels like a bridge to that, a means to close the many open books of my life that I turn back to (hoping the words have changed). I sometimes feel like a split soul–part of me in yesterday, part of me in tomorrow, and part of me in today.
      And, as I thought on that Hope, Love, Joy, and Peace that the lighting of the red Advent candles of my far-past childhood returns to me every year, I realize that I am on a countdown to that spiritual awakening promised by Step Twelve. Unlike Advent, I don’t know when the end date is, but I am feeling the process as I work to live a recovered life–a life retrieved. A restoration to a former, or better, state.
      I can relate the tradition of the Advent wreath to recovery. In the beginning, I had hope that maybe OA was the answer for me. OA was only the beginning. I am shifting toward love–learning to take care of my heart, soul, body, and mind, so I can do what makes me happy. Joy comes next, though I am not sure how it will manifest. Last is Peace, the inner serenity of finally finding a place to rest after running from my emotions and my broken messages for years. The final step will be accepting the gift of the fulfillment of the promises of serenity and release of the affliction by living a new and real life of constant growth and change and progress–the lighting of my inner white candle.
      How do you keep a tradition like Advent alive? Practice it. Just like I am practicing how to learn from the world around me, how to change what I can and let go of what I cannot, how to find acceptance, and even how to process the emotions so I don’t dwell in them and build deep resentments.
      My name is Jess, and I am a food addict and an approval addict. Yes, I will talk about religious things because I have a foundation in organized religion–good and bad. It is part of my history, though it is not part of my today.
      Tomorrow? Who knows? But for today, I am still an agnostic with a Higher Power and no self-selected authority telling me that how I relate to my Higher Power is wrong. That is their Higher Power, and I appreciate they have a connection with theirs which fulfills their needs. Well, I have a need for a Higher Power which doesn’t want me to suffer the pursuit of perfectionism any longer and which doesn’t want me to give up the power to change the things only I can change to someone who I have been told knows better than me.
      On the day I meet the perfect person, then I will grow with that new information, as well.

      Ugh. I don’t want to feel the emotions from doing a Step Four Inventory.

      Let me get my We Care message out, first, then I’ll go on about the whole emotions thing.
     
     
HP SAVINGS TIME
     
      Time seems to be at the center of our recovery. We look ahead to a lifetime of recovery but don’t live in tomorrow. We look behind to do Steps Four and Eight but don’t live in yesterday. Our lives are in the present. We work toward that world record abstinence of 24 hours and let yesterday stay there, no matter how it turned out.
      Today’s readings deal with the most important time of all–Our Higher Power’s time.
      In For Today, patience is addressed. Patience is the act of letting go control to our Higher Powers once we’ve done the footwork we can do. The art of patience is finding something useful to do between the time we release something to our Higher Power and its return to us to either complete footwork on it or learn from it. Recovering from an illness takes time, we are reminded, and we can only wait out our return to health.
      In Voices of Recovery, we are told that it’s a relief that we cannot change our character defects on our own. The judgment of our addict self is lifted, we are asked to accept progress, not perfection. Turning over problems to our Higher Powers allows us to live in today, to act instead of react to a problem we are not required to handle alone.
      In both of these examples, we read the benefits of letting go. When we release something to our Higher Power, we act in recovery. It can be hard, and I’ve personally been known to fret over an issue I want my Higher Power to resolve now, in my time. But when I let go, I enter recovered time–my Higher Power’s time.
      Sometimes we are confronted with things we can’t handle. Life in addiction is unmanageable, and simple things we once were able to handle become insurmountable as they join the pile of other things. We waste our time running in circles, trying to fix, to control, to set things precisely how we think they should be in hopes they don’t get disturbed. They always seem to, and what we neglected suddenly comes to the fore, needing to be addressed immediately. With so many alarms on so many small problems, no wonder we end up frozen–often unable to make decisions we know are simple!
      In a life of utter chaos, we make little to no headway. We put off, procrastinate, spread ourselves thin, and exhaust ourselves into giving up and trying to find comfort in the food. We think we’re organizing, but we aren’t. We doubt our abilities to prioritize, because often that insurmountable problem nags at us and makes us live in yesterday and tomorrow. We fret over decisions we made or did not make in the past. We fret over decisions we are to make. We fret, and we fret, and we fret, and still no answers are forthcoming. In this weakened state, we can get ill, and even more problems pile up as we are too ill to even consider adding them to the list. We’re left in despair, still without answers.
      With a Higher Power, the minute I say, “I don’t know” and mean it, it’s time to send it up. The minute I’m bothered by something days, weeks, months, or years in advance, it’s time to send it up. I like to treat them kind-of like a FAX to my HP, with a little prayer, asking that it be returned when I’m able to do the footwork for it. Always with a “Thanks” because I appreciate the help.
      Yesterday, I started footwork on perfection. I am a perfectionist, a character defect that I believe is fueled by the character trait of striving for personal growth. The problem is that if I make perfection a goal, I may miss the growth because it isn’t the solution handed to me on a platter. Growth is not an arbitrary goal, and it allows me to be human. When I make mistakes, I have an opportunity to learn from them. Perfection is an arbitrary goal, and it disallows me to be human. I am not allowed to make mistakes, therefore I have no opportunity to learn at all. I know the goal of perfection is part of my addict mind; I know growth is part of my recovered mind. One is insane to pursue; the other, sane. One I cannot even give to my Higher Power to handle for me; the other, I can.
      That was the footwork I could do. The seed of mental change was planted–instead of perfection, I am now seeking to find my true self. That true self knows that perfection leads to judgment, to not measuring up when I look backward for my Fourth Step. If I am striving for perfection? My Fourth Step becomes an inventory of how far I got from perfection. With the goal to find my true self, I can look backward and learn and grow. Where did I depart from my true self? Where did I make choices to gain approval from others? Where did I use my character defects, and what were the defects I turned to again and again?
      I have an opportunity for staggering personal growth. My Fourth Step Personal Inventory is now something I am not frozen in terror by. While I still have to work on the willingness to feel the associated emotions, I look forward to the opportunity to gain insight into my character traits and turn my mind toward the asset side instead of the defect side. For example, my stubbornness to divert my attention toward what I think I know can be turned into a dogged drive to change and grow. My martyrdom can become empathy. My procrastination can become patience.
      That requires something of me, the willingness to move my recovery into my Higher Power’s time zone. Every time I do, I find that life does go smoother. When I move my unsolvable problems to my Higher Power’s time, I can focus on living for today.
     
     
      I had trouble getting to sleep last night, and the dog got me up at one-thirty in the morning to powder her puppy nose. Other events ended up waking us overnight until the final vertical takeoff to start the day.
      I’m left wandering in a bewildered funk, my brain scattered completely. However, in seeking out what I’m to meditate on today, I was given questions I actually know the answers to . . . ones, unfortunately, which have exposed that even though I felt in recovery again, I was still working in addiction. Well, not entirely, because it’s about progress, not perfection, right?
      I am to consider what I want to do that’s blocked by things beyond my control. Well, I want to go travel to see my older son right now, before Christmas. I want to go see the holiday parade down Main Street, America, and get a sense of the change in seasons. I don’t know what is drawing me to stand outside in the freezing cold to watch people watching a parade. The nighttime chill, the potential of snow, the feeling of Christmas “as it should be”. Something makes me want to touch that. But I cannot go–I have too much to do here and I’m going to be there in January. And then there’s my parents’ visit soon after. Those are entirely out of my control because they’re months ahead.
      It’s like I am reaching toward Christmases past with nostalgia, convincing myself I can be happy if I just get one more. That’s not reality, though. I’d want it next year and the year after that. There’s no guarantee of snow flurries or a parade at all. And I have things I have to do here, things I want to do here. And things I don’t want to, as well.
      I want to run away to an Americana Christmas. Weird. And I can’t, which I have to let go to my HP.
      I also want to run toward the manufactured emotions of novelspace. I’ve done my time for WriMo this year, so I’m not going back there. Maybe January.
      I do have things I could be doing. I don’t know if making hats is busy-work, but I have a nagging feeling I should be doing it and using up the yarn I was given to do it. I have a bunch that was given to me, and I need to turn it into winter hats for the homeless. But if I do that, I may be left having to talk and listen to my Higher Power while I do it. I’ve been talking, but not as honestly as I could be. It’s not like my HP isn’t part of it. Talking to my HP is priming the well so I can get intuitive guidance. Oh, I just got a list of things to do today, and I am very aware now that it’s not coming from me because I have that solid in-the-moment peace from knowing what I should be doing. I was going to skip this morning’s OA meeting because I’m tired, but I need to be there. Not an anxious, “I really oughta go” but a “Go” from a source deep within me. Answers are there. And crocheting, too.
      This question is pretty awesome: What would I do if I were free of these obstacles and blocks?
      Well, the first obstacle is fear of feeling long-buried emotions. So, I’m going to step forward, as if I’ve done my Fourth Step already, since that’s the big activity, and I am getting that inner message to work it from Saturday until New Year’s Eve. There’s a peaceful part of me that knows it’s time, that doing it from now to then is significant. It is my footwork for the next month or so. I think my HP wants me to get in there and really dig for this stuff so I can start 2011 free of the obstacle of that.
      My Fourth Step is for both my programs. My sponsor in SLAA will probably be at my next meeting, and I’m going to let her know that I’m preparing this Fourth Step for both programs right now. I’ve sat back and pretended I can do separate ones. The compulsive eating addiction is a symptom of the love addiction–I picked up eating because of the raw emotions I felt I had to hide deep within me in order to keep surviving. I ate the rejection, the fear of acceptance, the fear of non-acceptance. Crap, and I am feeling emotions as I open up this truth.
      Come on, Jess. It’s okay to feel this . . . what I think is grief. It’s a tension in my heart that is making the tear ducts in my eyes ache to cry. Something’s ready to come up, to break the veneer of thin ice over this river.
      If it breaks, will I fall through and drown? No, because I’m here at 40 years old. I have fallen through so many times and made it out. And I don’t have to jump on the ice to break it. It’s going to happen naturally. I just have to stop fighting the thaw and get on that river and ride it to wherever it takes me. My last Fourth Step Inventory had me in tears, too. But it came like a dam bursting, like a flood of emotions and memories. And I am thinking that since this is the time of year when I have to fight most with my emotions, this is it. The power of that yearly rejection, the loss of those golden holiday memories, the long-dormant memories of my mother smiling while lighting advent candles (something which stopped when I was so, so young) . . . this time of year may be filled with nighttime hours, but it was lit by the spirit. My parents have not always been compassionless, without love. I want to scream primally because of this–they did love but their addictions brought out the other side, too. I want them to be evil, not human! I want to be better than them for feeling inferior for all those years! But they are human. Just human. And that inferiority was my human failing to my inner self.
      So, what would I do once I reach what people consistently say I will experience (and I have personally experienced) the relief of writing out an extremely honest Fourth Step Inventory? Okay, let’s go with it.
      Well, first thing, I would relax and wait for my HP to guide me to the right person to read it to, same as my HP guided me to the right person to be my OA sponsor. However long it takes, I will do it. That Fourth Step is the foundation for the rest of it all. With the treasures of my excavation lain before me, I will have let go the backbreaking toil to enjoy what that work has brought me. People say I will feel stronger, free. I think what I want to do after the obstacles are lifted is laugh. I want to laugh genuinely, freely. I want to laugh and play like a kid, enjoying the wonder of the world around me. Probably go hiking. Go see the snow. Be silly.
      It’s funny how long I’ve tried to be the definition of grace, when I just am not. It’s not in there. Well, maybe it is, during my quiet time. But I want to touch the young inside, unconcerned about the body it contains.
      I want to make more laugh lines in my face for my grandchildren to trace in ten years. Despite the fretfulness of the last few decades, I don’t have frown lines. That’s a gift from my Higher Power, that the lines on my face are from regular enough smiles and laughter. And I want to keep getting them. Let the world worry about looking ten years younger. Let the world worry about synthetic body parts. I want to take this body and run outside and play and feel my family know they are loved without reservation, without the need to have others see how perfect we are as a family. I want my family to feel wholly accepted, because that aligns with my true self.
      I know what will help me to break free–program, program fellowship, my sponsors, and especially my Higher Power. I have tools. I have literature. I can do this. It’s not about releasing the inner child in order to force it to grow up. I did that, and I’m a freaking addict for it. No, this is about balancing the responsibilities of me as an adult with the joy of the core of me.
      My greatest fear is that I’ll lose myself somewhere along the way. I have to let that go to my Higher Power, to trust that whatever comes, it will be fine. I haven’t lost me at all along the way. I’ve lost the desire to eat compulsively the minute things go wrong, but I haven’t lost me. I’ve lost weight, I’ve lost a lot of misconceptions. Yet it feels like every step I take forward, I am getting closer to that person I am supposed to be.
      I like living in reality, even though it scares me sometimes. That’s part of life, though. Scary stuff does happen. It’s when I fear living in reality (because I am supposed to get bumped and banged up some as I travel through life) that I cushion myself with a cocoon of whatever I can find–food, fantasy, you name it. Reality is filled with life and death, beginnings and ends, joys and pains. Addiction is filled with pain simply because I don’t want to accept the negative things that happen in reality. But being entirely present in my life instead of hiding from it . . . that’s an amazing experience. Like serenity, I don’t get that all the time. I turn to what I know, and that is the fantasy I can control my life. I can control my perceptions. I can begin footwork and enter into reality where others will act and react based on what I am doing. I can’t control others, and when I’m in reality, I don’t want to. I want to be part of the natural order of things, having others’ free wills give me opportunities to expand my understanding. If my addict logic states I am the only one who is right, then why aren’t I happy? I mean, if I am so right that it’s my job to control every being on the planet, to force my will on others, then why am I miserable when I do it? Because I’m not supposed to be doing that. I am supposed to be living MY life. And life is a series of events and interactions which give each of us the opportunity to learn and grow and even teach.
      It sort-of feels like I’m trying to convince myself to start that inventory, and in a way I am. I have decades of mental clutter which needs to be moved aside so I can go through the boxes of memories and decide what to do with them to lighten my life. Oddly enough, I need to be doing that in real life, too. My family goal the next time we move is to do it in a 17 foot truck. We’ve gone from a 26 and 22 to one 24′ truck and a bunch of car trips over the last 5 years. While we’re not looking to go smaller than 22 feet (I need a bed and want to keep my bookshelves, after all), that is a reasonable amount of space to pack a life.
      I have too many boxes and bins. I need to lighten my load, not add to it. I know most people do this in their sixties, but getting an early start is something I want to do. It also helps reroute money to where it needs to go instead of increasing my debt trying to accumulate more things I don’t want and especially don’t need.
      I have to get ready for meeting. My HP is waiting for me so I can get some enlightenment and some footwork in. Then back here for errands, dishes, laundry, and general life stuff. I have a full day of things to do, aka footwork. Time to go live in reality.
     
      My name is Jess and I am a food and love addict. I guess the task at hand is to finally really write what I know. I have an autobiography to put down, with a readership of one and an oral recounting of two. A life stranger than fiction, and once it’s written, I believe that something wonderful will come of it. I have no idea what, and that’s good, because that releases my self-imposed limits on my Higher Power which blind me to the amazing possibilities that reality offers.

      Yesterday, I noticed that more than a couple of my journal entries have the Holiday Eating Season Countdown incorrect.

      Last year, I fixed it. This year, I have decided to try to let it stand, despite the agony of wanting to go back and correct it. Perfection is what I’m after, and I want not to look like a complete idiot. Well, meh. Here’s my rigorous honesty for today–I calculated it wrong on a few entries. And it is okay for them to be wrong, just like it will be okay for ones later in this month and next month to be wrong. I mean, it’s not important. It’s not like people are relying on it as a calendar. It’s just a reminder to me to be aware that I, historically, have had issues with overeating during this time. It’s a reminder that I need to be more vigilant.
      I keep remembering how Easter broadsided me in 2010 as a surprise Triggered Eating Holiday. I knew what was coming for Thanksgiving and Christmas because it’s culturally understood that Americans tend to gain weight at the holidays because of the overabundance and the ability to hide it under bulky clothing. Decades of post-holiday diet commercials (to get into that Summer Swimsuit Body) made me quite aware that the last two months of the year were a minefield of trigger foods for me. Most of my permanent weight gain happened then. Family stress has been an emotional trigger since the beginning.
      In childhood, I was forced to eat my mother’s Christmas Stollen before I could open presents. This wouldn’t have been so bad except that a combination of the chemical taste of the candied fruit in the bread and the fact my mother never experimented with the recipe made for a yearly dread. I stared at the shiny presents as I ate the minimum possible. Later, my mother made a raisin and almond version just for me, and I appreciated it. Well, not then because I hated my parents and wanted them to suffer because I was suffering, but now I appreciate her going out of her way. That’s going to be in a Step Nine amends–not being kind about the effort she put into making the culturally traditional (for my family) Christmas breakfast bread.
      I remember the year she used my tip to rise the dough in a moist oven, using the steam from a pot of water (it’s how I keep my bread lighter instead of extremely dense and dry) as she rose the dough in the closed oven. She had, over the years, doubled the recipe because the dough did not rise as expected. That year? She made twice as many loaves as usual. And the candied-fruit-free loaf was pretty darned good. We had stollen for what felt like weeks.
      When my grandparents died, Christmas changed completely. My parents actually rejected us. I’m serious. They had my sister from Europe at their home no more than four hours’ drive away, and I asked if we could come for Christmas–to make a family thing of it. My mother said no, that she wanted to do it just with my sister’s family. That has been the status quo for almost ten years, now. The up note was that my husband, in an effort to comfort my older son and me, decided we were doing un-Christmas. We created a brand new holiday, named it after my older son, and created a mythology that bound our family together.
      The tree horrified my mother-in-law, which delighted my husband. Instead of ornaments, we put ski gloves and random flotsam from around the house on it. The tree topper was a Halloween skull. Thus W—mas was born; the next year, my younger son was added in, and the night before W—mas became J—’s Eve.
      The mythology, created by the whole family, is hilarious. Uncle Mordecai comes up from the toilet, dragged through by sewer alligators. He’s a surly fellow, and if you’ve been bad, you get toilet paper. There’s a red-nosed alligator, whose snout glows red because he’s a chronic drinker. (My apologies to those still suffering from alcoholism and those who are in program, but the idea of an alcoholic alligator really brought the kids to hysterics). My husband prepared the bathroom by unrolling the toilet paper on the floor (and the addict me of course spent a half-hour carefully rolling it back onto the roll) and sprinkling water from the sink around the toilet. In the morning, he flushed the toilet a few times, and the kids came down. This was an homage to the yearly use of the Nepalese donkey bells to simulate Santa’s reindeer coming and going. I received the bells as a gift when my parents traveled to India in 1980 or ’81.
      The presents for W—mas are often very silly. And my kids still love it. It’s our in-joke holiday, and it makes no sense to anyone else . . . though people with a good sense of humor find it hilarious. That it came from a place of pain at being rejected by my parents? That doesn’t matter any more. I think it was one of the few times I stepped out of the addiction to serve my family’s needs. Recovery from overeating was inevitable–all I had to do was hit rock bottom and admit I am powerless over the food and over the people I trusted to look out for my children’s hearts over my own. That harm is a deep resentment I get to release in Step Four–and my part in it was trusting people whose actions rarely aligned with their words. (Yes, I know I need to get back to doing my Big Book resentment prayer for them.) That needs to go to my Higher Power, to be returned to me as the map to the footwork of boundary-setting with them. They, like most of my family, are blood-related acquaintances. I have to accept that, forgive them for my own sanity (taking care of my needs), and move on.
      Perfection study after today’s We Care message:
     
     
A FELLOWSHIP OF HEART READERS
     
      If I had a nickel for every time I thought I knew what someone was thinking, I would be a rich woman. I’d be richer if I was right all of those times, using my many giant bags of nickels to open a Psychic Reader shop. I like psychic readers, mostly because they are really in tune with body language. It’s like having a therapist without the headache of insurance forms. But I’ve found that even better than going into a psychic’s is going into an OA room, where I learn more about myself than I would at a psychic reader’s shop. I don’t need tarot or coins or any of those things to tell me what’s going on–just a Big Book and the hearts and minds of people who are like me.
      We are a fellowship of heart-readers; through recovery, we grow that gift and share acceptance and love with anyone who is willing to come in the door.
      In For Today, it talks about our emotions. When we don’t understand people, it’s because we’re trying to look into their heads. As addicts, we don’t know why we ended up powerless over our actions and thoughts. Our balance comes from rigorous honesty with our emotions. And, to be of service to people, we look into ourselves, our hearts not our heads, to understand why others do what they do. And then we do a Fourth Step, to understand why we’re so frustrated when people surprise us with their behavior. Looking into our hearts, we gain empathy and connect to people on a level that we could not through trying to divine logic from an illogical source.
      In Voices of Recovery, program is described as a three-legged stool. When we work one side, that leg of the stool gets longer. However, if one leg is longer (say, physical recovery) than the others (mental and spiritual recovery), we can topple from the stool. If we’re feeling a wobbly foundation beneath us as we reach upwards, it’s probably time to look at our three-legged stool and see which leg is short. By working all three foundations of recovery–spiritual, mental, and physical–we find ourselves on solid footing and can reach farther in our lives.
      The Big Book talks about desire to stop the addiction and self-knowledge not being enough. In addiction, I think the question I asked most was “Why?”–usually while crying or being angry. I wanted to know people’s minds, to understand their logic behind something without logic. I removed the spiritual from it because I had no spiritual life. God was for other people. All that was left was to pursue ego-based willpower and self-knowledge to alleviate my disease. That brought me to diets, and I became a “Dry Overeater”. But that spiral into the insanity of the obsession made my diets shorter and shorter, until they eventually always existed in tomorrow. And as I worked to read minds, I shut myself off from reading hearts.
      I think that I could liken recovery as this–physical recovery heals the body; mental recovery heals the brain; spiritual recovery heals the heart. It makes me think of the two nearly identical Bible verses in the New Testament, Mark 10:15 and Luke 18:17. If we don’t enter program with the faith of a child, we can’t know the miracle of living outside of addiction.
      That faith of a child begins with understanding what kids are like, right? Well, I’ve never seen a four-year-old with a PhD, so they’re clearly not running on logic and education. A four-year-old, however, is more likely to run up to you if you’re upset and give you a hug. They want to comfort you; they want to help you. The child doesn’t go down a logic tree and take action based on your action, returning to that first state if failure occurs to try another logical action in order to resolve the situation. Kids work intuitively, they work from THEIR hearts. They know what heals them and they offer it up without reservation. They can answer that they don’t know and we accept it because they’re children. We know they don’t have a PhD or M.D., and we accept their form of therapy and are often more healed by it than the medical professionals we turn to for answers.
      That’s where the spiritual lies. Most kids have true faith. They believe that things will turn out all right. They don’t have inflated egos because they have few expectations on them. They can be silly or mad or sad and they are still loved. It takes growing up and gaining that logical ego over time to silence the intuitive heart–the part of us which does know how to heal by serving needs instead of bartering for wants. Time and experience changes us all, and the little child we once were grows up. Our minds are filled with logic trees, many of them which only served to get us to survive to the Promised Land of adulthood. Those logic trees are our addiction–our character defects which once protected us now stop us as adults. Our addiction which once comforted us through the worst of times is now the cause of the worst of times. The quiet meditation garden of our heart is left behind for the bustling metropolis of the mind–open 24-7-365. We don’t entirely forget about that garden, but we sometimes forget how to get there.
      Recovery is the journey to that garden. Step One allows us to admit that bustling metropolis of our mind which keeps us busy all of the time isn’t Utopia. We discover that the chaos has exhausted us and we can’t keep up. Step Two shows us there’s a mapmaker we can trust to get us back to the garden. Step Three is the acceptance of that map and the willingness to follow it, despite not knowing if it will lead us to our garden again. But it does when we trust the mapmaker, when we follow those directions. The journey isn’t easy (as anyone who has done Steps Four through Nine can tell us!), but we find that we can not only return to the garden, we can live there in Steps Ten, Eleven, and Twelve.
      With the faith of a child instead of the logic of an adult, we can work the program to the best of our ability. And, with program, we can resume our intuitive lives when play and laughter and self-acceptance with our imperfections were the order of the day. We become heart readers.
     
     
      I’ve worked under the “Progress, not Perfection” slogan a lot over the past year. It’s allowed me some relief from the pain, but not enough. I think the number-one character defect I will see when I work my Step Four inventory this time is that constant pursuit of perfection.
      The most frustrating thing about perfection is that it’s a moving target made of aether. I don’t even know what perfection is. I’ve set down many paths to it, and I’ve even reached those goals (like hitting my High School weight of 165 lbs.). Perfection is nowhere to be found where I’m standing right now.
      So, I say to myself, “Clearly I didn’t put the goal far enough out,” and I reset perfection to a new less attainable endpoint. Since “perfection” has a source in the logical mind (my heart certainly doesn’t mind my imperfection), I’ll start with a definition of the word.
      From Dictionary.com, the definition of the word, perfect:

–adjective
1. conforming absolutely to the description or definition of an ideal type: a perfect sphere; a perfect gentleman.
2. excellent or complete beyond practical or theoretical improvement: There is no perfect legal code. The proportions of this temple are almost perfect.
3. exactly fitting the need in a certain situation or for a certain purpose: a perfect actor to play Mr. Micawber; a perfect saw for cutting out keyholes.
4. entirely without any flaws, defects, or shortcomings: a perfect apple; the perfect crime.
5. accurate, exact, or correct in every detail: a perfect copy.
6. thorough; complete; utter: perfect strangers.
7. pure or unmixed: perfect yellow.
8. unqualified; absolute: He has perfect control over his followers.
9. expert; accomplished; proficient.
10. unmitigated; out-and-out; of an extreme degree: He made a perfect fool of himself.

      The others definitions are specific to arenas of study, so I didn’t need to add them here. Well, looking down the line, I see that definitions 1, 2, 4, and 8 are the core of the problem . . . especially 1 and 4.
      Conforming to an ideal. Whose ideal? That’s the problem I have. Like with religion’s request that I take on others’ idea of God to belong, I give others authority over me to define my personal perfection to belong. That’s not humility, that’s self-deprication or grandiosity. The problem with using others’ ideals of perfection is that I am not all things to all people. In fact, I’m too thin for some and too fat for others. Even with plastic surgery, I couldn’t be the “ideal” because there is no ideal. There is the core of addiction in that thinking right there.
      The source of the need to reach that ideal came from the rejection of people who I needed. Their own imperfection (and potential resentments of it) put me in a position to seek love through physical and mental perfection. “Be the best”, “Be the smartest”, “Be the most beautiful”, “Be the meekest”, “Be a leader”, “Do what I say”, “Be a natural protege”. All of them held the promise of acceptance, of opening the door to a flow of love which was withheld most of the time. I tried. I failed. I despaired. Then I tried again. Failed again. Despaired again. I became unworthy, unlovable in my own mind. Not even the acceptance by some people could undo the damage of the lack of acceptance from the people whose opinions mattered most to me. I remember being a young girl and feeling loved by my parents. Then it dried up, and I was decorated like a tree with bright expectations. They were so hopeful, and I was burdened by the weight of it all. And when I failed and they were disappointed in me, I hated myself because I loved them and hated to see them hurt because of me.
      Okay, to step back a minute, this is the logic of my addict mind, coming from the hurt child inside me. My suitable punishment for not meeting the needs (in reality, irrational wants) of others was a form of self-abuse guised as comfort. If you are what you eat, I could be sweet if I ate enough sweet things. And I have gravitated toward triggered eating of sweet things ever since. Logic doesn’t have to be truth–it just has to follow the paths of cause and effect.
      When I try to break down perfection, I hit a mental wall. I feel it, too. I come in with a new idea, and it’s like a force field bounces it away into nothingness. There is a fortress around my religion of perfection. I can get that love back, my inner kid insists. I just have to figure out the right combination of things which will open the door.
      Okay, again, I’m going to pause. I see the HP-like power I give two addicts over me. My parents are powerless over their own compulsions, and they can deal with that reality. I had to; so can they. It is the truth, and it is the only way I can forgive them for the harm. Yes, I harmed them, too. I could rationalize that they started it, but that does not matter. The moment I was legally an adult, I was responsible for my life. I was also in the throes of addiction. The minute I was free to indulge in numbing away my grief at the childhood I lived? I sampled a smorgasbord of potential addictions until I settled on the ones that fit me: food, love, and smokes. My hatred of being out of control turned me away from mind-altering substances within a couple of years. Giving up alcohol was pretty easy because I got into a lot of trouble when I combined the other three with it. The smoking I kept because it was “cool”. With it came an image of sophistication in my naive mind. Today, it’s the nicotene and the need to soothe the anxiety away with it. I know it is a blecky habit. I know I don’t “look cool” smoking–I look like an addict and smell like an ashtray. Moving on.
      The food I kept because it was anchored to the good memories I had of family. I have idealized many of these times. That’s when the family got together. We feasted to celebrate, we ate to numb the imperfections of the celebrations away. I’ve spent perhaps 15 percent of my life at normal weight for my height. I’ve spent 50 percent of that time obese, and more than half of that time morbidly obese. I even had a brief time (maybe a month) underweight. What I never sustained was normalcy.
      My love addiction is where that perfection issue triggers everywhere. I want love; I need love. I set standards of love that others cannot reach and am hopeful when I decorate people with my expectations then look at them with disappointment when they don’t achieve them. It nauseates me to think that I turn to doing to others what was done to me. But that’s my “normal”. That’s what love looks like to me. I traded what others want (sometimes it was sex) to get the payoff–the chemical high of feeling like I’m falling in love.
      Sorry, I ought to correct that. That’s what love looked like to me. In traveling back to consult my inner kid, I’ve reconnected with my Higher Power. I know what “perfect” love feels like. I don’t have to trade groveling and martyrdom to earn its steady acceptance. I am part of reality–good and bad–and I am still here to do the work necessary to have purpose and meaning in my life. It accepted me when I thought it had gone. It was still there, behind the wall of crap people said I needed to climb in order to earn its acceptance. What irks me is that I listened to other people and built that wall myself, trusting they knew better.
      Yes. I said it. I trusted they knew better than me about me.
      Here comes the hard footwork of humility in order to break down the foundation of perfectionism. The first acceptance I must make a part of me, with the same clarity of truth that I accept I am powerless over my addiction and that my life is unmanageable when I have compulsive thoughts, is that I am no better or worse than anyone else. My record for abstention is 24 hours, same as anyone else in recovery. I cannot give advice on recovery to anyone because it’s my recovery, tailored to me. The program language did take time to learn; I’ll admit that others understand the technical side of program better than I do, but that’s because they’ve been doing it longer. That said, I have the same 12 Steps to work from. How to work the program to the best of one’s ability is individual to each of us. It’s THE program; it’s MY recovery. The Fourth Step I am currently working is supposed to be imperfect. The layers of protections I have set up between me and the deepest hurts have left me to carefully remove the layers until I get to that core.
      That, alone, scares me. My addict self throws up the reactionary fear that once I grieve and move on, there won’t be anything left. Yet even in the midst of that, there was always a niggling voice that said “I wish I could be that little girl again, the one who loved without reservation, who had faith”. That inner child, the little Jess looking up at those stained glass windows and finding true serenity knowing God was there and was my best friend and loved me just as I was, is lost in the darkness of my adult addiction. I loved because I was filled with love. I could do and be anything because God was right there with me. I am starting to see that somewhere right before the break between potential addict and active addict was whatever event made me decide I wanted to become a nun so I could spend my life studying how to get closer to God . . . how to be perfect for God so I could have the reward of being with God in Heaven.
      The rules of religion were lain down. I had a goal–perfection on this Earth. I was taught that I was unlovable between the moment I found God and the moment I wanted to devote myself to God (even though I was not Catholic–which is where the first great disappointment came, because someone apparently taught me I wasn’t “born Catholic”).
      That’s when my parents lost their ultimate authority over me, when seeking God was my only hope for a happy life of being a singing nun in Austria. I always liked the other nuns; I always empathized with Julie Andrews’ portrayal of Maria the Nun when she went back to the nunnery mid-film because it was safe, because the human (and assumed unrequited) love she felt for Captain Von Trapp gave her intense pain. My happily ever after was to be a bride of Christ, not of a human being. And when I learned about the Vatican library, that was it. I wanted to be in Vatican City, taking care of God’s word and reading everything I could in order to please God.
      Well, life didn’t turn out like that, and it’s probably for the better. I would have been intensely disappointed the first time my faith was challenged. And when the first child abuse scandals came out, I would have lost God entirely. After all, I chose that life under the assumption that the faith of children was precious, and the idea that humans would use their authority in the name of God to rip faith from children’s hearts . . . that would probably have gotten me excommunicated when I spoke out with righteous ire against it–like St. Mary MacKillop before me.
      I could never have been perfect to others and been true to me. Even in that potentially idealized life, I would have ended up pissing off a whole lot of people in the Roman Catholic hierarchy.
      I guess that’s the core of it, then. Instead of seeking perfection to please my Higher Power, I have to accept that I was created this way–even before the addiction–because that was who I was supposed to be. This is me. I chose to numb myself with addiction because I was taught that love was earned by begging for it like alms. The world had authority over me, even as I tried to prove myself better than them, to be the first human to reach perfection as a not-so-subtle “Screw You!” to everyone who laughed at my expense. I think back to the part of the Body Image workshop I’ve got queued up to listen to (which I will be doing today), and one message sticks in my head. If I’m trying to prove something, I’m seeking approval from someone.
      My Higher Power approves of me, as is. Acceptance is the answer reminds me that nothing (not even me) happens by mistake. I am not a mistake, even as I walk through reality. I am a being capable of learning from the choices I make, of being teachable. I am a being who is filled with human emotion, whose character traits have both positive and negative sides. Those character traits were endowed to me from the beginning. They are a double-edged sword, capable of allowing me to fight for what I believe in. When I believe that acceptance and recovery are the answer, they serve me by bringing me toward my purpose and meaning. When I believe that control and addiction are the answer, they harm me by putting blocks in the way of a life of recovery.
      I have been called hypersensitive and overemotional. I think perhaps it’s time to rethink that in terms of character assets. I am empathetic and sympathetic and feel things deeply because I want people to be happy. I can’t make them happy, but if someone needs acceptance, here I am.

      My name is Jess and I am a food and love addict. Perfection is my bane, ever reminding me to place personality before principles and ever pushing me to seek approval from the world. It’s not happening. That’s unrealistic. But I can be true to myself and find purpose and meaning in my ability to care enough about others to accept them and my ability to care enough about myself to establish healthy boundaries through program.

      When I wrote the earlier post about Veteran’s Day, I was worried. But today, I released something small to my Higher Power and then . . . I got a small miracle from my Higher Power.

      I haven’t been staying away entirely from the Halloween candy. We have one thing left–these mini packs of chocolate-coated malted milk balls. This used to be something I could eat by the quart-sized container in the 1980s. I binged on them regularly.
      Well, I got three mini packs, put the calories on my chart, and I sat down to have them after lunch. I ate two and didn’t want the third. That’s when my addiction “spoke” to me:

      “You already counted the calories for them. Just eat the last, even though you don’t want it.”

      Well, I really didn’t want it because I was full. In addiction-mind, I tend to gobble them up anyway. But I set them aside for later, letting them go to my HP. If I wanted them later, I’d have them. As time went on, I wanted them less and less. And, about two hours after I left that packet behind, I returned it to the container where the rest were. And I added the calorie value back onto my sheet.
      This is probably the second time since I got this food plan going that I added the calorie value of something I did not eat back. I worry my family will see it (it’s on my fridge, in plain view) and think I’ve been cheating. I didn’t worry about it this time. I just did it anyway. After all, it’s my food plan, and setting aside food then not eating it is part of living out of compulsion. If I feel I have to eat it because I marked off the calories? Then I’m still eating compulsively.
      So, I went to the red bullseye department store to get dog food. I was inspired, though somewhat vainly in addiction, to see what size I was. I wanted to learn if I could zip the back of a standard size 12 dress and confirm which of size 8 or size 10 pants and skirts I would wear.
      Most pants and skirts were odd-sized. Well, I found an 8 and a 10 in slacks and four size 12 dresses. As I pulled the slacks from the hanger marked 8, I saw the pants hanging on it were a 6.
      Well, I looked down at those pants, pretty fearful. I mean, size 6–even a vanity 6–was impossible. Since it was there, I decided I would see how close I was to zipping that 6. I expected it to barely zip, if I could even get it over my hips.
      My HP has been working on me to get me into the gym at my apartment complex. Unfortunately, I was completely wiped out this morning. So, I slept in order to find the sanity necessary to deal with the rest of the day. Of that HALT stuff, the T for tired is probably the worst. When I am tired, the Angry and Lonely follow it pretty quickly. That messes with my sense of actually feeling the Hunger properly, especially the strange hunger pangs I get, like nausea. When I am tired, I live on reaction. I cannot slow down because I am pushing toward bedtime. I am more likely to use what I “know” (my addict-mind reaction instead of my recovery-mind deliberation) and I am more likely to seek comforting behaviors–like eating or freaking out when things don’t go my way. I am off-kilter the whole day.
      But, back to my HP just putting my hand on those size 6s hanging on the size 8 hanger. I was able to put them on, and they were snug. To make them hang aesthetically would only take a pair of pantyhose at this point. But I also realized something more important–living as a size 6/8 for the rest of my life takes one thing. Just one thing.
      An action plan.
      Now, the WSBC of OA has left it to the individual members to decide how to enact their own action plans until the Conference Literature Committee presents at the end of April at the World Service Business Conference. But I see the writing on the wall for this ninth tool. Yes, I argued against it when our intergroup voted on it to be presented at Regional Conference and was the sole vote against. I felt the Eight Tools were enough, that an Action Plan turned our spiritual program into a physical-based recovery.
      In the months since voting against, I have been privileged to sit at meeting with a woman who walks daily. During her walks, she connects with her Higher Power. The act of exercising is spiritual to her. Others have talked about finding opportunity to commune with their Higher Powers when they are taking time to exercise. It’s not just a “Get fit!” thing for these people. And so I wholeheartedly support the Action Plan, now, as a means to not only gain physical recovery through exercise, but to gain mental recovery (studies have shown activity encourages a more active mind and a better attitude), and spiritual recovery through that personal time one can take to commune with one’s Higher Power. A long walk in nature allows us to enjoy the world around us; time on the treadmill can be used to listen to literature or simply pray and perform ambulatory meditation. I mean, I was getting ramped up when I did yoga (I quit) to connect the spiritual to the physical once my body had memorized the series of yogic movements. Exercise is a time to get all three recoveries aligned, just like our Food Plans do.
      So, I am going to commit to going to the gym with my spouse. He likes going with me. I like going with him. And, while there, I can work out my body, mind, and spirit . . . and go from a size 6/8/10 to a fit size 6.
      An Imperfect Size 6. That’s the miracle my HP performed for me today. And I am so good with that.

      I came from snug size 24/26 in July of 2009–in my HP’s time. I have officially lost 8 sizes since then, going from a 26 to an 8. I have no desire any longer to go for size 4. I don’t need to be a size 4. It was so nice to put on that pair of pants which looked like it had the tiniest waist in the universe and put them on. I’ve come from a bad place, and even though the vanity-sizing is going to make shopping as much a trial as going into a store and being sized out of the plus sizes (at that same red bullseye department store, in July 2009 I couldn’t wear the largest size they had, sometimes)? It’s nice to see that my eyes which tell me I’m still that 3X/4X woman are broken.
      The second message worked today was that my body image issues can trigger addict thinking. Every time I dropped a size, I thought about the next size down. I tried to will myself to be smaller the next day. Perfection, I believed, could still be attained–if only, if only, if only. I wanted the same thing I did in addiction, to have physical recovery on own my time schedule. In this very web log, I wrote about it. Any time I’ve compulsively done the math on sizing or BMIs or weight, I was in the addiction. I fretted about the size.
      Right now, that pair of size 6 pants have been put back, to be sold to someone else. For the first time, I am releasing this to my Higher Power. In two months, when it’s time for me to go visit my older son for his eighteenth birthday, I will deal with the clothing issue then. In two-and-a-half months, when it’s time for my parents to arrive and see the 100 lbs. or so of physical recovery I’ve had in program, I will deal with that clothing issue then.
      My Higher Power seems to want me doing the footwork for Step Four, for establishing an Action Plan, and for working on body image issues. That’s my footwork for now, and, since I am not fighting with my addict mind over trying to will myself into the impossible, clearly the messages I got today and the reality I am going to bed serene and out of an addict-minded obsession over getting those pants means that the lesson was learned. I could have become obsessed; I could have bought the pants to have a size 6 hanging in my closet that I can wear to try to make myself feel better. It’s not time yet. And yes, even though I have the niggling thoughts of going to visit those pants to try them on again to get that “hit” from feeling smaller, I know my 10s are getting comfortably loose and my 8s are snug enough. I have clothing that fits and that money needs to be put to better use than my personal vanity.
      So, those pants now belong to my Higher Power, to be bought by someone else or to be re-found by me on the sale rack in a few months. Today was not the day for me to buy them and hold on to them like I used to cling to bags of candy, chips, cookies, or whatever I could stuff in my face. Instead, I saw that my Higher Power wanted me to get a message about those randomly mis-hung pants. And, as I stayed open and aware of what was being communicated, I started listening to the loving message about my physical well-being (that I do need to start that Action Plan), the loving message about my mental well-being (that I have a disconnect between how I see my body and how my body actually is), and the loving message about my spiritual well-being (that even when I didn’t fit the largest plus size available, my Higher Power was with me and will stay with me no matter where my body lands in the clothing sizing spectrum).
      My name is Jess and I am a food addict. I am humbly grateful for the lessons I received in abundance today. My Higher Power’s time, or real time, is quickly becoming the time in which I want to live. For, when I live in my Higher Power’s time, I don’t miss the miracles awaiting me around every corner.

Here sleeps in peace a Hampshire Grenadier
Who caught his death by drinking cold small Beer.
Soldiers be wise from his untimely fall,
And when ye’re hot drink Strong or none at all.

An Honest Soldier never is forgot,
Whether he die by Musket or by Pot.

      As I think on Veteran’s Day and the many people who have fought to keep us safe, I consider that Bill W. was a soldier in the war which created Armistice Day. His travels in Europe brought him in front of a tombstone at the cemetery at Winchester Cathedral, where the lines above were inscribed.
      He survived, though many did not. Because he survived, we have today a program which allows addicts to fight for freedom from addiction. For those people who take up the fight to preserve our rights as American citizens, I am humbly grateful. For those people who take up the fight to preserve my sanity even as I suffer from addiction, I am humbly grateful.
      Today’s We Care message is about the daily armistice we make between a life of recovery and a life of addiction. Though we can attain physical, mental, and spiritual peace in our time through recovery, skirmishes do arise as our addict selves just refuse to give up the fight. Addiction’s subtle sabotage can be turned into a full-blown occupation if we do not seek help, if we think we can control it, ourselves. To keep addiction at bay, we must ask that Sleeping Giant that is our Higher Power to come to our aid. With the resources of a Higher Power, we can live today in serenity.
     
A SEPARATE PEACE
     
      The “Just for Today” prayer is a great way to start the day, a reminder that we can do some simple footwork to reinforce a positive mental attitude and have a day in recovery. With its recommendations on how to live the program, the “Just for Today” prayer reminds us to let yesterday lie in the past and tomorrow rest in the future. Today is the day we’re living; today is the day we are practicing abstinence and recovery.
      In For Today, we are reminded that despite having the very serious disease of compulsive eating, we aren’t supposed to mourn. Laughter, it is said, is the best medicine. So why be mournful and somber that we have this illness? We are in OA, all together, and we have reason to celebrate–to laugh instead of cry, to feel joy that we found the 12 Steps at all.
      In Voices of Recovery, we are offered this from p. 83 of the OA 12&12: “If we are to experience permanent recovery from compulsive overeating, we will have to repeat, day after day, the actions that have already brought us so much healing.” This is a powerful statement about recovery, and the fifteen-year recovered and 75-lb.-released OA member asks us an equally powerful question: “Am I still doing the program activities today that I did in the first bloom of program?”
      I remember my first trip into an OA room–the very room of this meeting!–in despair and hope. When I left the room, I had only hope. Here were people who spoke MY language. My thoughts were not so alien. The details of the story may have been different, but the story was my own. And the first reading of “Our Invitation to You” . . . after feeling like a nomad in a strange land for decades, I finally had a place to rest and call home. I left, hopeful for the next meeting. While I did miss it, no one was disturbed or rejecting when I came back the week after. The door of my home group, this group, was the door to a life I never knew was possible for me.
      I spent those two weeks poring over that Newcomer’s Packet. I did not understand much in it, but something clearly was speaking to me on a level that my heart and soul understood–even if I did not understand the recovered language. After all, I was in full-blown addiction, still, and recovery was going to start in my Higher Power’s time. In that first bloom of program, I read OA literature daily. I still practice that, now, reading from conference-approved literature to get in the state of recovered mind.
      I wrote about recovery through program at the time, too. I try to write daily today. I find that when I write with honesty, exposed are the secrets that my addict mind wants me to hide. It’s hard to admit my failings–I want to be perfect. Through recovery, I am learning not only to accept but to embrace my imperfection. When I write imperfectly and honestly, the solutions come as I write. My Higher Power flows through my hands, and I am given truths which I can use to strengthen my recovery. Yes, I can choose to ignore them, but the relief that comes from receiving that knowledge keeps my abstinence in line and encourages me to focus on recovery, itself.
      I go to multiple meetings weekly. While not every meeting out there encourages my recovery in the program, the meetings I do attend give me opportunities to hear my Higher Power’s wisdom through others. Some have more abstinence than me; some less. Some have more recovery than me, some less. Even a person walking in the room for the first time can speak with the conviction of my Higher Power, reminding me that I don’t want to go back to my pre-OA life. While I don’t practice meetings daily, I am mindful daily of the meetings I do attend. I like having a literature, a sharing, and a speaker meeting. Each brings something special to my recovery, and I am grateful.
      A daily adherence to a food plan has brought me physical recovery beyond what I imagined. Abstinence released my addiction-locked mind, and I was open to new ideas as they seeped through the open crack between the door and the jamb. Over time, I shed the idea that I had to fight for my recovery and abstinence. My schedules and plans all fell by the wayside as my Higher Power showed me that recovery does not come in my time but Its time. I thought I would have all the answers by now; instead, I discovered gratitude that I do not. Without all the answers, I can grow. I learn more about life in recovery every day. And instead of being upset that I have not made any of my self-willed goals in my time, I am thankful that I have barely begun the journey. I have the rest of my life to learn, to grow, to live one day at a time, 24 hours abstinent at a time.
      Most important, I try to find the levity in the grim truth of my eating disorder every day. When I treat it like a terrifying killer disease (which it is), it gains power over me again. I feel I have to go to war with it. I feel overwhelmed by it and long to surrender to stop the devastation. When I accept I cannot control it, when I find joy that I don’t have to choose it, when I laugh at the insanity of the extremes I can go to . . . I approach life with a better attitude. It’s not so serious; I have a solution at my fingertips. I have hope, the most powerful tool I offer up to my Higher Power to use as the magic of the program is worked on me.
      There are things I could add to my daily recovery–phone OA members more often, go to more meetings, do more service, have a more active relationship with my sponsor, do cardio exercise daily–and when I release those things to my HP, they enter my life in their own time. I find that time is carved out of my day for them. I know that I could compulsively chase recovery (I am an addict after all), and I know that ignoring those tools (which I usually do) most often comes from a place of addiction. But I am making progress today, even if it’s just learning how to differentiate from compulsive thoughts and actions about the program and working the program. And that brings me peace.
     
     
      I have been thinking on the meaning of today–that war is always waged for the purpose of peace. It’s an irony to me that so much loss and anger and raw emotion leaves only death and destruction and sorrow in its wake.
      In that, I think I’ve come to realize that when I fight for my recovery, I am missing the point. Whenever I wage war against addiction, then addiction has already won. My self-will fights something caused by self-will. In other words, I fight for the enemy when I fight the enemy.
      In my experience, when I focus on stopping a behavior, immediately I am at risk of acting out what I want to stop. If I’m thinking about it and how to stop it, I’m not letting go of it. I am driven toward it even as I try to retreat. I end up submitting to it because I am wholly unprepared for the force behind that focused thought.
      My recovery, therefore, is one of peace and surrender, not retreat and submission. I do not surrender to the addiction but to the truth–I need allies. I cannot do this alone. Addiction is an occupying force, one which tells me I have self-will and autonomy as long as I follow its rules. It lies to me that I could choose differently, that I do not want to. When I try to choose differently, I am forced into submission. Then, I am encouraged to submit willingly to avoid harsh punishment, to pretend I want the subjugation. It promises an easy path if I will just stop fighting.
      In recovery, I turn to allies more powerful than the addiction. There is no peace in addiction, because the addiction demands my obeisance at every turn. When I surrender to aid, making allies of the fellowship and my Higher Power, the addiction is driven back to the borders. Every time I choose self-willed autonomy after the addiction is driven back, the addiction crosses the border in order to subjugate me. It will never live in peace with me; it will always wait for the opportunity to invade and occupy me.
      My allies are at peace with me. They accept my imperfection yet still offer aid. They assist me, not control me. My allies do not occupy me, they stay with me to defend against the invading force of addiction and wisely advise me. With my allies, I have a choice to send them away. Peace, however, comes from bringing them in daily to keep addiction at the borders.
      My ego sometimes leads me to think I can defend my own borders. I cannot. And then I invite my allies back, because a peace by choice is better than an unwilling submission.
      So, the “battle” for recovery is not a battle I am to fight. Sure, I do the footwork to make sure my Higher Power can keep addiction at bay. I go to meetings, I read and write, and I keep an open mind. I try to make myself useful. I talk and listen to my Higher Power, and I keep as rigorously honest as I can be.
      In exchange, I grow stronger. I learn how to turn to my Higher Power and the Fellowship when addiction sends saboteurs and spies to undermine the peace growing in me. I am an autonomous self, who accepts that only by allying with something greater than myself can I find relief on a daily basis from the ravages of a life of addiction.

      My name is Jess, and I am a recovering, abstinent, food addict. Freedom is a wonderful feeling. Even though it comes to me through the counterintuitive vulnerability of accepting help, I find that having friends in high places has been a blessing. After all, I’m not alone any more.

      On my WordPress Dashboard, I get a quick view of posts and of the searches people do to find particular posts or subjects. While anorexia and bulimia in OA still top the list (I’m dealing with the anorexic aspect of addiction in OA right now, so maybe I can actually do that service I hoped I could with empathy instead of just sympathy), the actual search for the post entitled “Knight Vision Goggles” (June 30, 2010) has started creeping up the search list. Since the SLAA stuff really is the foundation of the food addiction and the resulting repercussions of it, I am going to address it after I share today’s We Care message about . . . mental recovery. (I did edit it for here a little bit; I had a few clauses presented in the message sent via email which are annoying the dickens out of me, and I have the courage to change them here).

     
RAINDROPS ON ROSES AND WHISKERS ON KITTENS
     
      I love that this program has a lovely trinity balance. It’s like the AA symbol, the triangle in a circle. Like that Schoolhouse Rock song, “Three is a Magic Number”, I also consider three to be a magic number. I have an affinity for threes. I am the third child, and the day, month, and two-digit representation of the year are all equally divisible by three in my birthday. Even when I write, I tend to use three adjectives or descriptive phrases, and I tend to write in trilogies. So when lasting recovery asks me to attend to my physical, mental, and spiritual health, when the Serenity Prayer offers me advice on acceptance and courage and wisdom, I experience recovery as an equilateral triangle. When one is out of balance, the others tend to suffer, too.
      The 12 Steps are spiritual; our abstinence is physical. We sometimes forget that mental recovery is part of it, too. But as we become aware through the mental clarity abstinence offers (usually within a week of starting abstinence, which I have personally experienced and others I talk to or read stories from attest), and as we work the steps to create a conscious relationship with our Higher Powers, that mental state develops along with those two things. Our attitudes become about gratitude. We have a higher awareness. We are, in essence, changing how we live in the world simply by approaching it with a newly opened mind.
      In For Today, we are told that we have power over our mental attitudes. Our mental recovery is about our choices, the ones which–in the Serenity Prayer–we are asked to use our courage to change what we can. We can change our minds by working the steps. We can focus on love; we can focus on healing. We can choose lovely things to put in our mind.
      In Voices of Recovery, we’re given the how through Step Three and Step Eleven. Our willingness to let our Higher Power become our loving Higher Parent and guide us and our active communication with it as we pray (talk) and meditate (listen) in the stilled calm returns to us what was lost. This voice of recovery mentions a “magical mind”–which can be used to fuel addiction as well as fuel recovery. We have so much power within our own minds! We can change how we move through life simply by how we use that amazing mind!
      For me, approaching the trinity of real and lasting recovery in program aligns really well with the three states of matter in physics. My physical recovery is solid. I can touch my recovering body; I can use that body to move through a solid world. I can use it to convey food into my mouth, or I can use it to hug people, or I can use it to do service.
      My spiritual recovery is like the gaseous state. It expands and fills every container it’s in. When I talked, once, about the void inside me and how I tried to use food to fill it, I acknowledged that I am a spiritual vessel. Well, when I accepted that a Higher Power could give me meaning and purpose outside of food addiction, that empty space became filled completely by spiritual purpose and guidance. My Higher Power all-of-a-sudden became something both “out there” and within me. As the Big Book tells us, we don’t look outside of us for our Higher Power. We do not take others’ concepts of God and paste them into our lives. We need to have a close relationship–as best friends, as perfect parent and recovering child, as spiritual sponsor and hopeful sponsee–with our Higher Powers. From my childhood, I am still deeply affected by the New Testament verse, Revelation 3:20:
     
Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.
     
      My Higher Power was ready to have a nice sit-down with me, like visiting someone in the afternoon for tea or coffee–even as I tried to hide my eating from It. But it saw me through the window, and it kept knocking because I was suffering in isolation and intense loneliness. When I am truly working the program, I know it because my Higher Power and I have genuine and casual conversations–like I would with a human friend. I don’t need Thees and Thous or rituals to please it, I don’t need to grovel to earn Its love like I did with my parents. When I crawled into meeting (or, as Footsteps in the Sand offers, was carried in by my Higher Power), my Higher Power was already there. The program gave me the strength to open the door, and my Higher Power came right in. It gave me the spiritual strength to choose a food plan even as my mind was muddled. And clarity set in because of that coffee klatsch I invited my Higher Power to one evening in September of 2009. It was always there, filling everywhere around me, waiting for the time I opened the door to the spiritual void within. And when I opened the door, it rushed in like a fresh spring breeze and made the stuffy and miserable place I existed within bright and pleasant again.
      Between the physical recovery (solid) state and the spiritual recovery (gaseous) state, there is the mental recovery state–the fluid state. I love the concept of mental recovery as a fluid state, because this is where the work of attitude change occurs. The fluidity of my mental attitude means that I can choose to leave a resentful state and live a loving one. The fluidity of my mental attitude means that I can read program literature a dozen times and get a dozen different readings because I am in a different place in my recovery. This is where the “courage to change the things I can” resides. This is the wellspring of the powerful choice of Steps Six and Seven–to give up what I was sure I “knew” for the potential of living a life today that I had always promised myself “tomorrow”. My character defects come from this fluid state, as do my character assets. Which ones I pluck from the wells water of my mind to carry with me during the day are my own choosing. I can choose the sweet water of a good attitude, or I can choose the contaminated water of a bad attitude. One encourages my survival; one makes me feel sicker. Happily, program seems to be a pretty good filtration system, which can convert that contaminated water into potable water, even as I move through the day. And as I learn, through program, where to find the clean, sweet water, I am able to live confidently as I draw a good mental attitude from my fluid mind.
     
     
      While I wish I could have expressed those concepts in a less wordy manner, I accept that I tend to wax poetic. However, to break it down?
      Physical recovery is like the solid state of matter. My physical recovery is the solid expression of a life in abstinence, and its solidity is maintained by program. When addiction applies enough heat to melt it into relapse, my physical recovery becomes fluid–as it was when I lived in addiction. Recovery keeps it cool and maintains its solidity.
      Spiritual recovery is like the gaseous state of matter. It expands to fill any vessel it’s let into. I let it into the spiritual place within me, and now I have something to turn to instead of food. Instead of a vast internal cavern with a pile of rotting solid junk food at the bottom and dead space above, it is clean of the food and filled with fresh, spiritual air.
      Mental recovery is like the liquid state of matter. When I treated it like a solid, I was always frustrated. I cannot pick up a liquid like I can a solid; I cannot maintain a set attitude based from coping mechanisms of my past and expect to have a fulfilling life. So, accepting the fluid state of the mind–the impulses to binge which I don’t act on, the exhausting addict attitudes I can release to my Higher Power so I can carry a recovered attitude instead–is something that gives me strength to live today to the best of my ability.
     
      On to that Knight Vision. [I'm taking a moment to read the post, so I can review that state of mind and apply it to what happened yesterday, and the messages from my Higher Power that came from some great sharing and conversations during and after my SLAA meeting.]
      Okay, I reread it.
      First of all, I think admitting the SLAA addiction is harder than the food addiction for me. There are huge social stigmas associated with it. Now, the “love” part of SLAA is pretty benign. A “love addict” wears his or her heart on the sleeve, will martyr him or herself in the name of chivalric love. We feel compassion for someone who keeps finding themselves yet again facing one more relationship break-up because they thought they could trust that person.
      A sex addict, on the other hand, is perceived as a predator. This person’s admission (despite being surrounded by sex addicts in denial, who are more dangerous because they are still living outside rigorous honesty) puts them in a position where people judge and innately distrust them. It’s part of the reason I add, anorexic. I’m at the point of attending meetings, though I am not actively working the program there. Yes, I am doing service–I’m leading the SLAA group I attend throughout November. But I am doing what is recommended by many 12-Step programs–get solid recovery one at a time. I am there for the awareness. And I am an anorexic. I am drawn to isolate because I fear I am a predator, too, as long as I am not working toward recovery. And I would be right.
      Now that I have admitted this, I want to explain the face of my sex and love addiction. In group, we read the list of characteristics, and I see the things I turned to (and sometimes unwillingly turn to inside my head, causing so much guilt that I withdraw even further) in my early adulthood. I am a love addict who is willing to use sex to manipulate someone into staying. When I “act out”, I am a professional distressed damsel. I seek saviors in that state, and I always have a really good excuse.
      Currently, my soul and life is worth a million dollars. Yes, I am sick to my stomach admitting it, but I know that by admitting it, I can use recovery to understand how the fear has put a price tag on something that is priceless. Why a million dollars?
      That would pay off the debts of my spouse and myself and leave me with enough money to start over once my spouse left for pretty damned good reasons. While this closes doors to most white knights, the door is unlocked. Well, when I’m not horrified by admitting this in my own head and lock that door and hide in the farthest corner of my spiritual house from it. And yes, the door is locked right now and I am at that back corner right now, so even a million dollars won’t get in. Though I would be sorely tempted if I looked out the window and saw a handsome sex-addict waving that kind of cash around. How do I know the person would be a sex addict? Well, normal people don’t try to buy their way into people’s lives, and addicts attract addicts. It’s why we talk about not 13th Stepping. Group isn’t a supermarket where we take our personal grocery lists and look around for someone with a basket filled with all or most of what we want. Group is where we address our real addictions. And group was where, yesterday, in a teasing yet sincere manner, I told a White Knight type who was joking with me as he helped me take the 7th tradition for rent of the space to the proper place, to watch out–I am a Distressed Damsel in full-blown addiction. And no, I wasn’t triggered, just like I assume he wasn’t. Laughing at the bleaker parts of our natures, of the vicious life-destroying nature of our addictions, we not only remove their power over us by the light of honesty, we have the awareness to turn toward recovery instead of addiction.
      Part of my addiction is trying to avoid the pain of real life. I hate owing the money I do owe. I hate feeling trapped by a mortgage on a house that’s upside-down (we owe more than it’s worth, therefore we cannot sell). I hate that I have credit card debt. And I hate that my husband does not have the freedom to enjoy his life as he works sixty-plus hours per week so we can pay down our debts responsibly.
      If I acted out for that million dollars, he would be free of the debt and he would choose to be free of me. The harm I would do a person I do believe I actually have found real love with is not worth the price of admission. I consider that I would not only devastate someone who supports my recovery in both programs I attend and has patience with my current full-blown smoking addiction, I would harm his future chances to find love again. That kind of betrayal now that I am in group? No. So, I act in, withdrawing and isolating. That does, however, have repercussions to my marriage, too, but coming out of my burrow to where he is does less damage than trying to explain why our debt is suddenly paid off and there’s a guy showing up at the door regularly.
      Right now, the relief of rigorous honesty is setting in. The secret is out, and that fluid mind I wrote about above is turning toward recovered thoughts instead of seeking the high of self-delusion that I can be rescued. My recovered mind tells me it’s not even an empty victory. There is no victory in cutting a swath through my OA recovery and my SLAA recovery over a rationalization so stupid as money. I may have a body which can be bought or sold, but my mind and my soul are sitting there, too. I am precious and priceless to my core family and to my Higher Power and to my fellowships. No. I have no price tag, I am not biddable on eBay, and I am certainly not on Craigslist.
      I also consider the growth that comes from taking responsibility for my debts. A quick-fix cure that gives me a worse disease isn’t a cure at all. No, the process of working as a partner with my spouse to relieve ourselves of that debt with the same rigor and honesty I find in program is the only path to serenity. I made choices; the choices have consequences; I am making choices which have consequences which will leave me stronger. If I pay off my debt over time and keep my soul, I do better service to myself and to others. And on the day the balance is zero on the credit cards and car loan, I know (from experience) the relief will be sweeter because it was earned through living one day at a time, through practicing making smarter financial decisions, and through taking responsibility for my actions. This is a practice in footwork and recovery, of acting on life rather than reacting to it. And I am internalizing the lesson even now: The boundary of self-respect and serenity in recovery is stronger than the wall of saying “I’ll only indulge if I get a REALLY big payoff that I know no sane person would agree to . . . so I’m safe.” I am safe when I use program because I’m not focusing on addict rationalizations. And yes, there is possibly one person (in the billions out there in the world) with far too much money who would be amused enough to drop a million dollars just to see what happens. And that fear he could be out there triggers the anorexic withdrawal. I may rationally know I will never meet this clearly eccentric man, but it doesn’t mean I won’t put enough walls and locked doors between me and him to keep this potentially fictional person at bay. If I am to heal myself, I have to be out in the world, ready to meet that fellow on the street . . . and invite him to a meeting to see if a 12-Step program is right for him. If he rejects it? I have done my service making him aware it’s out there should he decide that offering women a million dollars to fuel his White Knight savior addiction yet ask for their souls as a “more-than-fair exchange” isn’t something Mr. Fictional White Knight wants out of life any more. Heh. Actually, that’s a really funny thought. Getting propositioned and inviting that person to a 12-Step meeting. I’m actually laughing, here. I mean, that is actually the one solution to my problem of feeling I have to hide from the world to protect my loved ones from my addiction . . . right there in Step Twelve.

      So, to a more philosophical line of thought on being a recovering White Knight or Distressed Damsel. There is a dance we Knights and Damsels do, one that I am pretty-sure is repeated regularly.
      Okay, so let’s start with the White Knight. A man or woman, the power in the potential relationship comes from the need to be desirable or loved enough. I tend to think most White Knights are love addicts, simply because they want someone who needs them so much that the rescued person won’t leave. They hide their inner Distressed Damsel–that part of them who longs to be loved enough, to earn being saved by saving another.
      Distressed Damsels are, to me, like the bunny in Monty Python’s Holy Grail. Oh sure, it looks like a harmless rabbit, but it has those big pointy teeth. In essence, your Distressed Damsel is a dragon in a cute widdle bunny suit. Big innocent eyes catch the attention those White Knights in, a semblance of helplessness brings them close enough, then SNAP! The jaws come down and the poor White Knight is consumed in one big gulp. Or chewed up then spat out. Oh yes, that Damsel-costumed dragon is a complete and utter bitch, going for the pain.
      In other words, Distressed Damsels use their addictive need to be rescued from a situation to manipulate White Knights into doing for them. We know the price–the exchange of words and acts of love or desire–and we get our payoff in fueling the White Knight’s addiction until a shinier knight comes along.
      Now, don’t get me wrong. It seems most White Knights and Distressed Damsels are so involved in the dance that they lie to themselves. We want to believe the fantasy. We want to believe the promise of chivalric love, of the fairy-story happy ending.
      But White Knights and Distressed Damsels are fictional characters. Real people cannot coexist with that fiction, even if they desperately want to and believe wholeheartedly that someone will eventually arrive who renders them perfect.
      We are all flawed, even those of us who are “normal”. That is a fact. It cannot be rendered untrue ever. The innate quality that I see in addicts is that hunger to be perfect and the despair that perfection is unattainable. We medicate ourselves to hide from that fact–using alcohol, drugs, sex, food, shopping, nicotine, gambling, and even co-dependence and enabling. We all have that need to get our fix, to escape to that false high that everything is right with the world and we have attained near-perfection through bliss.
      But we come down, and the need to return to that blissed-out state gets stronger as it gets harder to attain it, so we try harder to reach it again. And, in the end, we suicide through it.
      As I progress through recovery, I am becoming more aware how each of our addictions kills us. Alcohol and drugs are pretty easy to see–an overdose is always a risk, and the health complications kill over time. Food has become easier to see–it, like smoking, causes serious health complications which kill over time. Compulsive gambling and shopping leads to financial destitution; money which can be used to maintain one’s health is rerouted. Sex and love addiction? It, like drugs and alcohol, can lead to debilitating health complications like STDs and can lead to despair-driven suicide or being murdered by a predator of relationship addicts. Untimely death is always part of addiction. The inability to make reasonable decisions is gone, replaced with a directive to get the high any way possible. We put ourselves in front of that speeding train and think we can get out of the way in time because we’ve survived before. That was dumb luck, and luck relies on a series of coincidences out of our control which allow us to survive. We will get hit by the train some day if we keep on with our addictions.

      So, as a sex and love addict, I am going to be bold and make a statement based on my personal observations: I know I can trust a person who admits they are a recovering sex addict. This is a person who is not in denial, who is willing to stand in the harsh light of truth in order to NOT act out the addiction. Shunning them out of fear and moral superiority reveals a truth that I, as an addict, know leads the judgmental people into far more danger. An emotional reaction instead of reasonable action means that there is a weakness in there that one sees in one’s self. And, as an addict, we know our own kind.
      See, it’s the ones who hide that they’re sex addicts that people have to watch out for. They’re the ones looking for their next hit . . . any way possible.

      Oh, and for addicts who think that saying “Oh, yes, I’m a recovering sex addict; let’s go some place and talk about it” will get them in the door with me? I welcome any and all inside the door to my weekly SLAA meeting.
      My name is Jess and I am a food addict (binge eater and anorexic) and apparently a recovering sex and love addict. And as much as I hate to stand in the light of day saying “On my own power, I eat too much, and I will manipulate you into paying for the check when I do”, I know the power of admitting I am powerless over my addiction, that my life is unmanageable when I try to pretend it’s not true.

      “Before you speak, ask yourself, is it kind, is it necessary, is it true, does it improve on the silence?”

      Truth, necessity, and kindness are part of program. We’re not here to unburden ourselves and cause more harm. There are things we must carry with the help of our Higher Powers (Step Nine: Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. Italics mine.) rather than cause bondage of self-will to others by creating resentments. In other words, I don’t get to avoid an amend to save my bacon . . . I accept that the cruelty of the revelation would harm someone who does not deserve to be burdened with a truth that they will feel and re-feel as they churn their resentment toward me for telling them a painful truth. In other words, why would I purposefully place someone in the Hell that I am working toward extricating myself in recovery–just so I don’t have that burden to carry any more? If I need to relieve myself of that burden, I need to do the Resentment Prayer from the Big Book story, “Freedom from Bondage” (in this link, it’s on page 561 of the Second Edition of the Big Book, near the end of the page; in the Fourth Edition Big Book, it’s on the last page of the story on Page 552). I expect it would require the prayer for the person I resent for triggering me and for myself because I was living as an addict instead of seeking recovery. I knew my life was unmanageable then; I knew the choices were self-serving then. I just wanted what I wanted when I wanted it and did not care how it hurt others or myself. Now that I care enough about others and myself, I am facing it in recovery. And, of course, the related questions–Do I need to reveal this? Would revealing this cause harm to others or just me? Am I wanting to avoid the revelation to save my ego or to save someone else unnecessary pain?–bring fear. I don’t want to chance losing what I have. But I have to be willing to lose it, and I have to be ready to reveal it. Only after-the-fact of unearthing this harm do I determine if it’s harm to others or to my ego. My ego doesn’t get away scot-free; it’s gotten away with this crap for years. The humility comes in being ready to reveal it and seeking the spiritual guidance to determine if the kindness is in the revelation or the keeping of the truth to be revealed.
      The Big Book asks those seeking real and lasting recovery to be fearless and honest when we do this. These are two things we, as addicts, do the opposite of on a daily basis. When I feel fear and try to hide the truth from myself or others, I know I am choosing my ego over recovery; I am acting in addiction–even if my food plan is stable for today. I know that the more I practice relapse, the closer I come to it; addiction and recovery are both progressive states of being. I don’t get a balance in this life. I get relief from addiction through recovery or I live in the addiction. I will never be “normal”. I can learn to act normal, and I can even feel normal feelings. That’s part of the gift of recovery. The closest I can come to normal is “recovering”.
      Now, some people say “recovered” when they talk about the effect working the program has on them. That’s fine, because for them it can mean that they are enjoying the promises of a life of action rather than reaction in their current recovery. To me, however, “recovered” sounds like I, personally, have achieved a goal and can rest on my laurels. Not so for me. That may change, but I consider at this point in recovery, the minute I say I am “recovered”, it’s as if I am saying “I’m cured” or “I crossed the finish line”. There is no cure; there is no finish line. For me, either I live in recovery or I live in addiction. Both require daily practice to adhere to their specific principles. How I live that day determines if I am in recovery or merely food sober (a “dry” addict, aka on a diet).

      As a child, I lived in a state of unrelenting and permanent fear. Adulthood was a lifetime or two or three away . . . depending on how old I was at the time. By the time I was an adolescent, the years had taken their toll, and I was already resigned to the addicted life. I had no God but me. My avatars were food and the illusion of control over the uncontrollable. Coincidences would reinforce that sense of superhuman control–sometimes random events would make me think I had actually had an effect on others’ will.
      As an adult in recovery, I see that’s not true. As an adult in recovery, I have learned that “normal” people use fear as a tool. They see it as a challenge and they overcome it in a healthy manner. In recovery, I have the tools to see fear as a challenge and overcome it in a recovered manner. I turn to my Higher Power and use the program to make it happen. However, my inner child (or, my adult addict) is at odds with it. I will never be able to change the past, never be able to change how I grew up believing that I was able to affect the world by either deluding myself into thinking I had superhuman mind-reading powers or superhuman will which could bring a person around to my way of thinking. My past has no history of normalcy within its recesses. I was not taught healthy thoughts or boundaries as a child; only in my adulthood can I learn normalcy enough to emulate it. Like that “act as if” Big Book recommendation that I have a Higher Power helped me actually find one, I will always “act as if” I am normal. I mean, how normal can I ever be if I have a book to learn what normal is? I fundamentally do not understand normal people. I honestly think I will always be on the outside looking in. However, that’s what meetings are for. I walk into a meeting, and I find people who fundamentally do not understand what normal is. In meetings, I find people who are on the outside looking in. Some have accepted it and have purpose-driven and useful lives anyway (those in recovery); some are struggling with it and suffer because they cannot accept they can never be cured into becoming “normal” (those in relapse/addiction).
      Personally, I prefer recovered life to a normal life. I survived something that breaks people. It almost broke me several times. The suffering in my mind, body, and spirit drove me to the edge more than once. I am loath to admit that I spent a long time considering ending my life to end the pain. Then, I entered a time in my life when I had the pain but I was unwilling to consider suicide. Now, I have hope. I honestly believe that I have a useful life today. I can, simply by existing and being willing to go out into the public, offer the option of recovery to others who feel desperately alone and who are suffering in mind, body, and spirit like I was (and sometimes still do). Simply by letting people know that OA is out there makes a difference. I want people to research it, to see if it’s right for them. I want people to decide if a spiritual solution is what they need. Not everyone does need it. But making it an option is the service I render when I go out into the world.
      If the person is more interested, I can share my story. They, not I, should decide if my story is close enough to theirs to warrant walking into a meeting. Of course, it took me figuratively crawling through the door–having been battered into submission by my addiction–to keep coming back. I am an addict, period. Therapy and pills did not help me. I am one of the people of the Big Book who suffered “from grave emotional and mental disorders” (Chapter 5, “How It Works”, p. 58). And I am also among the “many of them [who] do recover if they have the capacity to be honest.” (ibid.) I have done my time on couches and medicated. I have done my time dealing with the psychological ills, poring through my childhood to find understanding–and honestly trying to change that past while concurrently creating more resentments and harm. In addiction, I was a danger to myself and others. I drew people into my eating disorder. I pushed them using my character defects. I have a lot of guilt over that now I have walked away. That’s why I consider myself deserving of being put on the lists for Step Four and Step Eight–I harmed myself more, sometimes, than others. And I have to learn to recognize with rigorous honesty that I did the harm then I have to learn to ask myself for forgiveness then give it to myself. The hardest part will be forgiving myself. But, I am willing and ready to change, and I have always believed that an honest desire to change to as harmless a life as I can live–the act of being forgiven for my “sins” which was instilled in me when I first found my Higher Power in the brightly-lit Sunday School rooms of my youth–is worthy of forgiveness. That’s one thing I can list in my Fourth Step as a gentle reminder that I was not thoroughly self-motivated.
      As I progress through recovery, I am learning so much. If fear immobilizes me, I am approaching it wrong. If fear inspires me to act, I am approaching it right. My inner child was immobilized by it because sometimes holding still until the danger passed was the only way to survive. I can visualize myself as a child standing perfectly still, barely breathing to avoid being a target. I’ve avoided attacks simply by not being there. Isolation–the act of not being seen or heard–was rewarded with not being attacked emotionally, physically, or spiritually. I was imprisoned in my childhood. I learned behaviors which kept the harm done to me to a minimum. The price was my spontaneity, my self-confidence, and a normal adulthood. However, I understand, now that my inner child was just trying to survive to adulthood. I always believed that I would emerge into the sunlight able to stand and able to be normal. I had true faith that, on the day I was an adult, I would be free to be normal and I would magically know how to be normal. Reality doesn’t work like that, and it took me decades longer to realize that I was still that little child . . . only this time I was the abusive authority figure to myself. And, as I fought to reconcile my relationships, I caused harm when I acted out the only way I knew how and when I modeled the only adult behavior I understood.
      The hardest reality is that I parented my own children both as the terrified and desperate inner child and as my own parents. My most heartfelt amends, ones which I know will bring tears, will be toward my own children. I did not know any better, but that’s addict rationalization trying to excuse the pain of reality away. I’m in recovery, now. To honor my children, I will go to them and humble myself and ask forgiveness–not expect or demand it because I am their mother. There is nothing I can say or do which will change reality. I did the harm, and it is a disservice to the pain they endured if I try to excuse my behavior. I am to state reality, ask forgiveness, then live today with the sincere intent not to harm people and the sincere actions to avoid harming others. By honoring the truth, by humbly admitting I acted horribly and asking their forgiveness, and by living today in recovery, I believe I can forgive myself.
      In turn, if I can learn to forgive myself, I can forgive others–even my parents–who come to me with the same attitude. I would want their forgiveness, after all. Giving forgiveness freely and releasing resentments (instead of demanding to know “Why?” while concurrently knowing the answer is often, “I don’t know”) is part of my release from addiction. If I can be vulnerable enough to accept an apology–even if the person still struggles and causes unintentional harm, as I still do sometimes–then I am still on the path of progress in recovery.
      I think on that sweet relief of really letting go–of releasing the anger and vitriol which poisons me as well as the people I am dealing with–and I have hope. The less which binds me to my addiction, the easier my recovery is to practice. Less temptation to revert to that desperate child and the desperate measures necessary to “survive to adulthood” means that the addiction’s grip on my life is loosened. I will be able to live in today, not yesterday. I will be able to let tomorrow stay there, as opposed to devising plots and plans to change others to suit my need to feel safe around them. I will have boundaries and I will be safe in them. I will have the safety of living in reality. I will not need to move and organize a wall around me to keep the invaders at bay.
      That said, I’m not going to delude myself. In and out of the rooms, I know that it will take decades to even catch up to the darkest pains . . . the ones which will shudder the foundations of my recovery when they’re revealed even to me. Getting the light debris out of the way is necessary if I plan to dig for the worst of the worst in the future. Since it’s in the future, however, I am granted a reprieve from seeking them out now. They’re released to my Higher Power, and when they’re revealed, I can release them again if they’re too much for me at that moment. I have faith that the problem will be returned to me with a solution and the strength and will to handle it. That’s another thing that I consider is positive which I brought forward from childhood–the belief that my Higher Power (at the time the Christian God and the Christ) will not give me anything in my life I cannot handle. Sometimes simply having awareness is the purpose of the revelation. It is merely to let me know that I will have the strength in the future to process it through the steps, grieve it in a healthy manner, then learn to live after it.
      Wow. I did not intend this post to be this long, but I guess I had a lot to process today. From accepting fear as both a deterrent from and a motivator toward action to realizing what is coming is not insurmountable as long as I keep making progress in recovery, I’m pretty pleased with this morning’s efforts.
      This is the face of MY recovery in THE program. I am not working my program because my program put me deep into addiction. I’m not working anyone else’s program because I’ve tried other programs and they don’t work. Plus, I internally rebel against authority even if I am looking like I am toeing the line. I have learned the art of sabotage over my years of addiction, and I will be the exception to any rule set down for me. The program, however, is so simple that I can apply it to me and the results have been miraculous (again, I define miraculous as coincidences combined with action, as opposed to an external authority coming down and just making it happen). The stepwork I have done so far with the rigorous honesty required has already made some changes. I am far from living out of addiction (Oh, those character defects! Food addiction was just a symptom), but I am making progress toward recovery. I think I am accepting that recovery isn’t a place but a journey . . . an inner pilgrimage to a life I can look back and say, “I started my journey on September 23, 2009, by crawling; today, as I reach the end of my life and entry into whatever mecca comes after, I have walked toward it this whole time.”
      Okay, I don’t mean to sound grim, that the goal is death. But death is part of reality. My goal is to keep walking a recovered path so that I reach my last day on earth knowing that despite the challenges of the journey, I am not afraid of what comes next. My desire is to have lived half of my life–or more!–on the path of a life well-lived. I want to be useful and help people along the way instead of wander lost in the woods forever. I want to accept help from others along the way, as well.
      On Friday, someone said that they appreciated having a disease for which the cure is love. While I do not believe I will ever be cured, I acknowledge and accept that I appreciate that I have a disease for which the protocol is love. It’s certainly better than the drug of food (and romantic intrigue), which has side effects that have consistently been worse than the disease, itself.
      To know (perhaps even to remember and revisit) real love in my lifetime . . . that’s a pretty awesome gift to get on the journey. All I have to do is keep walking forward.
      My name is Jess, and I am a loquacious food addict in abstinence and working recovery. It’s a good day in recovery, even if I have triggered behavior later on today. I’m facing fear today, and it’s triggering a familiar, addict-based reaction. I have the choice to be immobilized and slide backwards toward addiction or be challenged and walk toward recovery. Whatever the outcome, however, I will have learned something about me and my addiction. It’s nice to know that even through the worst of it, I can still find a nugget of recovery in the brambles of a triggered reaction.

      The progress of recovery and abstinence has had unexpected results. Recently, when watching television, I have been confronted with fat-sweet-salty-creamy-chocolatey comfort food on commercials, I actually just end up uninterested. First of all, the actors and voice-over actors in the commercials act like food addicts. Seeing triggered behavior as a means to sell food does the opposite to me. It makes me think of my life in addiction–that delirious obsession which leads me to an unmanageable life. I also seem to be able to use my recovered thinking to extrapolate experiences I’ve had with similar items from the past. The theoretically rich, dark chocolate tastes like sweetened dirt; it has none of the actual qualities of chocolate. I’d be happier drinking an espresso. If it has caramel, it is painfully sweet–causing my mouth and throat to burn before the bitterness of the chemicals to preserve it bring the often metallic and always bitter aftertaste. Texture is usually a combination of dry, waxy, and slimy. The reality is always disappointing when held up to the fantasy of the sales pitch. So, when I see these commercials, all I see is: “Return to a life of desperation and misery! Chase the perfect bite knowing it’s not gonna be here! Gain pounds by the dozen as you eat another then another then another until the package is empty . . . only to be driven insane enough to drive to the store to get another package in the hopes the next has the perfect bite prize! Risk diabetes for something you don’t even like eating!”
      The other thing that turns me away is when they use sex to sell it. No, not naked men, but the women look like they’ve just gotten an offer of a night of anything-goes Dom-Perignon-and-roses pampering from George Clooney or Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp. The super-hard sell of “They want . . . you want!” added to the consistency that I know what the real always looks like (there’s always some sort of whitish film involved over the blocky lump), and I’m just left uninterested.
      Reality getting in the way of the fantasy. Sometimes I feel disappointment or annoyance; most times, nothing. It may not be perfect, but I’m not getting triggered to chase it down or to fight with it to maintain abstention. My HP took it, I guess, and gave it back a few times . . . showing me the relief of the active obsession with my trigger foods. It’s gone past the “It’s not worth the calories” reasoning to “I really don’t want this” to “I don’t actually even like this” to “Meh, whatever.”
      It’s nice to not have even the heartache longing, the wistful desire to have a food-related tryst as I turned away in self-martyring despair. A blessing, or a miracle, or a convergence of practice and coincidence . . . it doesn’t matter why. It matters that it has.
      My name is Jess, and I am a food addict. The long-timers say it gets easier, that the time between trigger events lengthens with commitment to recovery and a food plan. It’s gotten to the point in my life that the weight loss is nice, but the relief from the nagging cravings and ability to actually go hours without thinking about eating (seriously . . . I don’t think about eating a snack or a meal until I have hunger pangs, now). Pretty cool what an HP-driven life can do. It kinda encourages me to keep going with recovery. I like this version of my life. It’s great.