Gloria, a compulsive overeater and food addict, and Neil, a compulsive eater, host this workshop on OA’s Third Step: “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.”
For Discussion and Journaling:
- What is holding you back from turning your will and your life over to the care of a Higher Power?
- Is there a food you are holding on to that may be blocking you from your Higher Power?
- Rewrite the Third Step Prayer in your own words.
OA-approved literature used in this episode:
- The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions of Overeaters Anonymous (link to Second Edition)
- Alcoholics Anonymous, Fourth Edition
Transcript:
My name is Neil, and I am a compulsive eater and I am from Baltimore. I have been in Overeaters Anonymous for 25 years, I went to my first meeting on February 18, 1990. I became abstinent and stayed abstinent for a period of time. But for most of the first four or five years of my time in program, it was a different kind of abstinence that I have now, in the sense that I was still kind of willfully picking up every now. I had a little bit of a blurry bottom line. So around five years in, I started working a fairly structured program, tightened up my food plan, and I consider myself continually abstinent since January 30th of 1996. I had my 19th anniversary, and I’m maintaining about a 30-pound weight loss.
When I was asked to be one of the speakers for this Step Three meeting, I did what I usually do, which is say yes when people ask me to do service. I began to think about what I wanted to talk about and how significant this particular Step is to me. When I grew up, my earliest memories of eating, relief eating, when I was a young child, typically camped in front of the TV set. I think I ate for emotional relief. I grew up feeling very emotional, very sensitive, and kind of overwhelmed by my feelings. I cried easily. I don’t know if it was fear or what it was. But I found that to be a very difficult thing to grow up with. It just seemed that after a while, I was just broken. There was just something deeply wrong with me, and I was ashamed of that. I felt like I couldn’t let anybody know. I just had this feeling of being unworthy. Relief eating was really a natural next step for me. It was very tiring to just be me. So I’d be camped in front of the TV and eating. I think that was kind of like a double whammy because not only was I eating to dull my feelings, but I was also engaged in zoning out. Fantasy is one of the things that my mind would do to escape. It took many different forms.
I came into program because of my emotions, I actually came into OA through another Twelve Step program. I came into that program when I was 29 years old, having been not only eating compulsively but more or less getting high in some way, shape, or form for the previous 12 years, just about on a daily basis. I came into that program and I was in that program for about a year and a half. I came into that program through a woman that I was seeing. It seemed like God helped me to find my way by helping me through the women that I was dating at the time. I found AA through that person and ultimately became involved with a woman who came into AA and OA in 1985. When the time came in 1990 for me to come in, she was there to encourage me in that direction, which is what I did
I came in because I was really emotionally very depressed. There was a lot of resentment and a lot of feelings that everything that I had learned in the previous seven years were not working anymore. I was still very guarded and very tightly wrapped. A lot of the old feelings that I had when I first started using were coming back. In a lot of ways, I felt like life was unfair. I wasn’t getting what I wanted. Of course, I had incessant demands, so even if I got what I wanted, I was never satisfied anyhow. So two things were being taken away from me. I had this tremendous sense of entitlement. So I worried. I tried to control things. I would dwell on possible negative outcomes. I expected disappointment. I was operating out of fear in a kind of survival mode. I was doing things impulsively. There was really no order and no balance. Trust didn’t come easy to me, and as a result, I acted impulsively. I wasn’t particularly concerned about the consequences of my actions. When you live your life that way, the wreckage piles up. And I think the shame and the regret pile up with it as well.
When I got into OA, which was really just kind of divine providence, anyhow – I think it was kind of a convergence of enough pain, enough temporary willingness, and my Higher Power working in my life – I was told that if I was a compulsive overeater, that I would benefit from putting boundaries around my food and incorporating daily positive actions, which were the tools. They would constantly remind me that, in some fundamental way, I was out of step with the world. If I wanted to learn new ways of reacting to life and new ways of interpreting the signals that I thought the world was sending me, I just had to stick with my plan: not eating a day at a time, which is still really the most important thing for me.
As a food addict, I have a spiritual dimension to my life. I have a relationship with a Higher Power, but I came to that as a direct result of being abstinent. While there may be people who can get by or can thrive, just with a relationship with a Higher Power, I have to work my program. I can’t take anything for granted. If I put myself at risk when I am in a relationship with food, I can lose everything that I have. I would be very disinterested in working diligently to remain consciously in contact with my Higher Power if I were not abstinent. To me, a day of abstinence is just as important, if not more, than it was when I first came in. I was told to stick with the plan but see where my life was out of balance, and where my expectations were causing me trouble. I was not of sound mind, I was told, and that I had to find an external source of power to help me if things were going to change. I needed to develop a personal working relationship with that Power, to let it know me and for me to begin to trust it. And that’s where Step Three came in.
Step Three, was the beginning of a journey that involved being okay with not having to have the answers. Okay to be needy. And most importantly, it was just coming to believe that I could ask for help, and in a general way. I didn’t have to say “God, do this.” I could say, “God, I don’t know how to do this.” And let me just sit still and know that no matter how things go, it’s going to be okay. That was a big thing for me, because learning to sit still when I was going through things that made me uncomfortable, was something that I did not develop any skills for prior to coming into program. If I felt uncomfortable, I became impulsive, I became impatient. And then I just acted out of survival mode. That was not a winning strategy.
The operative words in Step Three were to make a decision. I had to become an active participant in this process of working with a Higher Power and invest in that relationship. I had let go of the illusion that I was in control. When I began to do that, I could see the value in not getting what I wanted. Maybe God just wanted to put me in a situation, and to observe what was going on around me and to stop operating on automatic pilot. If I sat still, and I took some time, I could learn things that I wasn’t learning when I was acting more impulsively.
One of the things that was said to me early on when I said “What does it mean to turn my will and my life over to the care of God?” Someone said, “Your will is your thoughts. It’s what your mind is telling you. And your life is the actions that you take.” That was pretty good. Another thing that was a little confusing was that I wasn’t turning my will over to God. I was turning it over to the care of God. That was pretty important for me because I realized that I had to have a conception of a Higher Power that had my best interests at heart. It cared about me. It was a Power that was a benevolent Power that wanted me to progress and succeed and to grow and evolve.
I don’t know that I ever had that notion of a Higher Power. I could believe in a kind of galactically powerful being that created a complex world and made it go. I don’t know that I believed that I had a Higher Power that cared about what was going on with me and how much food I ate, and stuff like that. I know that there are a lot of people who are intimidated by this stuff. I had to start working from the direction of: Did my old ways of being where I didn’t have a Higher Power ever bring me happiness or serenity? Did the ways that I dealt with life ever bring me the results that I want to run on a consistent basis? And when the answer kept being “No,” then it was “Well, what do I have to lose?” I can just start asking this higher power to give me the ability to tolerate the stresses and pressures of my life, especially when things aren’t going my way. I didn’t have to know how everything was going to turn out. By developing the muscle memory that comes when you have a plan of eating, work with an action plan, do things in small incremental steps, and break down your day into smallest parts and work back from the results I wanted, I found that I was able to have a level of order in my life that I never had before, and that doing estimable acts one day at a time builds integrity and character, and self-confidence. That began to come with me, along with the ability to trust his Higher Power.
I began to believe that more would be revealed if I was participating and committed to my abstinence, and I was trying to be the best OA member that I could be. I was told very early on to get active in program. Service is really a part of my story. That helped put me in touch with other people who were very committed to working the program. They all had a spiritual dimension. They talked about God and their Higher Power. It was an active relationship. That was that reinforced that for me in a very positive way.
As I moved away from impulsive thinking I moved more into planning my day and organizing my thoughts. This was really a bold concept. I can make a decision to run my best thinking past God. I should say that I’ve always had a close relationship with my sponsor since I’ve been abstinent. Anything that was important to me or anything that I was involved with, or confused about, I would run past my sponsor. But before taking action, I could make a decision to run my best thinking past my God as I understood him, and then wait before implementing my master plan. I found out that bad ideas really are revealed to be pretty bad almost immediately. I didn’t have to wait long. A good idea would wait for me, and it would still be there when I got there. I could see if my ideas held up under under scrutiny.
One thing I can say for sure is that Step Three has saved me from more disastrous decisions and any other single aspect of my program, other than not picking up the first compulsive bite, no matter what. And nothing is more important to me than that. Abstinence is the engine that drives the whole operation and keeps me willing. My ability to not say the first thing that comes into my head revealed that there are entire alternate universes out there in that space between my thoughts and my actions. If I put God in there, it gives them a chance to emerge. As this process became more grooved, I really began to give credit to my higher power for helping me to see these alternate areas. I just had to do my part. I had to make a decision to let him show me
A couple of things that have come to me as a result of working Step Three is I could run into a snag in my master plans, and I could shift gears, I could be pragmatic and come up with an alternate plan without getting too flustered about the whole thing. And I also realized that if I wasn’t sure what to do, that I could slow down and just be still for a while, and God would let me see new options. Inspiration came to me when I learned to trust God and to turn my will and my life over. The OA Twelve and Twelve talks beautifully about intuition being returned. I have experienced that and believe it to be true. I had learned to become a more flexible person. The more that I was able to trust God with my life and my will, the more I was able to see that there were other people who hadn’t found this gift. I knew that they were operating under the same kind of frustration that I used to. It enabled me to be a little bit more compassionate.
One of the most important things that happened as a result of working Step Three, is that I was given the ability to see what I was going to need in order to take Step Four in a searching and fearless way. I was experiencing so much change and so much freedom from being able to take life in stride, that I was willing to shine the light on some of the areas of my life that were pretty problematic for me. I learned how to take life in stride, that I could take little bites out of life and I didn’t have to chase after it and take big, honking chunky bites. Every time that I ate, anytime that I had a buildup of emotions in me and I ate or did some kind of relief-seeking behavior, I lost an opportunity to learn something about myself. Once I learned that, it was a very good opportunity to start doing an inventory of things in my life – the resentments, the patterns – to examine the important relationships, the losses, the secrets, the shame-based things, the fantasies that I thought separated me from other people.
Knowing that I had a Higher Power and that I could turn my will and my life over to that power, no matter what, I felt the feeling of safety to begin to expose some of those things I would have learned about more in-depth. One of the things that was very important for me was to write a personal prayer, my own personal Third Step prayer to ask my Higher Power for specific things. Early on it had a lot to do with specific ways to stay abstinent. As it as it moved on, it was more a way of aligning my thoughts. I just thought I would share this, because this is something that I wrote at one point, and it continues to be true. So the prayer that I wrote was: “God, walk with me through this day, that I feel your presence and know in my heart that you are with me. Go before me during difficult times so that I will exercise discretion and good judgment when I need it most. Help me to treat other people as I would wish to be treated, and to remember always that without you, I would be lost in a world of addiction. Let me be a shining example to others of the best that OA has to offer. In good times and in bad, knowing that in your world, all things are perfect just as they are. May I do your will always.”
That was an exercise that I did some years ago. It continues to be something that I read and listen to. I was told that I should write down instances when I’ve seen God working in my life, and share them with my sponsor and other people. And to talk to other people when I make phone calls. Talk to them about the God moments, or the times when they’ve trusted God and felt as if it paid off.
Those are just a few of the things that I’ve learned in my time program as it relates to Step Three. I find this whole process of turning my will and my life over to God is an incredible turning point. As the Steps go forward, the need to further involve God in my life continues to grow as the Steps go on until it becomes a constant.
My name is Gloria. I’m a compulsive overeater and a food addict. I came into OA on August 9, 1999. I have been abstinent since then. I lost 120 pounds in this program and have kept it off for about 14 and a half years. I know that sounds great. But as my sponsor always says, it shows you how bad I got. I was thoroughly miserable and hated myself. Every day was the same. I was always going to stick to my diet. And I never did.
It says in our OA Twelve and Twelve that some of us have a genetic predisposition to obesity. I know that’s true for me because I was a third-generation compulsive overeater. I came out of the factory that way. My ethnic background is one where food is the most important thing in life without exception. That’s really very sad, but true. My parents were busy with their own jobs. They didn’t really provide any nurturing for me. I grew up fearful and food was my best friend. By the time I was ready to go to college, I really knew I had a problem. I’d been to diet doctors. Those of you who are old enough to remember when doctors would dispense amphetamines, speed, which I gladly took. That’s certainly one way I could have a very clean house. I’d be going 100 miles an hour on that stuff.
But of course, none of it ever worked. It seems that if you were fat you were not just fat, but fat, lazy, and stupid. It was all the same. So I determined that I was going to excel at school. But I was always looking for the answer to my problem. What was the answer? I thought it was academic excellence. That wasn’t the answer. I thought it was getting married because nobody would overeat once they got married. That didn’t prove to be helpful. I thought it was a job if I just got the right job. And I got a great job, but I binged every day that I went to work, I just never could find the answer. I tried for the first 50 years of my life to find the answer.
When my son graduated from college I was supposed to be thin and pretty, I could hardly find anything to fit me. I was over 200 pounds. I was very close to my bottom in May of 1999. My solution when I got back from his graduation was to keep eating for another few months until I finally was desperate enough to come into OA on August 9, 1999. That’s where I discovered many things. I discovered that this program, at its heart for me, was that my success in this program depends on how seriously I take the Third Step. I had to make that decision to turn my will in my life over the care of God as I understand him.
I was raised in a religious tradition where I thought God wanted me to be a nun. I didn’t want to be a nun. I apologized to God for that, but I always felt like God was not very happy with me because I didn’t want to be a nun. Somewhere along the way, I thought I was very smart. I went to college, and I went to graduate school. I’m too sophisticated to believe in the God that I had been raised on. I was basically continuing to flounder till I came into OA. The first thing I noticed was the physical recovery of the people I met in the room. The second thing I noticed was the serenity in so many of them. As they told their stories in this program, their serenity was due to the fact that they had made a decision to turn their life over to the care of a higher power, and that made them happy. And I so much wanted that. I came in to lose weight. But I wanted that serenity, that special glow that was on their faces.
So I started working on the Steps. In Step One I admitted I was powerless. if I’m totally powerless over this addictive substance of my food, then I need to find some kind of power outside myself if I am going to get well. I desperately wanted to get well. One of the first things my sponsor had me read was “The Doctor’s Opinion.” There’s a quote from that I’d like to read: “Frothy emotional appeal seldom suffices. The message which can interest and hold these alcoholic people must test depth and weight. In nearly all cases, their ideals must be grounded in a power greater than themselves if they are to recreate their lives.”
I wasn’t quite sure what all that meant. I got the part about how I was in a program now where I was going to have to recreate my life. My life was going to have to change. If I was going to do this, I had to somehow, whatever I came up with, whatever I was taught, whatever I learned as a way of living. It had to be grounded in a Power greater than me, which I choose to call God.
So in Step One, I was powerless, but not helpless. I needed to find a Power outside myself. The answer to that is in Step Two: come to believe that a Power greater than myself can restore me to sanity. And like perhaps many of you, that belief came to me based on other people. I saw that the power of the group was that Power. I started to believe that maybe I, too, could succeed. I could not only lose weight but gain that serenity and somehow change my life.
I lived a life where I was just drifting. I had a job, I had a wonderful life, a wonderful husband, a wonderful child, wonderful home. I couldn’t, but I couldn’t see any of that. I was just drifting. I didn’t know what to do. I acted on impulse. I had no principles. There was no spirituality in my life whatsoever. I was very, very unhappy.
With my sponsor, I came to Step Three. I struggled in this program to get what we call the spiritual connection, the God thing. I was tired of hearing people in a meeting, saying “I was on my way to a fast food restaurant, and God took control of my car and turned it around.” And that was all well and good if that worked for them, but that sort of thing didn’t work for me. I couldn’t come to that kind of belief. Until my sponsor told me basically, “If you could have any Higher Power you want, what would it be? Make a list of the things you want in a Higher Power.” So I did that. One of the things that I put on that list was, “I want a Higher Power who, if I had a decision to make and I didn’t know whether the decision should be yes or no, I wanted either a telephone call or text message. I didn’t want a cryptic answer. I wanted a message that said “yes or no.” And there were other things. And I put all that on my list. And she said, “OK. Make that your Higher Power.”
I tried to carry forward with that. I was still struggling with that. She said to me, “I’d like you to read the spiritual experience in the back of the Big Book.” I wanted that burning bush that is talked about, but that is not what I what I got. I’d like to read you a little bit from that spiritual experience in the appendix to the Big Book that helped me: “In the first few chapters, a number of sudden revolutionary changes are described. Though it was not our intention to create such an impression, many alcoholics have nevertheless concluded that in order to recover, they must acquire an immediate and overwhelming God consciousness, followed at once by a vast change and feeling and outlook.” That is what I thought I needed, that kind of sudden overwhelming God in my life.
Then it goes on to say: “Among our rapidly growing membership of thousands of alcoholics, such transformations, though frequent, are by no means the rule. Most of our experiences are what the psychologist William James calls the ‘educational variety,’ because they develop slowly over a period of time. Quite often friends of the newcomer are aware of the difference long before he is himself. He finally realizes that he has undergone a profound alteration in his reaction to life. That such a change could hardly have been brought about by himself alone. What often takes place in a few months could seldom have been accomplished by years of self-discipline. With few exceptions, our members find that they have tapped an unsuspected inner resource which they presently identify with their own conception of a power greater than themselves.” And that is exactly what happened to me. When I looked back on my first year of abstinence, I was able to see how much I had changed. I had really changed drastically. I had tried over and over and over again to do something about my eating, which was out of control. I had never been able to do that. Somehow when I entered OA, a year later, I had lost all the weight I needed to lose. I had friends—I had never had friends before. I wanted to do good things. I no longer rushed into doing something. I would think about what my sponsor had told me and the Principles of the Steps involved. This has happened without me realizing it. There definitely was a presence of God in my life.
One of the things that helped me make the decision that I was going to turn my will and my life over to the care of my Higher Power was taking something in my life that was so personal to me—that thing being my food, what I ate, which I never wanted anybody to know about. When I started giving my food away to my sponsor, that was like a little baby step towards me losing control, towards me giving over something of great importance to me to the care of somebody else. Somebody else was looking at my food and seeing if this was a good way to eat. Somebody else was looking at it and able to tell me if my portions were right. Something so intimate in my life, I was turning over to someone else. I was giving up that control.
The same thing happened throughout my time with my sponsor. When I was telling her about things I was doing I would ask for suggestions. I was becoming attuned to it not always being about what I wanted, or what I thought was right. It was about what somebody else thought. It started out with my sponsor and food, and gradually progressed to someone else that is a higher power helping me make my decision.
I remember very distinctly after I had been in the program for about 10 or 11 months, I had an evening when I was sure I was going to eat. I wanted to eat desperately, and it was late, and I didn’t feel like I could call anyone. I just got down on my knees, and I said, “God if I am going to stay abstinent, you have to help me. That is the only way that I can get through this.” And after that, it seems that I never in my life after that asked for help that I didn’t get.
Now, as a daily practice, when I have a decision to make, I’ve been taught to pause, pray, think, and then act. And if you read pages 86 through 88 in the Big Book, there is a wonderful set of instructions on how to not just do prayer and meditation, but how to continue turning my life over to the care of a Higher Power.
I was someone who absolutely lived in fear constantly. I was so afraid of making mistakes. Half the time I didn’t even know what I was afraid of. But now, every day as part of my discipline, when I get up in the morning, I get on my knees and pray. I thank my Higher Power for my abstinence. I ask my Higher Power to help me continue being abstinent. And I ask my Higher Power to help me not just to know his will, but to follow it. If you read our pamphlet on a Plan of Eating there’s a wonderful discussion of the spirituality that we find in our food plans: that I give up control and place it in the hands of a Higher Power.
Neil mentioned how he had rewritten the Third Step prayer. I did the same. I’d like to read you what I wrote: ”God, I offer you my heart, soul, spirit, thoughts, my love, my joy, my working mind, all that I have, and all that I am. It is all yours, and I hope you will use me, all of me, in accordance with your plan for me. And however you see fit without complaint or instruction from me, take the best of me and make it better and make my life useful. Helped me out of my self-centeredness. When my ego wants to take over, shut it down and point me in the direction you want me to follow. I have defects that cause me problems. Please remove them when they interfere with my ability to serve you and to help others, Mainly, God, I ask that you remove my difficulties, so others may see what you are capable of: your power and your love, and that they may come to your way of life so that they see what you can do with others, such as me. Use me as proof that you are the solution to my problem. With all my heart and soul, I know you will never fail me if I seek you.”
