Addictive Eaters Anonymous Step One: We admitted we were powerless over food – that our lives had become unmanageable.
A member of Addictive Eaters Anonymous spoke to other AEA members about their experience of living the 12 steps. This blog is the edited transcript of the interview on Step One. All the readings referred to come from Step One in the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous (12 & 12) book.
I want to read this little bit from the beginning of Step One, “Who cares to admit complete defeat? Practically no one, of course, every natural instinct cries out against the idea of personal powerlessness. It is truly awful to admit that glass in hand we had warped our minds into such an obsession for destructive drinking or eating, that only an act of providence can remove it from us” (12 & 12, P.21)
How do you admit complete defeat, today?
Complete defeat, so far as the food is concerned, is just an absolute knowing that I'm powerless. It’s a different level. When I first surrendered to the fact that I was powerless and could not stop eating after I'd been in the programme for about three months, I knew at the deepest level that I could not, in my mind, beat it. Because I was always trying to beat the obsession, and the craving. I thought it was something I had to conquer. On a particular day, I realised, after being in the food from a quarter to seven in the morning, that I could not beat it and that I was powerless over it. That was my surrender, I believe.
It took a long time, two or three years, for me to really realise and accept that God had removed that craving and that obsession. We move on to today and it almost feels as though I take it for granted, but not in a negative way. It just is the way it is; I am powerless over food and I don't try and prove otherwise. I don’t. It took a long time to convince me, all the years before I came into the programme and then, what is more important, the months when I first came into the programme, before I admitted complete defeat.
So personal powerlessness becomes the firm bedrock and complete defeat becomes enduring strength. How?
You could ask a Higher Power that one. It is not my strength. It’s not my egoic strength. It is the Higher Power’s. Thank you very much. It is a bit like the rain, you get the rain. I can't make it rain. A creator or God or whatever gives us rain. I don't have anything to do with it. It happens.
That strength from your Higher Power, is that what is preventing you from thinking about food, from wanting to pick up the food?
It is all part of the process. But I do feel on its own, it would not have been enough because I would have started thinking that I was doing it. I had a lot of fear in those first two or three years that I would pick up the first one, but that was depending upon myself still. I wasn't able to change that. So it forced me to work the steps, go to my meetings, have a lot of contact with others, and try and carry the message. That was what drove it. But then the time came when I realised that the obsession and the craving had faded out of my consciousness. But it did not mean that I stopped doing those same things in working the programme.
It reminds me of this little bit from The 12 & 12. “Practicing AAs remaining eleven steps means the adoption of attitudes and actions that almost no alcoholic who is still drinking can dream of taking” (12 & 12, P.24). So did you have to do those things, did you have to practice those steps?
It was not optional for me. Particularly going to AA meetings, and listening to others that had been around for a long time helped. And the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, particularly, Bill's and Dr. Bob's stories were all about trying to carry this message of recovery, of hope, to someone else who was as desperate as I was. But a lot of people weren't and therefore they didn't stay.
Until I had tried all avenues that I was aware of, or was capable of following, I wouldn't have admitted complete defeat. If someone comes into the programme when they're 20 or 21 years old, I marvel, because there is no way I would have come in at that age. I still had a lot of things to try to beat it.
You did the diet clubs, all the restricting and not restricting. Had you tried everything by the time you got to that point?
I felt I had, including going to church and the spiritual aspect. That had always been there.
So that in itself did not have the power or the ability to relieve the addiction?
I take it back to the fact that I always had this spiritual hunger, but I equated that as religion. And I'm only talking about myself here because it isn't necessarily the same for others. I was very judgmental, or hypocritical because all my eating was in secret. I judged people who went to church, who were trying to live a Christian life, as weak and gutless, a lot of them to my eyes. So, I felt totally disconnected from a Higher Power. Through going to church and praying I never connected. Of course, for other people, it is not like that, yet for me, it was.
When I came into a 12-Step programme I immediately felt the same as the people there and one of the main things was their honesty. The fact that they had behaved in ways that I thought were pretty awful at the time, and they admitted them, but the fact is they weren't doing them any longer. That had a big impact on me. It was the belonging, the finding people who were like me when I thought I was alone. So those secrets were keeping me apart.
I like this bit at the end of Step One that talks about “Then and only then do we become open-minded to conviction and as willing to listen as the dying can be. We stand ready to do anything which will take the merciless obsession from us” (12 & 12, P.24). Do you still have that same conviction you did all those years ago? Is it still the truth for you?
I think so, yes and I'm grateful for that. To me, that is a gift from God, because it wouldn’t be hard for me to say, oh bugger it. I can see how people who have been around for a long time eventually listen to that little voice and then other things become more important to them. They cannot see what the result will be if they stop trying to live this way of life. But I have never been tempted to do that. To me, that is a gift.
Do you think you are still aware of what life in addiction was like? Is that still very clear to you?
Well it is and it isn't. I really believe, and this is just me, if I were to pull back and withdraw slightly or totally that it would just be like the flick of a switch and I could go back. You can't see recovery when you're not in recovery. It’s like first coming to the programme. I always think of it as you have just come into the programme, and I'm trying to help you see the benefits of sobriety and surrender. The way I'm doing it is I'm describing a way of life, which is like describing the Mona Lisa, that you have never seen, not face to face. How can you realise? Eckhart Tolle talks about honey. He talks about how you can write screeds about honey, and know everything there is to know about honey, but until you taste honey, you don't know what honey really is. To me, that is the same as sobriety and surrender.
You have to have enough faith, enough desperateness, to be willing to take it on the promises of other people to experience it yourself. I believe that if someone picks up the first one again, and there have been people that have been around for many years that have left us and picked up the first one, that they lose that experience of what it was like in recovery. They can't access it any longer. So they go back to that “Oh, my God, oh, my God”. I think that would happen to me. I don't think I would be any different to anyone else.
That is a good explanation because I see newcomers come in and I hear our sharing and I think, what an extraordinary gift for that person. Then they don't come back. It is just like what you said about honey. It makes sense that if you pick up the first one again and you leave, then you have also lost access to that knowing and that being. What can we do but do what we do and live the way we live. Thank you for sharing your experience of Step One in Addictive Eaters Anonymous.