Gotta Have Faith

So, George Michael song references aside, I am seeking faith these days. Tonight's OA meeting - which I had to drag myself to, by the way - focused on the second step, which is all about believing that a power greater than ourselves being capable of restoring us to sanity.

I realized something important tonight. I haven't gotten past the first step yet. I am having a lot of trouble finding faith in anything - whether it's the oft-evoked "God" or even the OA groups or programs themselves - partly because I still believe I can kick this addiction on my own. It's kind of a disturbing revelation, because the twelve steps and everything that accompanies them are based on an admission by the food addict that s/he has no power over food. But when I have days like this past Saturday, when I tried to eat "sensibly" - reasonable portions of foods I shouldn't be eating because they trigger me - and succeed by some fluke, I get the idea that I can do that sort of thing in the long run. I mean, it's not as though I've eaten myself to death already, despite having had this problem for fifteen or so years. So maybe I can control it?

I have a feeling that someday, maybe not too far off in the future, I'll look back at this post and the feelings and thoughts that created it and I'll laugh. Or maybe I won't laugh, but I will definitely shake my head. Because it's so ludicrous. I'm desperately out of control with food. I spent all day today wishing I could be eating everything in the world because I was feeling down and wanted comfort. I do not know how to self-soothe! Food has been the only thing that's ever worked.

But that's just it - it hasn't ever worked. My favorite part of the chapter on the second step in The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions of Overeaters Anonymous - heretofore referred to as the "Twelve and Twelve" - is the following passage:

"The more we ate the more we suffered, yet we continued to overeat. Our true insanity could be seen in the fact that we kept right on trying to find comfort in excess food, long after it began to cause us misery."

I read that aloud to myself the other night before bed, chuckling at the sheer RECOGNITION I felt when reading it. I've often thought about how paradoxical and ridiculous it is that the very thing I look to for comfort is slowly killing me, not to mention making me miserable a lot of the time. Interestingly, the leader of tonight's meeting pointed out that exact excerpt from step two, and I feel like it gets at the crux of why a lot of us have come to OA. We've been trying really hard to get better anyway we know how, but what we've been doing has not been working. It's been backfiring, big time.

A very wise professor of mine in graduate school, a therapist in practice over 16 years, once told me, "People change because staying the way they are is too painful." Surely this principle is what brought me to walk into my first OA meeting, and every one I've been to since. My search for faith is treacherous thus far because it's so integral to believing the program can work. It's integral to believing anything at all, I suppose, or at least anything that hasn't already materialized before me. I've always been the type who only believes things when she sees them; can I learn to act as if there was a higher power that could take my character defects and flaws and remove them? What about self-reliance and taking responsibility for my actions?

My head is spinning a little with regard to OA and recovery-related stuff. I mentioned that during sharing tonight. Other members said all they could say - keep coming back, recovery will come. Have faith, or act as if you do.

So now I'm left to fake it 'til I make it, I suppose. Will it work? Stay tuned...

Doubt

I haven't posted anything in a week, and I'm sitting here wondering why. The obvious answer is that I have wanted to avoid the self-reflection and critical thinking that go along with writing about my deepest, darkest fears and secrets. Keeping up the lie I've been telling myself for a long time now - that everything is okay, that I am not, in fact, a food addict, that I will wake up one day and be able to control portions, etc. - takes far less effort than does a "searching and fearless moral inventory," which is what OA and other twelve-step programs recommend. The searching and fearless moral inventory doesn't come until a later step, and I am waterlogged at step 2 right now (more on that in a moment), but I guess I feel like until I begin that process, I will not understand my own recovery in concrete terms. Everything will be abstract.

According to The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions of Overeaters Anonymous, step 1 is as follows: "We admitted we were powerless over food - that our lives had become unmanageable." Now, you'd think that by entering an OA meeting, a person has tackled step 1. But the truth is, I have been attending meetings regularly for a little over a month now, and I'm just now coming to terms with the fact that I am powerless over food. It's so easy and so seductive to think and believe that I am not, in fact, powerless, which is an uncomfortable and strange state to be in, but that I simply haven't learned to control myself. I'm starting to get it now - I have no fucking control over food, certain foods especially. It is cunning, baffling, and powerful, just like the OA literature says. I don't know that I completely believe yet that I am powerless, but i'm working on it. I'm getting there.

So maybe I'm not yet to step 2, which is: "Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity." Yeah, no, I'm not there yet. Maybe I'm a special case, because I've grown up in a religiously lax household, never being made to believe in much of anything spiritual. I'm also a devotee of logic, rationality, practicality - even though I have a creative writing background and my career field is social work, I've always relied on science to tell me the "hard facts," the inalienable truths. I guess you could say that if I can't see it, I've rarely believed in it.

But I have come, in the past several years, to understand that life is not a big, random mess of chaotic atoms bumping against one another in the ether. In order to make sense of my life and the lives of those close to me, I have begun to imbue certain turns of events with meaning. I don't really believe in coincidence, for example. I believe that everything happens for a reason (or at least I want to believe this). Is it coincidental, for example, that my best friend and my mom both went searching for love online and both found partners who ended up living a block away from them or less? No, I don't think it is. I think that the universe works in mysterious ways. So in the few times that I've prayed in the last few weeks, following the advice of fellow OA-ers, I've addressed the universe, the Life Force Energy, the cosmos as God. That's where I see him/her/it/them.

So maybe I've acknowledged, in some situations, that there is probably a power greater than myself. I've even gone so far as to contact that power and ask to know its will for me. And I must say, the couple of times that I've gotten down on my knees and prayed to know God's will, it's occurred to me within mere hours of the prayer itself what God's will is. I don't hear divine voices speaking to me, but I do have realizations, or a-ha! moments, if you will. God does speak to me, somehow.

But can I acknowledge and truly believe that this higher power can restore me to sanity? I guess I'm dealing with a lot of doubt and shame and guilt and all manner of other [largely self-imposed] obstacles. Should I pray to God that I begin believing more strongly in God? Does that even make sense? Sheesh.

I recently purchased some OA literature, and among my purchases was a small white book called For Today. September 16's short "for today" thought is this: "Just as truth freed me of my obsession with food, so it can free me of other living problems. I am not afraid to seek the truth." If I repeat this enough out loud, will it be true?