Stephanie, a compulsive overeating, and Nancy, a gratefully recovering compulsive overeater, host this workshop on OA’s Fifth Step: “Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.”
For Discussion and Journaling:
- What is your worst fear about Step Five?
- How do I pick someone to share my Fifth Step with? What do I want in this person?
- What are the benefits of doing this Step? What is my integrity worth to me?
- Do I understand the difference between humility and humiliation?
OA-approved literature used in this episode:
- Alcoholics Anonymous, Fourth Edition
- The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions of Overeaters Anonymous (link to Second Edition)
- The Twelve Step Workbook of Overeaters Anonymous (link to Second Edition)
- Sponsoring Through the Twelve Steps
- Twelve Stepping a Problem
Transcript:
My name is Stephanie. I’m a compulsive overeater, grateful to be abstinent today.
Today we’re talking about Step Five. We are going to be referring to several pieces of literature during this time. One is the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous and the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions of Overeaters Anonymous. There’s a Workbook for Overeaters Anonymous. Also, there’s a pamphlet called Sponsoring through the Twelve Steps. And a region chair presented at the forum at the 2015 World Service Business Conference a new piece of literature called Twelve Stepping a Problem, that’s really helpful when we’re looking at the importance of working all Twelve Steps.
I’m going to take a few minutes and talk a little bit about myself. let you know that I’m a real compulsive overeater before we get started with Step Five, I came into OA in ‘86, full force. A few years before that, I’d used it as a diet club, lost about 80 pounds (36 kg). I’m someone who was fat her whole life. I came from a family where there was an alcoholic father, and I was the oldest of six kids. We moved very often. I was a fat kid that never felt like she could fit in very well. But I returned to OA in 1986, weighing about 250 pounds (113 kg). and I had been blessed with the “Gift of Desperation.” (Sometimes I use that as an acronym for God, because that really helped me be willing to do what was necessary to work the Twelve Steps.)
Before we get started with Step Five, what I’d like to do since this workshop is about focusing on the importance of all Twelve Steps is to just kind of step you through how I got to Step Five the first time. As I said, I came in really desperate. I weighed 250 pounds, and I just couldn’t seem to put down the food. I had come up with a food plan when I was in OA before, and I couldn’t stick to it. I really thought the magic was in the food plan. I’m one of those people who firmly believes that I need to put the food down before I can get my head cleared enough to work the Steps. But if I don’t work the Steps, if it’s just a diet, I’m doomed to go back out and eat. And that’s what was happening for me. I was trying to follow that food plan and just could not do it.
Step One talks about “We admitted we were powerless over food . . .” and that wasn’t too hard for me to see when I came in in ‘86 because at 250 pounds I was just like a snowball gathering momentum—just gaining weight faster and faster and faster and faster and just no end in sight. But that second part, “that our lives had become unmanageable,” I had a lot of trouble seeing that until I put down the food. I thought I was a perfectly lovely fat lady. I did not have any sense of ways that I had harmed myself or other folks by the character defects that I was later to discover. The food convinced me I was powerless. I didn’t have any trouble with that. And then when I put the food down, the disease convinced me that my life was unmanageable.
So that brought me to Step Two. Step One is the honesty step. It was important for me to be honest about what I really did with the food, and that allowed me to move through Step One. Then in Step Two, after I found out what the problem was, that I was looking for the solution and that was, since I was powerless, I needed to find a Power. I needed to find Power greater than me because my best willpower my best efforts, all my brain power, everything I tried, had not worked, at least not worked long-term. And then the second part of that is that this Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. Well, I had trouble seeing that I was really insane until someone explained to me that insanity was doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results. And I could see that in myself, especially with the food, I would lose a little weight and think everything was great and think that I could go back and eat one of my foods that was a trigger food, and I just never could.
I had tried God before. I’m one of those people – I get in some desperate states and I say, “oh God, oh God, oh God, please help me, please help me, please help me.” I didn’t have any kind of a personal relationship with God. But what I found – where I found the hope – was not in a personal God. It was in the meetings, where I saw the power that you guys had when you worked the Steps. I saw the power that you guys had when you put the food down. I saw the power in the rooms. And that gave me the hope. I had the problem. Now I had the solution. And now I had to figure out how to implement it.
And that brought me to Step Three, which is “made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.” Good old me, I thought, “well, I gotta figure out who God is before I can do this.” Because, you know, who knows what God will want me to do? He might want me to be a missionary in Africa. I don’t want to do that. Or worse yet, he might want me to be a door-to-door Bible salesman. And my sponsor said, “No, you don’t have to do that.” She said, “this is about turning your will, which is your thoughts and your life, which is your actions, over to God. The way that I recommend that you implement that is that you take Step Four.” So it wasn’t, it wasn’t this whoop. I mean, it is important for me to move forward through the Steps. But it wasn’t like this great ethereal thing where I had to figure out what God was and was I really on board with him and did he like me and all that kind of stuff. It was that I had made the decision.
The way that I implemented it was I did my Step Four. My sponsor encouraged me. She said, “you know, if you don’t take that First Step, it’s really likely that you’re going to go back out and eat again. By the time I got to Step Four, I’d probably been abstinent for three or four months, and I probably lost 30, 40, 50 pounds (13.5, 18, 22.5 kg)—I can’t remember exactly, it was a long time ago, and I’m old. That kind of encouragement—that sort of “do it or die”—that kind of realization that this was a life and death mission that I was on; it wasn’t just “Oh, I’d like to be on a diet because I’d like to lose a little weight.” By this time, I’d really come to the place where I saw that I needed a lot of help. And that Fourth Step made that even more apparent.
I love this inventorying that we learn to do and Step Four, and that we continue to practice and Step Ten. It’s something that I never did before. I always thought that what I thought was the right thing. It never occurred to me that it was not. If I thought it, it was right. I had a pretty good education. I was intellectually arrogant, I guess you might say. I thought that if I thought it and believed that it was right. And if I just spent enough time with you, I could convince you.
Step Four was very fear-evoking for me. It says “made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” I did the best I could. And that’s really all that’s required. I’ve probably done a dozen Fourth Steps. And each time, it’s more thorough, and it’s more fearless because I’m able to be more thorough and more fearless. And that first one I was filled with fear. It was painful to me to see some of the true things about myself. I wanted to do it perfectly. And I was the queen of procrastination.
One of the things that my sponsor lovingly did for me was that she suggested that I pray before I write, She insisted that it be in writing. And that I do it consistently every day, that I spent 15 minutes working on it. Even if I didn’t put the pen to the paper—just set 15 minutes aside every day and think about it. And there came a point after I’d worked on it for probably for three or four months, she said, “You know, we’re just going to draw this to an end, and in a couple of weeks, I want you to finish up what you’re doing. And we’re going to go ahead and do the Fifth Step.” I’m grateful that she did that, because I could still be working on that same Fourth step. Maybe not realistically, but I certainly was heading in that direction. And she was very good about that.
So that brings us to Step Five. What I’m going to do is go back to the literature again, and give more specifics on places that Step Five is mentioned in our OA literature. In the Big Book, Chapter 6 is “Into Action,” pages 72 through 75, really discuss this. This book was written in 1939. When I came in, in ‘86, that was really what was available to do a Fourth step with. The OA Twelve and Twelve was not in place at that time. (It came into being in 1990.) It was two years after that when the Twelve and Twelve came. Now we have that and it has beautiful information on the Fifth Step, pages 45 through 52. Then again in Step Twelve, it reviews all the Principles of the Steps and goes into detail about Steps Four and Five. Our Twelve Step Workbook for Overeaters Anonymous has some good questions on pages 31–37. Sponsoring Through the Twelve Steps, a pamphlet that I’ve gotten more familiar with in the last few years: I really love the questions at the end of that segment, pages 11–12. They are really great questions to go through as I’m reviewing the work that I’ve done in my Fifth Step.
The Fifth Step has two parts: one is admitting to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. The second part is more subtle: to sit down and to have an hour afterwards to review the first Five Steps, the first Five Principles. Those questions are really great for reflection when I’m spending that hour by myself. There’s also the new Twelve Stepping a Problem, on the OA website. It’s really a great way to, for example, if it’s driving you nuts that your husband snores, I mean, something as simple as that you can work the Twelve Steps on it. It’s really, it’s really a great thing.
So Step Five was really an action step. It made me put the pen to the paper, to focus on who, what, where, when, how and why. The who: I needed to admit the exact nature of my wrongs to God. He already knew them. But I needed to get honest with myself through God, and I needed to share with another human being. What I found was that I was pretty incapable of being completely honest with myself alone. But I could rationalize, I could defend, I could blame. When I was sharing with someone else, they could reflect back to me what I was saying, or they could share incidents in their own life that would help me see the truth of my situation.
Some of the literature that we’re talking about today talks about the importance of finding someone who’s safe. For me, that’s really important, someone that’s absolutely trustworthy, someone who will respect my privacy, who’s a good listener, who’s not going to try to fix me, who will keep my secrets safe. What happened for me, first time I did my Fifth Step with a sponsor, was I was still in a lot of fear. I picked my sponsor because that’s what everybody did. I was still in so much fear, I really hadn’t gotten to that fearless place. I misdirected. One of the things that I spent a long amount of time talking about was stealing pens and pencils from the hospital where I worked. And I spent maybe 15 or 30 seconds talking about an abortion I had. And what happened for me was, honestly, I was pretty okay with taking the pens and pencils. I could see the exact nature was that I stole, but other people did it. And so I really didn’t feel horrible about that. Having an abortion, I felt terrible about, and I could not address that because I was in so much fear. But the good news was, I didn’t lie. I mentioned it in brief form. And later, when I was able to go back and do another Fourth Step, I was able to do more work. And over the years, as I’ve been in OA, I’ve been able to get a lot of relief from that.
One of the most wonderful things that happened for me, in that regard was that I was taking someone else’s Fifth Step. In the town that I live in, we had a treatment center back in that day. There was a lady who beat her children, and I was able to share about having the abortion, and we both had a good cry and asked God to relieve us of our pain and forgive us. It was very powerful. I could see how something that I did that seemed so wrong to me, had been useful to someone else. And to me, that’s one of the most powerful things about how this all works: that God has his hand in all of this. It talks about what are we going to do. We’re going to admit the exact nature of our wrongs.
It’s interesting that it uses the word wronged. It doesn’t say wrongs, it says wronged in the Big Book. And what that has come to mean to me is what gets between me and God. And for me, that’s the self, the ego, the selfishness, the me, me, me part that gets between me and God. It’s demonstrated in a lot of different ways. But to me that is the essence of the exact nature of what separates me from God. There’s a thing in the Big Book that talks about that person who’s sharing their Fifth Step. It says he is under considerable fear and tension that makes for more drinking. So if I didn’t continue to do the work, for example, on that abortion, that my fear and my tension and my anxiety would have led me back to eating. I just feel certain of that, thank God I had enough recovery, little though it was, to keep me in the program, to keep me working on doing the steps. I’m grateful that I was able to do just a little bit to get started down that road.
Another part of the what, as we discussed earlier, was that hour that I take afterwards to review it. That was really important for me to see where I’m off the beam, to see things that I have not completed. As I said, I was in a lot of fear. So even though I could see that I hadn’t really done a very thorough job on that part of my inventory, I was not ready or willing to revisit it at that point. But it was in the back of my brain. There’s a question that I’ve heard: What is my integrity worth to me? I had begun to value myself enough that my integrity had some value. There’s a point in the Big Book where it says, “We must be entirely honest with someone if we expect to live long and happily in this world.” What happened for me was, after I did that Fifth Step with my sponsor, I didn’t feel any relief. In fact, I felt worse. And my thought was to blame my sponsor. That thing about as long as I’m as sick as my secrets: I still had secrets, and I was still sick.
One of the things they talked about was where and how am I to do this? It suggests face-to-face, if possible. But today, with all the technology, if my sponsor does not live nearby, or I’m not able to visit her, these kinds of Fifth Steps can be done on the phone or on Skype. The important thing is that I have privacy, so that I feel safe. And so that I do no harm. You know, if I’m doing a Fifth Step, and my husband is involved, there are things that I don’t want to say while he’s here. So maybe Skype is not the best option if he’s here. Maybe I need to go to a safe place to do that kind of sharing.
Then we look at when do I do this? It talks about immediately after the Fourth Step, because I don’t want to sit mired down in that garbage. I want to offload this soon as possible. The how did I do this: I picked a partner. And in all cases, it has been my sponsor. The way I’ve been guided to do it is that I kneel and I say a prayer, usually the Third Step prayer, and I ask God to guide me. It talks about in the Big Book that we pocket our pride, and we go to illuminating every twist of character, every dark cranny of the past. That prayer helps me do that. It helps me set aside myself, my self-centeredness, so I’m able to do that.
And again, when I’m in that quiet time afterwards, when I have the hour alone, I practice that prayer that they talked about in the Big Book. We thank God from the bottom of my heart that we know him better and ask him if we’ve omitted anything. And what I’ve been instructed to do is review the first Five Steps with an eye towards finishing up the other Steps. What I have done in the past is made three lists. One was a list of my character defects. Those are the things I’m going to need to pray for in Six and Seven. And the folks that I’ve harmed, that’s for my my Step Eight. Then people I still resent, and that’s the forgiveness prayer that I need to do work on Step Eight.
So why do I do this? I don’t know if any of you get Lifeline, but there was a great article in this last Lifeline about why Step Five is necessary. If you haven’t read it, it’s really a great article. It talks about in the Big Book: if we skip this Step, we may not overcome drinking. That’s the best reason of all. I’m gonna go back out. I’m gonna lose everything that I have. If I go back out and use, they have not learned enough. The humility, fearlessness and honesty in the sense we find necessary and taught until we’ve told someone else all of their life story. Every time I read this, I just think back about that first inventory. And I think how blessed I was that I didn’t have to go back out. And so one of the reasons is that if I don’t, I’m due to go back to the food.
But another thing is the promises on the paper. There’s lots of promises listed on page 75. It says, once we’ve taken the Step, withholding nothing, we are delighted. We can look the world in the eye. We can be alone at perfect peace and ease. Our fears fall from us. We begin to feel the nearness of our Creator. We begin to have a spiritual experience. And this is really where I began to feel that connectedness with God. It wasn’t that I didn’t know this stuff. But I think my willingness to be as forthright as I was able to lay it at his feet was really important to me. And then another one of the promises: the feeling that the drink problem has disappeared will often come strongly. That sense that I’m on the beam that we feel we’re on the broad highway, walking hand in hand with the spirit of the universe. And if I’ve omitted something or if I’ve short-shrifted myself, I don’t get those feelings. I learned that by trial and error. The first inventory taught me that lesson real strongly.
Before I close my part, I want to share reading from our literature. One is part of the “Invitation to You”: “Can we guarantee you this recovery? The answer is simple. If you will honestly face the truth about yourself and the illness, if you’ll keep coming back to meetings to talk and listen to other recovering compulsive overeaters, if you will read our literature and that of Alcoholics Anonymous with an open mind. And most important, if you are willing to rely on a power greater than yourself for direction in your life, and to take the Twelve Steps to the best of your ability, we believe you can indeed join the ranks of those who recover.” Wow, what an awesome guarantee.
The last part I’d like to read is from Step Twelve, page 100, from the OA Twelve and Twelve. “In Steps Four and Five we learned courage and integrity. As we face the truth about our defects of character, applying these principles in all our affairs means that we are no longer ruled by fear of admitting our mistakes. We have the integrity to show the world our true selves. No longer needing to appear to the world of perfect people, we can live more fully, having the courage to face up to our mistakes and test our strengths and the challenges of life.” Some pretty awesome stuff that comes out of Step Five
Hi, my name is Nancy and I am a very gratefully recovering compulsive eater. I consider it a privilege to be part of this workshop. I’m—just to qualify a little bit. I came into OA in the northern suburbs of Detroit, Michigan, is September 28 1973. I grabbed hold of OA right away and was given the gift of a my best friend who was also another compulsive eater, and she took me to my first meeting. By the grace of God and the fellowship, I am maintaining a weight loss of about 150 pounds (68 kg). And things have changed, you know, I’ve gone—I’m old as well—and I have gone through the medication thing that’s put weight on me. I’ve also gone through some of life’s changes that have added it. But somehow or another it always comes back to where as long as I stay abstinent—and that’s what my sponsor tells me today, “You got one job, Nancy, and that’s to stay abstinent and God will take care of the rest.”
When I got there to my first meeting, it was a Step meeting, we did not have any hard bound literature in OA in those days, it was still—OA was still reasonably new—and so we were encouraged to read and follow, as Stephanie had mentioned, the AA Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions and the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. And so in those days for our own private reading, we could change alcohol food and alcoholic to compulsive eater, and the shoes fit perfectly. And so that’s what I kind of grew up and cut my teeth on. (No pun intended.) So a lot of the things that I do today are things that I have learned at that time. I learned—when I got to my first meeting—it didn’t take long before I heard people talking about the dreaded Step Four and Five. And actually the first night that I went, we were on Step—they were on Step Eight, and I just kind of wondered what kind of a cult I had gotten into because they’re talking about making a list of all the people we had they had harmed. And I thought there is no way I’ve harmed anybody but myself. At over 325 pounds (147.5), I ate too much, I drank too much, I smoke too much, and I had spent over 20 years on amphetamine diet pills. I knew the caloric value of every food known to humankind and had been on way too many scales to make myself comfortable. And I was a yo-yo dieter: I could go on diets and lose weight, when I would get down to where I wanted to be, I would just say—I’d see myself in a reflection someplace—and I’d say, “Gee, I look good. I feel good. I’m never going to do that again.” And then about a year later, I would be back up to where I had begun my diet and even a little more. And so I would start on that journey again and the whole business. And that is one reason why I always identify as a grateful, recovering compulsive eater because OA put an end to that, and it and the way it did was through the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions.
That’s why I just—I believe that the most important thing that we can do in, in our lives when we get to always to get into the Twelve Steps in the Twelve Traditions, because that’s what is going to save us. It’s not going to be the latest diet du jour. For me, it is not going to be hanging out with the right people or the wrong people. It’s not going to be any outside influences as far as what to eat or what to drink. I’ve long believed that it’s when we first when I first got to OA, it was about the food until it was not about the food. And that’s what the Steps do for me. I always go back. I always go back. If I’m having a difficulty, I say what Step am I working on this? And how can I do this? I have always had a sponsor. They told me the first night I was at meeting that there were three things they recommended: number one was that I got abstinent and that I got a sponsor and that I worked the steps. And I thought it was really strange that they didn’t indicate that it was anything about a diet, there were no scales present. And I just didn’t realize that it wasn’t about the food. But they did have a couple of food plans that if we had none other that we would rather use, and they suggested that we take them to our doctors and get our doctor’s approval. And that’s what I did.
I went with my best friend, as I told you. So when we got there, as I said, we were on Step Eight, and by the time I had gone through Eight through Twelve and then back around to Steps Four and Five, I had heard enough people sitting in my meetings and the meetings were very small then in in the Detroit area, when we had two meetings in the greater Detroit area. And they were both very small, like seven or eight people, I think there were seven my first night, and that was counting me. But they still—they started talking about this notorious Fourth and Fifth Steps. So I kind of got scared too, and I thought, “Oh, this is where they’re going to bring in the doctrine, and they’re going to start trying to get me.” So I had kind of firmly set my jaw in place and said, “Well, you’re not gonna fool me. I’ve been down this rodeo before.” I was really quite surprised—by the time that we got back around to Step Four, I had heard more people share and share about some of their foibles and some of their fears and some of their anxieties, and we weren’t even on that Fourth Step. So by the time I got to the Fourth Step, I was pretty, pretty much acclimated that it wasn’t going to be something where an arm or leg was going to fall off or that I was going to turn green or anything like that was going to be disastrous to help me. On the contrary, I found a room of people who were there—and mostly women because men hadn’t started coming to OA at that point in time in our area—and they were kind and they were considerate and they didn’t try to make—they didn’t try to make themselves feel better than me just because I was a newcomer. They were encouraging, and I had never had that happen.
I had grown up in a home of a raging alcoholic. There was a lot of violence in our home, and I remember being very young, and when the wrath of my dad fell heaviest on my back and he passed out in another room, I would go to the kitchen, looking for comfort foods. Sometimes I would be sobbing so hard that there’d be a knot in my throat but I was always able to get those foods down.
Some of the things that my dad did were things that Daddy shouldn’t teach their little girls about, and I carried that around. It’s a heavy, heavy burden. And so when I got to step Four, and subsequently to Five, I was scared. I was scared that I was not going to measure up. I was scared that I wasn’t going to be worthy to go to OA, that someone was gonna find a flaw in my character that was going to make me so bad that they were just going to dismiss anything that I had to say. The saving grace for me was that I had got my, my best friend, whom I had seen OA working in her life and I had seen a tremendous weight loss and it was the first time that I had ever known her to be thin in our entire lives. And I had seen her work OA and how it had changed her character, and how she was no longer crass or judgmental, or whatever. And I thought, wow, there’s something that’s happened in this woman that I don’t know anything about. And I had asked her to be my sponsor the first night. And so she kind of led me through the, the minefield, and all the explosions that would happen in life. And she kept saying to me, you need to learn to live life on life’s terms. And part of that is coming to deal with who you really are.
We went through these Steps, and we got there. And I figured she was the one and only person in the whole world that I can trust. I was involved in everything you can imagine. Because I found out through this inventory process, I was the great escapist, and I would escape by being a human doing instead of a human being. And I was involved in my church and in my community, and the Girl Scouts and the PTA, and everything that came along. But there was something that happened to her that she accepted me just the way I was, and so did the other people in the meeting. And when this Fourth Step came up, I wasn’t faced with a great deal of fear. And we went through the Fourth Step, and she taught me things that they—the little things like, you know what you’re not going to get every defect the first time through. She also taught me what the three parts of it are—is that you, you start out and you take baby steps, and you realize that this is going to be as long as you’re alive; it’s going to be an unending process. And that every time you do an inventory, you’re going to find something that may surprise you. Because you’re not going to be in the same space that you were when you are when you start in OA, And she said, just give yourself a break.
And so I went through my first inventory with her, and all I got was kindness and understanding. And I think there was a soothing quality, and a great deal of relief in knowing that I could share this with my friend, who had become my sponsor, and not be judged or criticized or condemned about what I should or should have not done as I was growing up. And so at any rate, it gave me a sense of hope to have completed that inventory, even though I had entered it with a little bit of reticence.
Two and a half years into the program, I had lost the weight that I needed to lose, and at a Thanksgiving dinner, I ate something that wasn’t on my food plan and I immediately built walls. Those walls that I built were a prison that I walked into that there was no way out. And I was out on a five-month relapse. During that time, my sponsor had left program to and she had never returned, and to this day, I don’t think that she’s returned.
I knew that OA was the only way out. I ran into another woman in our meeting who had taken OA from Texas to Michigan, and started the meetings in Michigan. And I ran into her in the supermarket, and I immediately asked her if the meetings were still going on in her house because I was so embarrassed, and I was so built full of guilt and shame and fear. And she said no, but she recommended another meeting. And I asked her if she would be my sponsor because Mary Jane had left the program, and Caroline said yes, she would, but she said on two conditions: The first condition was that I had to be as honest as I possibly could. And the second condition was that I had to work the Steps instead of the food. And so consequently, I agreed to that, and I also learned then in there that I don’t fool anybody. I thought that I was working the Steps to the best of my ability, but I was still in the food. And it probably took that relapse to show me how to get out of working the food and get into the Steps.
And the next 13 years until I moved to California, she was my sponsor. And she taught me all the different kinds of ways to do an inventory. Most of them were out of the Big Book (Alcoholics Anonymous, Fourth Edition), and by that time we had the OA Twelve and Twelve, and though I learned the Steps out of the Big Book and the AA Twelve and Twelve, I gotta tell you: I think that our OA Twelve and Twelve is the finest piece of literature that has ever been created for the compulsive eater because there are subtle differences that I’ve seen in in my recovery in OA, as opposed to what we learned in AA. Although the same principles are involved, and though I can learn and work from the same principles, I still—my first reaction is to go back to the OA Twelve and Twelve. Everything I need to know is in that book. We also have some great pamphlets.
She taught me how to do an inventory in different ways. I—at one point in my life, I got confused. I said, this isn’t working. It’s not working to sit down with pen and in hand and, and write down my defects on the paper. I said, I, I need to know something else. And she said, okay, I’m gonna give you an aid, an assist that has worked for me. She took me into her bathroom, and we were both facing the mirror, and she said, I want you to tell me what you see when you look in the mirror. And I looked in the mirror, and she said, tell me a physical characteristic that you see with a knife. And while I have red hair, and she said, that’s good. What’s another physical thing that you see? I said, I have freckles. And she said, that’s good. You’re on a roll. She said, What else? And I said, well, I have green eyes. She said, good. Now, let’s change direction here. And I want you to tell me what you see about your emotional being. And the first thing that came out of my mouth is I said, I’m angry. And this had never come up on any of the inventories prior to that time. I said, I see anger. She said, that’s good. Do you see anything else? Just use your emotional self. And I said, I’m fearful. She said, that’s good. And now can you give me a third one. And I said, I’m a people pleaser, and I use food to escape. She said, I think you’re on the right track. And so that helped me get over that speed bump that is now called by my sponsor—that speed bump of getting a writer’s or an inventory cramp and you can’t go on further. And so it was just another technique as far as taking an inventory.
And then when I left her house that day, I went home, and I was able to then write about these things that I had identified. There are some things—just like the physical inventory—there were some things that I could change, and some things that I couldn’t. But it embarked me on a lifetime career: 41 years (and, and I’m also in another Twelve Step program), and I think between the two programs, I have done maybe 100 inventories, and I always find something that I either forgot, or that’s something that’s new because I’m learning to live life on life’s terms. And I have found that there’s a great deal of joy, because I’ve been able to stay abstinent in taking those inventories.
As Stephanie mentioned, it says that, you know, if we skip this Step, it’s likely that I’m going to compulsively eat again. And I won’t know when or where, or how it’s going to happen, but it’s going to blindside me because my diseases cunning, baffling, and powerful.
The last thing I want to share with you is that on page 72, the Big Book, and in the Steps Eleven and Twelve of the OA Twelve and Twelve, there’s a word that has very been very key to my recovery, and it’s called practice. And in the in the Big Book it says, “In actual practice, we usually find a solitary self-appraisal insufficient. Many of us thought it necessary to go much further. We will be more reconciled to discussing ourselves with another person when we see good reasons why we should do so” (Alcoholics Anonymous, Fourth Edition, p 72). Then it lists some of the reasons. In Steps Eleven and Twelve in the Overeaters Anonymous Twelve and Twelve book, The word practice is mentioned—it’s in some form—over 22 times. And so I have to practice the Principles of this program that I find in the Steps, and I have to practice them every single day. And if I don’t practice them, I’m going to fall back into that same old rut that I did before. I’m going to be fearful and I’m going to be angry and I’m going to want to escape in everything. And I’ll be setting myself up for a complete failure because I won’t be able to do those things and all I will want to do is eat. Thank you so much for letting me share.
And Nancy and I have come up with three or four questions here that we think might be helpful in terms of thinking about Step Five. You may want to journal on this or contemplate or talk to your sponsor about these questions. I’ll read them, and then I’ll repeat them in case you want to write them down. We’ve had several requests to make sure that we give these questions slowly.
First question is, what is your worst fear about Step Five? What is your worst fear about Step Five?
Number two, how do I pick someone to share my Fifth Step with? What do I want in this person? How do I pick someone to share my Fifth Step with? What do I want in this person?
Question three, what are the benefits of doing this Step? What is my integrity worth to me? What are the benefits of doing this Step? What is my integrity worth to me?
And the last question: do I understand the difference between humility and humiliation? Do I understand the difference between humility and humiliation?
