Notes I made for this weekend's retreat:
In choosing the topic acceptance and surrender I realise I ‘m attracted to what I need to learn (and re-learn). Pre-program I would have denied that truth to myself – it would have felt too hypocritical, too imperfect but today I know that honesty and awareness are what give me freedom. Today I am just grateful for the opportunity to think about something that has been so fundamental to my recovery.
The first three steps of the program for me can be summarised in three words, they are awareness, acceptance and surrender. These three words are the cornerstones of my recovery. When I don’t have these in all areas of my life, my life becomes unmanageable.
I am a prisoner of my own belief systems – I get trapped in situations because I think that I need to be able to control everything, that I am responsible for everything, that I can think myself out of situations. But my best thinking got me into my biggest problems.
How I set myself free isn’t by attacking myself and this controlling thinking and saying I am wrong. My HP doesn’t want for me something so unkind – it is not me who is wrong, it is my thinking. He wants me to investigate the beliefs that are causing me problems, gain the awareness so that I can accept and surrender. I need all three steps until I can be free of the chains of a particular problem, if I miss one part of this process, say skip from awareness to surrender, I will eventually falter.
Food has been my story. I was born into a family of compulsive overeaters – I had teenage sisters who were binging and starving when I was a baby. Food was the centre of our family. It was where we came together – how we showed love, how we showed anger in denying each other food, how we celebrated our life, how we felt better if we were sad or angry.
I thought it was ok to live life like this, until I hit puberty and discovered I was uncomfortable being in a womanly body with curves and bumps. I began to try to control my food and what I looked like. I was very sporty and I started to feel self conscious in my sports clothes. I stopped sport. I started eating even more. Slowly I gave up everything that made me confront my growing size. I became someone I barely recognised.
The first three steps of the program for me can be summarised in three words, they are awareness, acceptance and surrender. These three words are the cornerstones of my recovery. When I don’t have these in all areas of my life, my life becomes unmanageable.
I am a prisoner of my own belief systems – I get trapped in situations because I think that I need to be able to control everything, that I am responsible for everything, that I can think myself out of situations. But my best thinking got me into my biggest problems.
How I set myself free isn’t by attacking myself and this controlling thinking and saying I am wrong. My HP doesn’t want for me something so unkind – it is not me who is wrong, it is my thinking. He wants me to investigate the beliefs that are causing me problems, gain the awareness so that I can accept and surrender. I need all three steps until I can be free of the chains of a particular problem, if I miss one part of this process, say skip from awareness to surrender, I will eventually falter.
Food has been my story. I was born into a family of compulsive overeaters – I had teenage sisters who were binging and starving when I was a baby. Food was the centre of our family. It was where we came together – how we showed love, how we showed anger in denying each other food, how we celebrated our life, how we felt better if we were sad or angry.
I thought it was ok to live life like this, until I hit puberty and discovered I was uncomfortable being in a womanly body with curves and bumps. I began to try to control my food and what I looked like. I was very sporty and I started to feel self conscious in my sports clothes. I stopped sport. I started eating even more. Slowly I gave up everything that made me confront my growing size. I became someone I barely recognised.
In trying to control my food, and my life, it got completely out of control. I married for the first time very young, to an active alcoholic. Our first year of our marriage was marked by how out of control our addictions were. After 6 months I had gained stones & 3 dress sizes and he was so out of control he could barely keep a job, and was lying and stealing to feed his addiction. We were out of control, something I am thankful for today. My mother-in-law took me to my first 12 step meeting. One of my first sponsors in the other fellowship took me to OA, but I believed that my weight was a symptom of my crazy life. At this time, I did not believe that I was a food addict. I thought if I changed my life, my weight would change.
Slowly my life did change. I left behind all my problem relationships, I did lots of therapy work and lots of recovery meetings, but I was still eating. After 10 years of healing my life, but being unable to control my thinking around food, I finally submitted to OA.
I did that in a therapist’s office while she was trying to get me to see I had willpower over food. I knew she was wrong – that it was time for me to accept I was powerless. I was angry that I had to face another addiction, but I had the willingness to turn up to meetings. That’s all I had though. I thought all my years of eating & dieting was me getting acceptance, but that wasn’t completely right. I have found acceptance is an elusive bugger – that as soon as I think I have it captured in my hands, it wriggles free and eludes me.
Slowly my life did change. I left behind all my problem relationships, I did lots of therapy work and lots of recovery meetings, but I was still eating. After 10 years of healing my life, but being unable to control my thinking around food, I finally submitted to OA.
I did that in a therapist’s office while she was trying to get me to see I had willpower over food. I knew she was wrong – that it was time for me to accept I was powerless. I was angry that I had to face another addiction, but I had the willingness to turn up to meetings. That’s all I had though. I thought all my years of eating & dieting was me getting acceptance, but that wasn’t completely right. I have found acceptance is an elusive bugger – that as soon as I think I have it captured in my hands, it wriggles free and eludes me.
Recovery for me has been a process of learning to accept my reality – of accepting exactly what it means for me to be powerless. In order for me to accept reality I need to understand that I am not in charge of the process, that my HP is in charge. That is the basis of my surrender and I need to surrender at least once a day.
Accepting I am an addict and what it means to be an addict is the first thing I have to do each morning. In reminding myself of that, I can plan to live my life the way I want, not be trapped by my addictions. I am not like everybody else, I have to accept I can’t eat or drink like everybody else. I can not make life look the way I want, that is my HPs job.
Surrender is one of the things I grapple with in my recovery – I can not control my surrender – it is an unconscious event, one where I slowly allow my higher power to take over the handling of my life. I can not simply will myself to let go, and let my HP take control. It just won’t work for me like that.
Surrender almost seems like the wrong thing for me to do. I spent many years before recovery trying to learn to control everything to control my food. I tried to practise more willpower in what I ate. I read every book I could get my hands on about being thin. I tried to practise affirmations to let the universe know what I wanted my life to look like, telling it I wanted to be thin and to be able to eat what I wanted. I tried to pray to my god to ask him to make my life the way I wanted. But these things didn’t work, all these things just made me eat more because I can not control my compulsive overeating. I am powerless over my eating.
What I can control is the footwork I do. In going to meetings, working with a sponsor, reading OA literature and writing out my feelings I am making sure I am doing everything to get me ready for my surrender. These things make me teachable, open me to living my life differently and to living my HP’s will, not mine.
My surrender to my obsession with food is often very close to being sick and tired of being sick and tired. I seem to judge myself for that, even though I know that it should be enough. I have this little fantasy that surrender is something I can do graciously, as an act of faith, something that I simply do each day, and then don’t think about again
The reality is so much uglier. I kick and scream in my surrender, pushing the boundaries of what I can eat, pushing the boundaries of what I think I should have the courage to change. Each morning I surrender to food, I surrender to my fear, I surrender to my relationship problems and then 30 minutes later when I feel a twitch of discomfort in feelings, or simply see something I can no longer eat, and then I take back my power. I decide I am in control again. I begin to push those boundaries again, to feel in control. Luckily I can surrender hundreds of times a day.
And sometimes I have to fake it until I make it. I just give up fighting, and that feel close enough to surrender for me. Then slowly, as I let my HP take over my life, it does move to a more gracious and loving space. I know that in loving myself I need to hand all that I am powerless over to my HP.
I also struggle with universally surrendering my life to my HP. Most days I am happy to hand over my food to my HP, and therefore can do that in faith. I recite my little Step 3 pray each morning, telling my HP what it means to be surrendering to my food. Normally it goes along the lines of I am a compulsive overeater; I am powerless over my food. That means I surrender my food to you by having three meals today, nothing in between and no foods that are on my binge lists. Having done this I might immediately be worrying about things beyond my control, money, my job, my security but I will be unable to hand these to my HP.
What I can control is the footwork I do. In going to meetings, working with a sponsor, reading OA literature and writing out my feelings I am making sure I am doing everything to get me ready for my surrender. These things make me teachable, open me to living my life differently and to living my HP’s will, not mine.
My surrender to my obsession with food is often very close to being sick and tired of being sick and tired. I seem to judge myself for that, even though I know that it should be enough. I have this little fantasy that surrender is something I can do graciously, as an act of faith, something that I simply do each day, and then don’t think about again
The reality is so much uglier. I kick and scream in my surrender, pushing the boundaries of what I can eat, pushing the boundaries of what I think I should have the courage to change. Each morning I surrender to food, I surrender to my fear, I surrender to my relationship problems and then 30 minutes later when I feel a twitch of discomfort in feelings, or simply see something I can no longer eat, and then I take back my power. I decide I am in control again. I begin to push those boundaries again, to feel in control. Luckily I can surrender hundreds of times a day.
And sometimes I have to fake it until I make it. I just give up fighting, and that feel close enough to surrender for me. Then slowly, as I let my HP take over my life, it does move to a more gracious and loving space. I know that in loving myself I need to hand all that I am powerless over to my HP.
I also struggle with universally surrendering my life to my HP. Most days I am happy to hand over my food to my HP, and therefore can do that in faith. I recite my little Step 3 pray each morning, telling my HP what it means to be surrendering to my food. Normally it goes along the lines of I am a compulsive overeater; I am powerless over my food. That means I surrender my food to you by having three meals today, nothing in between and no foods that are on my binge lists. Having done this I might immediately be worrying about things beyond my control, money, my job, my security but I will be unable to hand these to my HP.
I often struggle to recognise God’s will for me – something I feel I need to understand in surrendering to it. I am miss instant hit. I want the answers to come now. Life isn’t like that so now, to really check I am following God’s will, I ask myself is this seeming too hard, am I pushing too strongly against the grain. Is it hurting anyone? Is it kind?
To truly surrender my life to my HP, I can not pick and chose which parts of my life I give him. My HP is control of everything. One of the hardest things I’ve struggled with is my fertility, and I think it is very wrapped up in my life as an addict. I have made lots of decisions about being a mother based on my addictions. About 3 years ago I was having IVF treatment that was playing havoc on my emotional health and in the middle of it all my fertility specialist said that for me to be pregnant I would need to do something that wasn’t legal in Australia. I decided then that motherhood wasn’t what God wanted for me. It met my too hard criteria. It was also hurting me.
One of my closest girlfriends was so angry with me at this decision – she felt I was giving up on a dream I’d had all my life. The procedure the doctor said was my only possibility is legal in the US (where this friend lives) and she wanted me to come there and do it. The decision was hard, but deep down I knew that it just wasn’t what God wanted. I surrendered to that will. It still hurt, and still hurts. For some reason I think it should be easy for me to follow God’s will – that it shouldn’t hurt.
I surrendered to this will of God’s but I was angry at God, and in the middle of that grief and the insanity of fertility drugs I broke a long-term abstinence. I did it wilfully. Just made up my mind I’d punish God for not giving me what I wanted – just let my insanity shine through. I forgot I wasn’t in control – in letting my abstinence go so wilfully I forgot I was powerless over food, I thought I could get it back whenever I wanted.
God had another plan for me. I have never had that kind of abstinence return. But I see that is God’s will for me. Today my HP makes me work for my abstinence, if I don’t attend meetings, do service etc my abstinence quickly slips. My HP knows that’s what I need – to be constantly reminded I am powerless over food.
Recently a UK doctor has told me, completely unprompted by me, that she sees hope for me in the baby front. Hope is enough. And it reminds me God has a bigger plan for me, as I am in very different circumstances re the baby-making today (new partner for one).
To truly surrender my life to my HP, I can not pick and chose which parts of my life I give him. My HP is control of everything. One of the hardest things I’ve struggled with is my fertility, and I think it is very wrapped up in my life as an addict. I have made lots of decisions about being a mother based on my addictions. About 3 years ago I was having IVF treatment that was playing havoc on my emotional health and in the middle of it all my fertility specialist said that for me to be pregnant I would need to do something that wasn’t legal in Australia. I decided then that motherhood wasn’t what God wanted for me. It met my too hard criteria. It was also hurting me.
One of my closest girlfriends was so angry with me at this decision – she felt I was giving up on a dream I’d had all my life. The procedure the doctor said was my only possibility is legal in the US (where this friend lives) and she wanted me to come there and do it. The decision was hard, but deep down I knew that it just wasn’t what God wanted. I surrendered to that will. It still hurt, and still hurts. For some reason I think it should be easy for me to follow God’s will – that it shouldn’t hurt.
I surrendered to this will of God’s but I was angry at God, and in the middle of that grief and the insanity of fertility drugs I broke a long-term abstinence. I did it wilfully. Just made up my mind I’d punish God for not giving me what I wanted – just let my insanity shine through. I forgot I wasn’t in control – in letting my abstinence go so wilfully I forgot I was powerless over food, I thought I could get it back whenever I wanted.
God had another plan for me. I have never had that kind of abstinence return. But I see that is God’s will for me. Today my HP makes me work for my abstinence, if I don’t attend meetings, do service etc my abstinence quickly slips. My HP knows that’s what I need – to be constantly reminded I am powerless over food.
Recently a UK doctor has told me, completely unprompted by me, that she sees hope for me in the baby front. Hope is enough. And it reminds me God has a bigger plan for me, as I am in very different circumstances re the baby-making today (new partner for one).
I’ve read over and over again God’s will never enters where self-will dominates. When I see or hear of a problem, my first instinct is always ‘it’s up to me to fix this’. That thinking was the result of my childhood where there was so much chaos and unhappiness that I realised no one was there to save me. In my childish mixed up thinking I thought I was there to save everyone else. It suited my family to let that thinking play out. My self-will got me into some crazy situations. At 22 I was named guardian of a very sick 27 year old brother who had been abusive and who I had never forgiven. Once I drove him in a psychotic state in a car full of firearms to hand them into the authorities. I’d secretly reported him as unwell and he’d had his license revoked and had been ordered to hand them in. The man at the armoury joked with me that I was having a mad time, but sadly my self will meant I was having a mad life.
I had this mentally ill brother, a terminally ill father who was terrified of dying and couldn’t stand to be alone, a mother who wasn’t coping, a brother very ill with AIDs, a husband who was who was completely out of control. I was over-involved in all these dramas.
I was so busy rescuing everyone else that I could barely function. I lost my job and I realised I needed to change or I was going to die. I really believe I’d be dead today if I didn’t have this program.
12 steps showed me that the change needed to come from me. I slowly stopped living on self-will. I accepted I didn’t know what was right for me, let alone everyone else, that my life was in God’s hands.
The change has been profound, but happened fairly slowly, so slowly that I barely noticed all the little changes. I can barely remember my life before program. I’m slowly learning how to keep my hands off. When I hear a problem my first instinct is still what can I do? That’s ok if the answer is, ‘Give it to God’.
And I need to continually practise surrendering to God, to letting go of the outcomes. The solutions to many of my problems have been beyond my imagination. Surrendering to my problems puts me in a position for a different alternative. I have had miracle after miracle when I handed it over to God.
Change begins with surrender because you can’t see another alternative until you surrender your way of doing things.
My life is so different because of two little things – acceptance and surrender. To have the life I need, I need to accept the fact that I am powerless over things – my food, my feelings, my partner – that I can’t change without help and then I ask for help – I surrender.
I had this mentally ill brother, a terminally ill father who was terrified of dying and couldn’t stand to be alone, a mother who wasn’t coping, a brother very ill with AIDs, a husband who was who was completely out of control. I was over-involved in all these dramas.
I was so busy rescuing everyone else that I could barely function. I lost my job and I realised I needed to change or I was going to die. I really believe I’d be dead today if I didn’t have this program.
12 steps showed me that the change needed to come from me. I slowly stopped living on self-will. I accepted I didn’t know what was right for me, let alone everyone else, that my life was in God’s hands.
The change has been profound, but happened fairly slowly, so slowly that I barely noticed all the little changes. I can barely remember my life before program. I’m slowly learning how to keep my hands off. When I hear a problem my first instinct is still what can I do? That’s ok if the answer is, ‘Give it to God’.
And I need to continually practise surrendering to God, to letting go of the outcomes. The solutions to many of my problems have been beyond my imagination. Surrendering to my problems puts me in a position for a different alternative. I have had miracle after miracle when I handed it over to God.
Change begins with surrender because you can’t see another alternative until you surrender your way of doing things.
My life is so different because of two little things – acceptance and surrender. To have the life I need, I need to accept the fact that I am powerless over things – my food, my feelings, my partner – that I can’t change without help and then I ask for help – I surrender.
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