If ain't one thing, it's another ...

... as the hillbillies used to say back home.

My food is so completely out of control. I am powerless over my compulsive eating right now. I know, know, know I am not powerless over my choices, but I am really in a bad place when it comes to food.

I had begun attending Overeaters Anonymous meetings more than a year ago. I even had a sponsor for a short while. However, when my sex addiction issues started going haywire, I had to focus on the disease that was killing me the fastest.

There is no doubt in my mind that I am very slowly killing myself with food. For the past 48 hours, I have eaten nothing but sugar, fat, carbs, milk products. It's just gross to even think of all that has gone into my poor body. And this is simply a continuation of behavior that I've been engaged in for months with sugar and carbs. Right now I am powerless over $1 item menus in fast food drive thrus.

I went to an Al-Anon meeting today at which a woman shared whatever our "substance" we turn to for comfort becomes our Higher Power. That must surely mean that God is nowhere to be found in my life, because he's being gobbled up in junk.

I know the message is that I have to get back into OA, start working the steps with a sponsor and really commit to getting truly sober in SLAA and abstinent in OA. I'll be perfectly honest, I'm scared shitless if I start to work my OA program, my sex addiction issues will rise again and I'll feel out of control in that area of my life.

I know that there is a power greater than me who can restore me to sanity, and I stand at the turning point, am I willing to turn my will and my WHOLE life over to God as I understand God. All I can say today, is God please help me find the courage and willingness to do what it takes to regain my sanity.

Ain't No Love in Here

I recently heard a woman speak at an OA meeting ... she was fantastic in her story telling. Something she said about her refrigerator keeps sticking with me though. She said she has a note on her refrigerator that says, "Ain't No Love in Here."

For people, like me, who struggle with compulsive overeating, they find comfort and love and understanding in food. Food is a place they can retreat and be pleased ... not to mention, shamed and degraded.

I read this in an e-zine this morning, "Compulsive overeating is accompanied with much guilt and shame. People with this condition often feel that they are not good enough and are ashamed that they could not control their eating habits. This only makes it worse because their negative feelings only lead them to more compulsive overeating. Food is how compulsive overeaters deal with their craving for acceptance and appreciation. Some use their overweight appearance to keep people away because they subconsciously feel undeserving of love, while others use it as punishment whenever they feel bad about themselves. One does not become successful in overcoming this condition unless they gather up the courage to face the real emotions they are afraid to feel and unless they can honestly admit the issues that cause them to be stuck in this destructive behavior. All this of course, would be a difficult accomplishment without professional help and the support of friends and loved ones."

For me, my compulsive overeating and sexual addiction are closely intertwined ... for it was in being sexual violated beginning at age 3, that I turned to food for comfort and protection.

As I was trying to pull myself away from the computer this morning ... where I sometimes sit for hours, chatting, e-mailing, searching for that "hit" or that person to meet ... I thought of the woman's note on her refrigerator ... Ain't No Love In Here.

If I were to post a personals ad that said ... "There is a hunger of the body, a thirst of the mind, but it is the craving of my soul that cannot be satisfied," I wonder if any human power could ever satisify that? I think not.

Update

Well, it's 11:15 p.m. and I leave in a few minutes to pick up dear hubby from the airport. So far today, by the grace of God, I am abstinent in OA, sober in SLAA and rested enough to make the 30 minute drive over to the airport. I contacted five churches today about using their facilities for a weekly SLAA meeting, and am awaiting responses. I went to an OA meeting at a residential treatment center for girls with eating disorders. I called the woman I wrote about earlier who might be a potential sponsor. She said she already had too many sponsees, but I could call her anytime. I was thankful. I called someone else who could be a potential sponsor, but she was not home, and I left a message saying, "You don't have to call me back." And I looked up the names and numbers (for the third or fourth time)of some therapists that are in my insurance plan and called and left a message for one of them. I went to a restaurant for dinner, with the intention of eating some binge foods, and found myself full after eating a healthy, nutritious dinner.

I'm thankful to my friend for writing me, to God for allowing me to take an honest look at what I am doing. I know that this is just one day, tomorrow will have its own set of struggles. That's why we do this, one day ... and for me, one minute at a time.

A humble reply

I wrote the following in response to a recovery friend's question, "How are you doing?" It is a humbling truth about me, a woman who seems unwilling to work her program of recovery:


To be honest, I don't know how I am doing. I feel stuck in the warp of food and sexual addiction ... God "told" me -- not nuts, just the message I got while I was walking -- go to gym every day. If you don't do anything else, go to the gym every day. I stopped going. My doctor told me eat a little bit of protien and the rest fruits and vegetables, with only a few carbs every day. I didn't listen. My inner core tells me to pray and meditate every day, instead I waste my time looking for either new sex partners or new love partners. My OA friends say, you have to get a sponsor. I call people in OA, but never the people who I want to be my sponsor. I am paralyzed when I think of calling them. You've told me, others have told me -- get a counselor, but day after day I don't make the call. I need an SLAA program in my area, and at one time had the willingness to start it. But every day passes by ... I don't make the contacts to the church that I need to. I am still going to OA meetings, but have stopped my Al-Anon meetings almost all together. Instead I isolate and act out. I know, I have seen, God has shown me, honesty and acceptance are my two keys. I still lie, I still judge, I still expect outcomes, I still eat and have sex with strangers to make up for the "lack" of my expectations being met.


Why, you ask. Why, I ask. I don't know my friend, other than it seems that I don't want to get well. That's a lie and we both know it. It's all a bondage of self, a disease ridden self destined to kill herself one way or the other. The third step prayer says ... "God please release me from the bondage of self." Some days, the shame of all that has been and all that is keeps me from even praying, "God give me the willingness." Yesterday, when I wanted to go get a whole package of snack cakes and eat them, or go home and post an ad and find a dinner and bed partner for the evening (My husband is out of town.) I struggled with the voice inside that said, "make a call, go to a meeting." But I shrieked out ... "God give me the willingness." And I made two calls til I found someone who was going to a meeting and said "See you there." On the way home, I still wanted to stop and get those snack cakes, but I just kept driving and had the willingness to pray, "God, just get me home. There's nothing there that can hurt me too much." When I talk about the shame to even pray ... it's my codependence there ... I'm even codependent with God. I feel like such a disappointment. It's one thing when you do all these things and you don't know better. It's another when you know and you just keep going ... you don't take the action. But, guess what? The first step says ... "We are powerless." My friend, I am powerless. But I am not hopeless.


There is a woman who spoke at two different OA meetings last week ... and I feel that she could be the answer to my ongoing silent and spoken prayer to God for a sponsor who can help me. I had the willingness to ask if I could call her this week, to which she said, "Please do.", the willingness to write down her number and I am terrified to call her -- I can even at times feel the call of my disease saying "But I don't want to get better." But I am going to call. Let me rephrase that ... I am continually praying for the willingness to call her, without any expectation of the outcome, other than praying ... "If this is the one, let her say yes." The answer will come one way or another. There is something in "How It Works" in the AA Big Book that says ... "No human power could have saved us." And the further down the spiral I go, the more I realize how true it is. A sponsor can help me, but no one, and especially not me, can save me. That's the humble, honest truth.


Thank you, my friend, for asking. Thank you God for giving me the humble and sobering answer I needed to write.

The willingness

I sit here tonight, having just finished eating my portion ... meaning the portion I allotted to myself on my food plan, knowing that I have the opportunity and the need to go to a meeting. Which meeting do I go to? I've struggled with both OA and sex addiction issues lately. I went to a codependency meeting earlier in the day. Sometimes I think I am "hiding out in recovery" ... going to meetings, not getting much done.

I mean, after all, I am sitting her on my ass procrastinating. I know where the OA meeting is ... and would need to look up the SA meeting. I can go to both an OA and an SA meeting tomorrow.

What I really want is for my husband to come home and for us to have a great conversation and laugh and love one another. It was after 8 before he came home last night. I use this fact to beat myself up and to justify acting out in my sex and love addiction.

I had the chance to act out today ... and I didn't. I stopped it. I am thankful.

Anyway... I'm doing good about making "just for today lists" and I think except for kidding myself on a couple of them ... I did pretty good today.

I had a happy dream in the afternoon. I was with a friend and we were laughing and having a good time. I want to laugh and have a good time. I don't know what happened.

Acceptance is the answer to all my problems today.

Better get going. I'm going to the OA meeting. I'll do OA and SA tomorrow, God willing.

Getting Honest

I went to an OA meeting this morning and heard someone share the story of her relapse in that program. She said, "I took my first compulsive bite, and was too proud to tell anyone what I did. I thought, 'I'll be OK tomorrow.' I kept eating compulsively for the next five years." I don't want to continue any of my compulsive behaviors for the next week, much less the next five years, SO I want to put aside my pride and ego, and get honest with my support system here.

I have struggled to some degree or other with my sex and love addiction issues since moving to a new city at the end of March. I have engaged in some online intrigue and posted ads on sites in order to attract people to contact me -- telling myself the lie that if they contact me, I can choose to ignore them later. Telling myself the even bigger lie that I can handle "just a little playing around." Even though I have been going to meetings for sex addiction recovery -- they have not been SLAA meetings, and I have used that group's definition of sober when it was convenient to say I was sober, and my own SLAA definition of sobriety to claim sobriety in that program. This disease is cunning, baffling and powerful and will play every deviate trick in the book to get its way.

The truth is, when I needed comfort -- false comfort having been removed when I began to get abstinent from compulsive overeating -- I sought that comfort by posting an online ad seeking an extramarital affair. Of course there was no shortage of responses ... but I found "just the right one" -- the one I could manipulate and control and sucker into "falling madly in love with me." I started a correspondence that involved me offering my sacred sexual self -- the part of me that was so abused and damaged in my childhood, and that is only starting to heal -- up for grabs, in return for the comfort of expressed love. This correspondence took away my serenity, my ability to be honest with myself and others, and reeled me further and further in toward the same situation I was in just before I made this move --- proving once again, that addictive love is not love at all, as it makes no difference who the person is, just so they are feeding the disease and giving my damaged self a way to damage itself more.

I had the opportunity to tell a good recovery friend the truth yesterday, but I didn't. I chose instead to focus on all that was going right in my life. The result was that last night I made plans to meet this new victim of my disease later in the week. And this morning, after hearing the woman speak about how her pride and dishonesty led her to a five year relapse, I saw the message from God. I was faced yet again with the humbling experience of admitting that I had knowingly sought to use another person to escape building a relationship with myself, my HP, my husband and those who truly love and care for me.

I am thankful for all I have learned in this:

God has all kinds of messengers. In this scenario, there was the woman who spoke at the meeting this morning and the man I was intriguing with. The woman said the words that helped me to connect to the parts of me that have sought and found recovery. The man was yet another reminder that my disease is still with me and will present itself over and over again, and it will do so to the detriment of myself and other human beings who have every right to be treated with dignity, not used.

This was also a reminder why one of the most important tools of recovery is going to meetings -- it is in meetings (and sharing and reading in these online forums) that we give and receive the messages God needs to pass along.

In working the steps and doing recovery work -- though not perfectly -- I am growing. There is progress. When I first came into the program ... I would never have even recognized that I was using the man to fulfill some unmet need for comfort. I would just have said ... "I'm an addict, I'm powerless. There's nothing I can do. I have to act on this compulsion." Likewise, I would have felt "bound" to have kept my promise of meeting him, and then obligated to fulfill his insistence for sex. I would not have seen that by seeking someone else, I was trying to escape the hard work and responsibility it takes to be an adult. I would never have prayed and asked God, "I need your help in keeping the willingness to end this today."

I also saw the need to get honest and be honest every day. It's not a lesson I haven't been presented with before ... but again, I hadn't learned the lesson well enough. This experience gave me another chance to incorporate this core truth into my recovery.

My beautiful body

This weekend I went to a workshop in which the speaker, a well-known self-improvement author, walked us through a process of self-discovery. The speaker's general theory, adapted from the theories of Carl Jung, is that anything we can't embrace about ourselves creates difficulties in our lives, and keeps coming up (we keep attracting it) until we "learn the lesson" of acceptance.

So on Saturday we had to face our "shadows" ... those things that we didn't like or didn't want to be called. Of course, my list was a million miles long ... but we had to narrow it down to one sentence that we would never want someone to say about us under any circumstance, and then say it over and over again to a group of three people who were our "mirrors" until we could see that the negativity and "badness" in the words was of our own making. They are just words after all. So ... my focus sentence was "I am a disgusting, fat, ugly loser." These are words that have hurt me in the past tremendously.

Well, after 18 minutes of chanting "I am a disgusting, fat, ugly loser," I still hadn't accepted them as "just words." The other three members of my group made it through their "shadows," so I of course was feeling even more like a "loser."

But the next morning, I got up and went next to the ocean for prayer and meditation. I was still thinking of those words. The first thing I saw was a bird with feet that looked like fern leaves. The divine message that came to me from God was "I give every creature the body it needs to survive." A few minutes later, I saw a seal ... and watched with childish amazement as it went under the water and then came up a few minutes later for air. I thought of its big body and little short fins it was using to propel itself through the water and was again reminded of the fact that it has just the body it needs. A crane flew just barely above the water, looking for food or a landing spot below the water's surface, and a huge bird, maybe a pelican (I'm not familiar with ocean birds) also flew nearby ... its large body and widely expanded wings so close, but never touching the water. I needed the acceptance of my own body ... and I found it in all these animals. Their beauty and the amazement with how they used what they had to go about their day was a beautiful revelation to me.

I too have a body that has protected me over the years in many ways ... it is a body that deserves my love and respect, not my self-hatred. Accepting others judgements of my body is giving away my power and forgetting to appreciate every step of my yet unfinished journey.