Step Two- “Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”
Recently I was asked to share on Step Two. Not my favorite step, it’s the one I sprint by on the way to Step Three, the really exciting one. So I had to take another look at it.
I link the number of each month to a Step. Then that’s the Step I focus on for the whole month. So, this month, October, is my Step 10 month. I read the Step in both the AA and OA 12 & 12 and ponder the relevant principle.
Rickicism No. 13
Since the most prevalent symptom of my disease is to forget what I must do each day, it becomes critical to my personal sense of well-being to start out on the right foot. Consider this contrast in approaches: A person wakes in the morning, goes over to the bedroom window, looks up at the sky and says, "Good morning, Lord!" Alternatively, but using essentially the same words, another person awakes in the morning, goes over to the bedroom window, looks up at the sky and says, "Good Lord, morning!"
It therefore becomes vital that I start out each day with a reasonably clear objective in mind in terms of my program. Mainly, it is to do some stretching and exercise, eat an abstinent breakfast, and get to a meeting at some point during the day, although frankly, mornings are best for setting the tone for my daily activities.
So I inquire, what have I gained or lost from the program? For starters, a decent weight loss to date and a sense of serenity that seems to go with the territory; secondly, a lack of concern about the future. After all, today is the tomorrow I worried about yesterday, and to my amazement, I find I am still here!
I had a victory today that I wanted to share. I was dreading a doctor appointment because the last time I was there, I did not feel heard. My old self would have gone home and binged after my appointment to make myself feel better. This behavior would spill into the next day, and the next, and the next to the point where I did not even realize what I was doing. It would become second nature. I would wake up a month later and wonder to myself, how did I get here? How did it get so bad? And then I would try to reign it in and control my compulsive eating with various diets or fasts and it would work for a bit, but then ultimately fail. And the cycle would repeat itself again and again with the next event and the next. This cycle applied to any situation where I felt I needed to control the outcome but could not. So, it did not even have to be a doctor appointment not going my way, it could have been any situation good or bad where I believed I needed a perfect outcome. I could have been celebrating a birthday where I believed it was “my day” and I deserved to have a perfect day.
Since working the steps, I take that same anxious energy that I used to try to control outcomes of any situation; and, instead of going to the food for ease and comfort to deal with the result, I now send 10th steps to my sponsor and go into action and turn my attention to helping someone else.
So, today, by the time the doctor appointment arrived, I was able to take my sponsor’s feedback of going into my doctor’s appointment with the new perspective of knowing I am not alone and there is a new solution. I was able to show up and be present by letting go absolutely. Absolutely, meaning my mind was quiet and open enough to allow my hp in to help guide me into letting go of my character defects that were wanting to gain control of the interaction. And the doctor appointment went well. And even if the doctor’s appointment did not go well, I would have had the same solution: I am not alone. Letting go absolutely works.
LY
"Today I know that change is constant." Voices of Recovery p. 327
What I wrote after finishing “Dr. Bob’s Nightmare” in our Big Book writing meeting:
This is a shocking story, partly because it points out so strongly the vulnerability to alcoholism that brilliant and highly accomplished people can have. For decades, Dr. Bob just couldn’t get it that he was permanently disabled from drinking sanely. He went to immense effort to make sure he could drink by arranging every detail in his life to make the habit sustainable. That effort became more massive at every turn, and the certainty of its failure grew ever more massive, too.
I did an equivalent thing with my addiction. It went from being a way to please my boyfriend to being the ruin of every important thing and almost every important relationship in my life. Only my parents were still there when I hit bottom, and they let me know I was causing them nothing but grief. All the while, I wanted desperately to stop my disordered eating; and I investigated every spiritual and secular avenue for recovery I could find. All to no avail.
Dr. Bob had to go through many dimensions of hell before he could stop drinking. I had to go through a 19-year relapse and a near-death experience before I could secure a foothold on sane eating. I couldn’t have done it without OA, nor without my near-death experience.
It is a testimony to the generosity of our higher power that so many addicts of all varieties are given chance after chance to begin recovery -- until, finally, the last brick is put in place to complete their path of surrender. A great songwriter and poet, Leonard Cohen, said, “There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” Some of us have to get cracked wide open by self-inflicted pain before we can give in to common sense. Only a higher power can be persistent and patient enough to stay with us until that surrender happens.
-S