Like this:

      I walk into paradise. A beautiful landscape, a vista to see, a quiet and peaceful place of meditative beauty. I see others who are affected by this beauty, and I wish I could be. They seem so content, a look of peace in their eyes. Serenity. Joy. Laughter.
      I walk into a room filled with people at a celebration. It could be a holiday, a birthday, a fiftieth anniversary. People who have not seen each other for long periods of time hug and kiss in greeting, share what’s transpired since last meeting. They seem so content, a look of peace in their eyes. Serenity. Joy. Laughter.
      I am there, but I wear a heavy backpack. I carry luggage in each hand, weighed down because they’re filled. I carry this load because I think I have to. I carry this load because I think everyone else does or did, that they’ve found a way to put it down. I carry it by choice, trying to balance the load, trying to keep my balance, trying not to be pulled down by all of this I carry. I am quiet, thinking of what’s in my bags. Do they need the anvil? Do they need the block of clay? Do they need the rocks? My heavy load, I hope, is useful to someone. My heavy load, I hope, will be taken away. I stay to the side, not wanting to explain why I am dragging it all with me. I don’t know how to explain why I am struggling with it. I am exhausted, I am powerless to put down those bags because I truly believe I can’t put them down. They’re needed. They’re what we all have. The others could put them down. Where? Or can I just not see theirs? How do they survive with their packs and luggage when I am ready to fall over?

      Step One of the Twelve Step program for alcoholism, states: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable.” In other twelve-step programs, the addictive substance is named instead of alcohol. In essence, we admit our powerless over having made something a power greater than we are. We believe we can release it, but it has us on a very short leash. We are slaves to something that does not think or feel. It does not control us as much as we are drawn to it with an unwavering dedication to it. We cannot let the physical object (food, drugs, alcohol), action (sex) or moral ideal (toxic love, for example, or co-dependence) out of our sight, away from our touch. It harms us, but we cannot stop trying to find what we think others have through it all. I mean, culture says party people are happy, and we see people laughing and smiling and sated when they use our addict substance of choice. We aren’t, but clearly we aren’t having enough of it, right? We aren’t using it right, doing it right. They have peace, serenity, joy, and laughter with that substance–or so we perceive. All we have is pain, and we cannot get away from it because there is nothing else for us to hold onto. There is nothing else.
      Hitting rock bottom is that moment when despair so overcomes us that a spark of hope is ignited. Rock bottom is a moment of reality-awareness, when we are so broken that we finally admit to ourselves that anything is better than this. That we lied to ourselves and everyone else that we could stop and put it down. That we are happy as we are, or at least we are resigned to that fate. We reach that dark night, when our senses fail us, and something inside tells us a secret we cannot hear but we feel to the depths we didn’t realize was within us: “There is something else.”
      This whisper of hope, that there is something besides using and abusing our addict-substance may go ignored many times. I know it did for me. It took a strange synchronicity of events over twenty years to bring me into the OA rooms. I have said before, I’m not entirely sure what drew me to look for a 12-Step program for food. I was aware diets didn’t work because I was rebellious and resentful of anyone or anything controlling me–keeping me from the food I needed to feel better yet made me feel worse with every compulsive bite.
      In addiction, I tried to cure myself from poisoning by taking in more of the same poison. Seriously. I hated being obese, being unable to function, move around, walk a tenth-mile without being exhausted as if I ran ten miles. I could not run. My body, which was hard enough to carry, actually got in my way. The force of each footfall set up an arrhythm which disallowed me from finding a rhythm. My body shuddered on another direction as I tried to maintain my gait, and I lost balance regularly. I had to move slow, to lumber if I had to move fast, because it took real effort to speed up. I wore my addiction, and I tried to disbelieve it. I promised myself tomorrow, which never came.
      I remember my rock-bottom. I sat on a couch with a bag of individually wrapped candies. I had already eaten enough that I didn’t taste it any more. It was a high-pitched screaming of too-sweet, too-salty, bitter even. I felt nauseous because my stomach was overfull with chemicals and refined sugars and processed fats. I. Felt. Poisoned.
      My hand betrayed me. I started consciously screaming in my own head that I wanted to stop. Practically crying inside, then crying inside as I realized I was dying of this. On the outside, my body kept the rhythm going–unwrap, stuff, barely chew, swallow, and repeat. No tears, no speaking, probably not even more than a dull glaze in my eyes. I hit rock bottom when I hit reality–I was suffering, and I was powerless to stop me. I was not the master of my destiny, as I thought. I was not able to put down the food, which I said I could any time I wanted to–but I didn’t want to (so, nyah, would say with emotions and actions my bratty inner resentfully rebellious addict). Ever the addict, I blamed the food, blamed others for “making me feel bad” and forcing me to this. But that first truth was groundbreaking and illusion-shattering:
     
      I cannot live like this any more.
     
      That was the beginning of looking into myself for potential answers. What I came up with: surgery, a national diet plan, or Overeaters Anonymous. The weekly fees of national diet plans, which didn’t work before, were prohibitive and would take money we needed to live. I didn’t need the guilt of wasting the money and still failing. That shame would have caused a dramatic weight gain, especially after I got resentful for being forced into a one-size-fits-all diet with one purpose–lose weight to look good for others, not feel healthy for myself.
      The next was surgery. Between the potential pain of recovery from elective surgery, the threat of vomiting if I accidentally ate too much, and the realization that my abdominal cavity would be inflated (and the air had to go out some way) made it unpalatable.
      The last option standing was Overeaters Anonymous. A dollar or two per week (instead of twenty or more at a weekly diet program weigh-in meeting), and I avoided going under the knife. Would it work? Probably not, I reasoned. However, it was the cheapest and least invasive answer.
      It took the reading, Our Invitation to You, to make me completely sure I belonged in OA; I was home among people who knew what it was like to be a slave to food and filled with despair, and they had welcomed me with open arms. What I believed was a private Hell of one turned out to be a group problem. And this group had a solution, an alternative to try. Use what alcoholics had used for decades; treat food like an addict substance.
      Yes, I had the same doubt I think most people familiar with 12-Step programs face at the outset: Um, but I have to eat to survive! I can’t just put down the fork and walk away from food. That’s how OA (and, in turn the S-groups) differ from other 12 Step groups. We have to identify the poisonous part and excise that, even as we practice the healthy part. Little did I know the choice of food as my physical addict-substance would help me with my core toxic love addiction. My food addiction mirrors in all things the toxic love addiction and real love anorexia. Every broad awareness in OA translates into both, and it comes down to the core of 12-Step programs–cut out the poison and search within for our answers instead of searching at the bottom of a bag of snack food, or the bottom of a dime bag (or pill bottle), or the bottom of a bottle, or the last cigarette in the pack, or under the sheets. Pare away the diseased behaviors and embrace the healthy ones. Appreciate our scars for what they are, for they remind us how far we’ve progressed from being a slave to a poisonous life.
     
      Logically, we wouldn’t choose to poison ourselves. I mean, people who profess that they want to “enjoy life” don’t chase down a container of Drano and drink it. It’s like that story in Chapter Three of the Big Book, where Jim (an alcoholic who’s been dry for a while) stops for a sandwich and puts whiskey in milk. He rationalized that it would be okay if it was in milk. After all, milk is healthy, right? He didn’t put tranquilizers in milk, because they weren’t his addiction. He didn’t put in tons of white sugar (something adherents of the White-Food-Free Abstinence would possibly understand). No, he put his addict substance into it. And every non-alcoholic looks and is likely baffled by it. Who the Hell puts whiskey in milk? That’s insane! We forget, however, the many things we did that were food-madness. I mean, how sensible is it to douse a cup of salad with a half-cup of dressing? Or how sensible is it to make a bowl of buttercream frosting and eat it with a spoon? (I’ve done that.) Or how sensible is it, and I am pretty sure this is a classic for many of us, to purchase a roll of pre-made cookie dough and eat it out of the package? And among those, who of us ate it like a submarine sandwich, forgoing a spoon? (I have done both.) Eaten a frozen cheesecake. (Yup, me, too.) Ate chocolates off the floor. (And used the “ten-second rule” as an excuse.) Ate pancake batter or unbaked bread dough. (That’s me, too.) Eat a half-gallon of ice cream and hide the container. Eat a pound of candy and hide the container. Eat a whole eight-or-nine-inch pie, and hide the container. Eat a box of snack crackers or a bag of chips and (everyone sing along) hide the container. And we think we’re so flipping sneaky and clever and smart when we dig through the trash to set it in the midpoint, covered by the healthy food we intended to eat but let rot as we chose our trigger foods. While I don’t recall eating out of the trash, I don’t really think I left enough on anyone’s plate (mine or others’) to eat out of the trash. However, it doesn’t mean I didn’t blank it when I was in compulsivity; I just don’t remember because the two rules are so hard-pressed to each other that I had to live in delusion to avoid completely mentally breaking. We do these insane behaviors, however. We do it, and we think whiskey in milk is insane, because it’s not our addiction. It doesn’t need defending. It doesn’t need rationalization. Our addiction, however, gets the VIP-treatment, gets a free pass to some of the most disturbing behaviors we can come up with.
      If that is not unmanageability, what the Hell is? I mean, eating in secret (though our bodies tell the truth), hiding the empties in the midden, and carrying that in our minds as we hope we don’t get caught. It’s exhausting to focus on a secret to the exclusion of everything else, to be irritable in order to distract people from our secret, to feel incredibly ill and poisoned and achy and queasy. To realize we can’t get high on any amount of food yet delude ourselves into thinking one perfect bite will be our salvation.
      That belief of the Holy Grail of food is out there (just like the Holy Grail of relationships is) leaves us completely powerless to stop the behavior. Just like I was powerless to stop my hand from diving into the bag even as I increasingly felt flu-like (poisoning) symptoms doing it. I was powerless, I had no willpower of my own. I was food addiction’s bitch, and it owned me completely–and I couldn’t understand why or how I got to that point.
     
      There is a gift in not understanding getting to that point. That gift is awareness. When we start practicing awareness regularly, questioning our insane behaviors and calling them out into the light as insanity, we accept an alternative must be found in order to survive. But first and foremost, we have to admit there is a problem. We have to admit that indulging the compulsive eating makes us ill. We have to admit that there is no miracle bite of food in the world which will cure our lives and make it unnecessary to go backwards. It’s like there’s a miracle out there which can undo the past shame-and-guilt-heavy choices we’ve made. And it does take a miracle to step away and accept that we chose. That no one forced us to buy and eat that food. Even codependents to food addicts, our “compulsive feeders”, can only use words. Words do not hold us in chairs and force-feed us. And even if a compulsive feeder does tie us up and force food into our mouths? We can spit it out. We have the ultimate choice to swallow what we put in our mouths, completing the commitment to eat. It is a choice. It is always a choice.
      That’s, I think, the gift of Step One. We have to be shaken aware, to accept utter defeat by the addiction, itself. The addiction is not the substance; it is the inability to put the substance down–for whatever reason. It doesn’t matter why, and analyzing why will only keep one trying to use rationalizations. Addiction is irrational, period. It is unmanageability. It it powerlessness over something which rules our lives and is expressed in the use of a substance to get high or to get numb. There is no alternative because there simply isn’t. I can’t fix a poisoning by drinking another poison; I can’t fix food addiction by shifting trigger foods. It is pervasive, unrelenting.
      The Step One admission is taking the leap of faith into the void. We have clung to the addiction for so long that we can’t imagine living even for a moment outside of it. Our lives are about putting energy into the hunt, into the compulsive use, into increasing dosage to get any high (or numbness) at all, into coming down, into returning to the hunt. There is no room for anything else–addiction is not only a full-time career, it is our hobby and our obsession. If I could have gotten paid for being a food addict, I would have been rich as Hell (restaurant reviewers savor food and the dining experience, which wouldn’t work because I wolfed food down without tasting it). I practiced food addiction like an Olympiad, training for the gold in compulsive eating all of the time. Admitting that I had put all of my energy into compulsive behavior to the exclusion of all else is wretched. It’s an admission I wasted my life.
      That’s what the other steps are for, to show us we didn’t waste our lives. We have experience, strength, and hope for those who are just waking up from their own addict-substance obsessions. We have a past littered with lessons about choices which left us unfulfilled. They were choices, too, whether or not we were aware they were at the time. Addiction is built on lies, so the lie that we only have one choice–to submit to addiction–is what we think. However, we know deep within us that there has to be an alternative. Otherwise, why would we have to sneak and rationalize when we practice our addictions? That comes up in our lives, even before we start on the long journey toward an existence of duality (addiction and recovery). I will never not be an addict, because I default to the addiction. It takes work to consider any choice and accept it is my choice. Do I choose the recovered solution every time? Hell no. However, I accept with gratitude and humility that I am fully aware I am responsible for the choice I make. For me, I found that responsibility through a 12-Step program. I am finding the duality which I have lamented over two years (and still will in the future, when I feel frustrated by a big challenge which forces me to use every 12-Step tool in my arsenal to maintain recovery–if I can) is a gift. There is no cure, but there is a decision I can make which will help me practice a solution and live outside of acting out the addiction. I have real-world effects to choosing recovery. I am physically slimmer by 100 lbs., and I can socialize without trying to manipulate people. Is it easy to maintain? Yes and no. Some days I’m less challenged, though the war inside my head and heart is still waged. I second-guess my actions all of the time, analyzing and criticizing with 20-20 hindsight. That’s the addicted behavior showing through. In recovery, I accept the choice, I look at the reality of it (What emotions did it trigger? What behaviors did I consider? Did I try to mind-read another’s intent?) and step out of the event. I glean what lessons I can take forward with me, and I learn about how my addiction manifests.
      This is a good example, one I am happy to be able to share. Yesterday, as I walked across the parking lot from my car toward the SLAA meeting room, a man in a large pickup stopped, leaned across his bench seat toward his open passenger window, and said, “Hello,” in a tone which triggered my social anorexia (and the approval/toxic love addiction). My response was to smile and wave as I went on with my own life. It should have ended there. I mean, it can be broken down into: A person I did not know greeted me, and I acknowledged the greeting. That, really, was the event.
      In the room, I started analyzing it. Was he hunting for someone to act out with? Did I send out ‘toxic love addict’ vibes? What did he intend? How do I react to it properly–be offended he dared try to invade my space or let him down gently or (and this freaks me out) manipulate him to find out if I can get something I want out of him? That glut of questions and the non-acceptance of the event (greeting, response, moving on) made me feel that anxiety. I wanted to know the unknowable. I wanted to have something to put into my logic pathing, so I could react in a way that was socially appropriate to those who would have seen it.
      The weird thing is, I did what was socially appropriate (and recovered). I didn’t know if he was someone from long ago from group who came back (he didn’t end up in the room). I acknowledged the greeting and returned to my goal of getting into a meeting. I was polite but didn’t enmesh at the time. Until I started enmeshing with the idea of that person–all acted out within my head and completely without the input of that other person–I had acted in recovery.
      I did assess my part in it at the end. I realized I acted in a manner authentic to me. Acknowledgement of my presence in the world was met with acknowledgement of his presence in the world. It didn’t go deeper than that. I didn’t engage the anorexia and give him the finger for invading my personal space by saying “Hello” (yes, that is how I see it sometimes) and I didn’t engage the acting out by fishing his life for something I could manipulate from him and his triggers which I could exploit to do it (yes, that is how I see it other times). In reviewing the experience, I realized I had stayed authentic to the event, that I didn’t circle the wagons or dig a pit trap.
      So, I now have a recovered solution if a situation like that goes beyond a “Hello” into a prey-predator situation. I simply say, “No, thanks.” I’m happily married (which is true), but adding that would engage the person and give an external reason (which potentially could be considered as a challenge to get around) as opposed to simply letting someone know I am simply uninterested. Why doesn’t matter. I’m just uninterested. Beyond that, I realized that I have an addict tendency to engage by saying “but thanks anyway” or “Sorry”. Those words after that statement are pure manipulation. They say, “but I am willing to keep engaging you to manipulate you.” By thanking the person (outside of the socially accepted yet completely benign, “No, Thanks”), I am saying, “You hit an acting out trigger. Wanna try to hit another?” By apologizing, it’s saying, “I want you to try harder to get through, so I can spot your triggers in passing and yank you around like my own personal b–ch on a short leash and choke chain. After all, I am still an addict, and I will eff you up if you get enmeshed with me.” I considered it, and no, I am not thankful for a person fishing for my toxic love triggers to use them against me. No, I am not sorry I am in the relationship I do want, and I am not sorry that the person is not going to be put into that place in my life. Therefore, stating today’s reality is the only truly honest answer: “No, thanks.”
      So, that’s how addiction makes me feel powerless and makes me feel life is unmanageable when I choose the same-old, same-old behaviors to try to change my life. I mean, I can’t expect to win a Grand Prix car race with a Fisher Price Power Wheels car toy. If I keep sitting my butt into the Power Wheels and assume some day I will be able to come in first at Le Mans–if I learn to drive it better–I am completely deluding myself. It’s not about learning to drive the toy car, it’s about not accepting that a Power Wheels has vast limitations in size and vehicular capability. To participate at all in a Grand Prix, I have to start by choosing where to put my energy–and that would be getting into the seat of a car which would be competitive at all. Then I take the time to put the energy into learning how to hone my skills through dedicated practice to become a Le Mans winner. Just like with recovery, I had to get out of the food and the toxic love (and anorexia in both) and into a 12-Step program. I now have the vehicle of a life of sanity and how to use it; by practicing it daily, the energy of being in lifelong recovery is manifested today. The more I practice, the more likely I will end up being able to make consistent recovered choices.
      And that all begins with admitting that what I was doing in addiction made my life absolutely unlivable.
     
      My name is Jess, and I am a food binge-arexic and toxic love addict and real love avoidant. I intend, over 2012, to put energy into really getting into the step corresponding with the month over that month. Since it’s January, I am going to be focused on Step One and how that powerlessness and unmanageability has manifested and still does. I intend to really consider what a thorough Step One means in OA and in SLAA, and I intend to progress at complete acceptance of Step One (which I don’t always do). I hope by really digging deeply into my personal experience with each of these, I can slide into 2013 having completed the steps to the best of my ability.

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