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OA Recovery: 40 Days of Abstinence

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I have decided not to return to that face to face meeting. I believe that it’s a really low-level meeting since only one person seems to have abstinence for any length of time and she was the one who told my husband to leave — at an open meeting. Some people argued that I should go and help raise up the level of the meeting. Some people thought I was not far enough along in my recovery to do something beneficial for that meeting. I thought that I didn’t have the time or energy to waste on a meeting with toxic people.

I am no longer really concerned about losing weight. Yes, I want to lose it, but focusing on the steps has kind of shifted my focus away from losing weight. I have lost 8.5lbs since January 1st, only by cutting out sugar. It’s kind of funny, this past week, my meals have kind of sorted themselves out. I have been finding regular foods to eat, I have mostly been packing my lunch, and I mostly know what foods I will be eating each day. I think it’s kind of ironic because I couldn’t really do it before. I guess I have just reached the right part of my recovery where it’s become easier for me!

I have now reached step 4 in my journey of overeating recovery. It requires that we make a moral inventory. I read through the chapter on step 4, which just gave a lot of reasons why this moral inventory was necessary. My sponsor also said that this is the point where people tend to disappear from OA. When I asked her why, she said it was because it’s too tough and too emotional and people tend to overeat as a result. It was a good reminder for me.

They call it a “fearless” moral inventory and stated that a lot of people are dishonest with themselves. I knew that the only real way I tend to be dishonest with myself was about food, so I assumed that this step would be easier for me. The OA book Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions has a laundry list of questions that seemed quite daunting. My sponsor said she preferred the AA forms for that and e-mailed me three forms — one about resentment, one about sexual conduct, and one about fears.

My resentments took up two whole pages. I had a lot of people and institutions I held resentment towards. My gaslighting, emotional-abusing ex-husband took up almost half a page on his own. Other fall-out from that divorce, the friends I have lost over it, and things I stopped doing because he “ruined” the experience took up another half page. The rest were other times where I had mostly believed that I was wronged by other people. After writing in why I was angry, I had to “own” the resentment and figure out why it was my fault. I had some issues with this. I complained to my sponsor: how can I take responsibility for a gaslighting, emotional-abusing ex-husband and the friends that believed the lies he told them about our breakup!? I didn’t even realize that I was emotionally abused or gaslighted until over a year after our split. She said I should just write that I am at fault for holding onto it for too long. I did that for a while. Then I realized that I trusted people too blindly and expected too much of these people who were clearly not my friends. Then I re-read the chapter saying that this step is supposed to help me trust people again. Wait, what!? I had just come to the conclusion that I had trusted people too much.

The rest of my resentments were a mish-mash of issues — everything from being upset that my sister wants to live across the country (because I love her and I miss her), someone who denied me a scholarship even though I was the only one who met the requirements for it, a friend who was a pathological liar, a friend who broke off the friendship claiming that I was using her, all of the schools that fired me for being Pagan, etc. Anyway, I was hurting inside to relive all of these episodes where people and institutions made me angry. I didn’t overeat or eat any sugary foods, but once my husband knew I was upset and he was very helpful about trying to make me feel better.

The remaining two lists were comparatively easier. One great thing about being Pagan is that sex is part of the religion (“all acts of love and pleasure are my rituals”), so we don’t get shamed for having sex. I feel no shame for it. However, there were a few times where I didn’t say “no” with enough conviction when I was still healing from the emotional abuse. There were sometimes when I used my sex appeal to help me feel better about myself significantly earlier in my life, sometimes giving guys the wrong idea. Honestly, the sex section really only had 6 entries.

I was glad that I saved the fear section until last. Thinking about my resentments, I have a lot of fears due to them. A fear of not being good enough. A fear of rejection. A fear that no community would ever accept me being Pagan. I pushed to get these all done in one day so I didn’t have to feel bad for two days in a row. I asked what was next and my sponsor said I had to read step 5 and discuss my answers with her. I read chapter 5, which seemed to outline why it was important to share my lists with another human being. Both my sponsor and I agreed that we would save that for next weekend.

Tidying Up: Step 4 – Komono – Spiritual Items

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Since I started this blog as a spiritual journey, I figured I would tackle the spiritual items first. Since I moved, these were scattered in various locations throughout my bedroom, cluttering up everything. I made a pile intending to take care of it right away. However, I ended up letting it sit for a week instead. My altar is an old TV stand, so it just has two shelves to hold everything. In the past, I had a whole drawer elsewhere dedicated to divination items. I had my drum, incense, and various other articles located on my bedroom bookshelves.

My pile of spiritual stuff. I daresay many people would have a bigger pile than I do!

I made three piles: one of items that I LOVED. One was stuff to give away or throw away. The third had items I wasn’t sure about. I was thorough. I took all of my seashells out of their container and went though them. I took all of my gemstones out of their container and went through them. The majority of the items I wasn’t sure about ended up being kept, but I am happy and proud to say that everything now fits underneath my altar now, even my drum!

Willful and Unintentional Invalidations

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There are people in this world who prey upon others by purposely invalidating the experiences of others. Doing this constantly is called gaslighting. That was my experience with my ex-husband. I entered the relationship a strong, independent female. I left it seven years later an emotional wreck. I didn’t trust my inner voice. I couldn’t make simple decisions. I lost my trust in people having lost almost all of my friends (they all believed the lies he told them when we broke up). And while that was 6 years ago, I have not yet fully recovered today. I think I am significantly better, but I still haven’t recovered. It’s tough losing your husband and almost all of your friends in one fell swoop. I was devastated. It didn’t help that the few people I still trusted didn’t really know how to react when I told them what happened. I was met most often with sympathetic silence or disbelief. With such limited success, I stopped telling people about it. I kept to myself and stopped trusting others. I stopped making new friends and distanced myself from the few friends and family I had left to me. I lost many years to misery and snatching bits of myself back piece by piece. Each piece was a struggle and a fight.

However, there are people that just unintentionally invalidate the experiences of others. I have had some issues with a few of them lately. I confided in one of them who knew my ex-husband and I thought was “on my side”. This person told me that since my ex-husband didn’t realize what he was doing it didn’t make him a bad person and that I should really get over it already. It killed me to hear that. After all of the things that my ex-husband has done to me, it shouldn’t fucking matter if he realized what he was doing. The damage was still done. It hurt so badly that after all this time and all of the struggle this person had seen me go through trying to become the person that I wanted to be that I was still not believed or supported. It just reinforced the damage done to my trust of others by my ex-husband and those “friends” that believed his lies.

Another time something like this happened recently was when someone overheard me talking about OA (overeaters anonymous) . That’s something else that I talk about that is again met with stony silence. Nobody seems to know what to say. I can only guess what their thought processes are. I have known people who have done AA. Whenever they talk to someone about it, they have been met with sympathy and support. In this case, I was met with disbelief. I explained the exact nature of my eating issues and she claimed that everyone was like that, that she was like that. I bit my tongue because I wanted to tell her that maybe she needed to do OA too. I didn’t know this person well enough to feel she had violated my trust, but I happen to know this person is a UFO enthusiast and interested in people looking for bigfoot. So the fact that she couldn’t extend her belief to consider that some people can be addicted to certain foods in the same way others are addicted to alcohol was astounding to me.

In the first example of my ex-husband, while he may not have known what he was doing, he was certainly getting the feeling of power from it. In the second and third examples, it was clearly not intentional and I don’t think that they intended to do harm. However, when you tell someone their experiences are not what they were is invalidating them, their inner voice, and their assessment of the world. It wasn’t like we were debating facts. We were debating my life and my point of view. How do you even combat that? You don’t. It is my life and my experience. Be a good friend and show support regardless of your opinion of my experience. Or at the very least hold your tongue. This is yet another case of “If you don’t know what the other person is going through, hold your tongue.” Or “Don’t judge others. Everyone is fighting his own battle.”

Imbolc With My Family

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As I think I have stated before, we are trying to celebrate the Pagan sabbats (holidays) more as cultural holidays. For Imbolc, we planned to do a thorough cleaning of the house, to purify it, and have a dinner with my family with Imbolc-appropriate foods. My husband and I spent the first half of the day dusting, sweeping, vacuuming, and mopping our house. Even though there were still several areas that needed work, the areas that had been attended to (clothes, books, and papers) were starting to be happy areas amid the rest of the chaos. I was actually starting to be happy with how our house was looking!

Afterwards, we all went to go see two houses that were for sale in our area in our price range. Our price range was low and everything was in a “fixer-upper” category. We’ll see how the process goes!

We got back later than expected. I was going to make cheese pull-apart bread and my husband was going to make sugar-free brownies. He was also going to make homemade cheese curds for poutine (french fries with gravy and cheese curds). He did make the fries from scratch though. They were delicious! Everyone but me had iced cream for dessert.

In talking over the holiday with my mom and step-dad, they seemed to think that there should be something more to the holiday than they saw. Not being Pagan, I expected them to just want to eat dinner with us. However, I guess they wanted some weird Pagany stuff. I told them that divination was common and I could get out my tarot cards if they wanted (I’m really very bad at them, but I’m working to get better). Luckily for me they declined. Lighting candles is a big part of Imbolc, but I couldn’t figure out what we were going to do after those candles were lit! Although at the end of the evening, I realized story telling was also a good idea, so maybe we will try that next year!

Recovery – 33 Days of Abstinence

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I got started with a new sponsor. She seemed to be very thorough and to-the-point (which I like). She gave me a list of eating behaviors and asked which ones I did. She then gave me a bunch of rules that I needed to follow in addition to abstaining from sugar. I don’t remember all of them because many were non-issues for me. The ones I do remember are: don’t eat standing up, eat slowly, do not do anything else while eating (like play on your phone or watch tv), do not take seconds, do not hide your eating, do not eat in the car, and only weigh yourself once a week. I argued for weighing daily and for our movie night once a week where we share a big bowl of popcorn. She was willing to allow movie night, but not weighing more often than once a week. She did not ask that I provide her with my food ahead of time and seemed to trust that I was following the guidelines, which I was. There was one exception, but I figured it wouldn’t count. I wanted a banana for a snack. However, my son loves bananas and would want one if he saw me eat it. We only allow him one banana a day because they make him constipated and he already had one that day. So I ate a banana while standing and hiding so my son wouldn’t put up a fuss (he’s only one and a half).

With this new sponsor, I was flying through the steps. She had me read each step in the book and then discuss the step with her. There seemed to be some pivotal questions to answer and then I was onto the next step. Today I reached step 3: “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.”  I knew I would have to deal with this eventually. I prayed and meditated for weeks hoping to find a deity willing to take on me and my recovery. Instead, I was met with silence. I finally decided to use “my-best-and-highest-self” or “Goddess-within-me” as my higher power. I’m glad I did, because when I thought about turning my will and life into the care of an outside deity, I think I would have had a more difficult time doing it. Instead, I could definitely turn my will and life over the best version of myself. Gods know, I am certainly not the best version of myself right now, but she is in there somewhere.

I attended my fourth meeting today. I had even convinced my husband to attend (albeit in the back). He has eating issues but is still convinced he can handle them on his own. Even so, he was curious about what happened at these meetings. He was called out at the beginning of the meeting for not being part of it. The woman who did this was the only sponsor in the room (what a great example). She claimed she was concerned about anonymity (even though this was an open meeting) and told him to go sit in another room. I was annoyed but stayed because I am abstinent for 33 days today and was looking forward to getting my coin for 30 days of abstinence.

The meeting continued with their usual announcements at the beginning, including “children are welcome so long as they are supervised”. My 1.5 year old son was there, giggling, running around and smiling at everyone. He was never an issue before. In fact, I was told to bring him back because he was a sweet boy. Now I am not one of those parents who is deluded in thinking that my terror of a son is a sweet boy. My son did not scream or cry. He didn’t even babble much and when he did it wasn’t that loud. They asked if my husband could look after my son. I said he could for today, but that there were days when I would have to bring him. I brought my son to my husband in the other room who suggested we leave. I agreed with him and started crying because I really felt unwelcome. One woman came out and apologized for the others and begged me not to give up OA because of it. I told her I didn’t intend to, but that I wasn’t going to drive an hour to go to that meeting again either. I was livid. There were no other meetings within an hour drive of me (except for the ones that met when I was at work). I never did get my coin.

I received a phone call from one of the members of the meeting about an hour later. Apparently after I left, they were all discussing how they could have handled it better. They decided to add language at the beginning of the meeting to mention that all who were interested in OA were welcome at the meeting. Unfortunately, they also changed the language at the beginning of the meeting from “all children are welcome if they are supervised” to “all children are welcome, but they must be in a different room from the meeting.” There is no way in hell I’m putting my one and a half year old in another room by himself (or with another child). So basically I can only go when I had child care, meaning my husband would stay at home with him when he could. That also meant that he could not come to meetings with me. I am very angry that this happened. I resent them for the way they treated my family today. I also resent them for changing the rules so I could no longer attend regularly. I am told that the next step is all about resentments, so this next step should be fun.

Tidying Up: Step 3: Papers

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I didn’t expect to have any problems with this step. I would be separating out any sentimental papers, so I really didn’t expect to have any issues. One thing Marie Kondo says is that you have to take ALL of the papers throughout the house and pile them in one place. I did not realize I had that many papers to go through. I also didn’t expect how long it would take me to go through all of these papers. I managed to do all of the books in a few hours. It took about 6 hours just to finish the first half of the sorting. By the time I had finished, I was left with only three smaller piles of papers, I was sick of looking at papers, so I took a break.

I resumed working on the papers a few days later and that took a few hours as well! While Marie Kondo is able to really only have three folders (important papers, warranties, and stuff that needs to be done), I was pretty pleased with how few papers I had left. There is also another folder I keep upstairs of spiritual papers that I wanted to keep. Some of them were from classes I took or rituals that I liked, but there weren’t that many of them.


Recovery – 21 Days of Abstinence

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I have now been abstinent from sugary foods for 21 days now. It has been one hell of a journey so far. For the first two weeks, I was detoxing from all of the sugar. I wanted it. I craved it. Because I couldn’t have it, I overindulged on other foods. I was concerned for a time that it might be another food issue I have, but then after about day 15, I stopped wanting extra foods at meals.

That was around the first time that I managed to make it to an OA (overeaters anonymous) meeting. I had tried a few times, but due to the holidays and meetings that were no longer active, I finally found this meeting (and made sure to call first). It started with the serenity prayer and a bunch of other stuff that was read. It seemed like a ritual, so I guessed it was said every time. The best part was when people shared. One of them mentioned that after the physical detox was over, I would have emotional issues to contend with. She said that all of the feelings and issues that you ate to cover up would now show up and need to be dealt with. I had no idea how right she would be.

For the past week, I was angry, sad, depressed, but most of all I was distracted. My work started to suffer because I was having problems planning my lessons and getting things done that needed doing. It was a struggle, but I think the idea of having made it so far that I didn’t want to start over again helped.

I also had problems with my first sponsor. She wanted me to tell her what I was going to eat each day before I ate it. I really struggled with this for a few reasons. First, there are so many different resources out there with conflicting statements about “good” and “bad” foods, so I found myself in a state of chronic indecision about what to eat. Second, not knowing what to eat, we didn’t end up picking up any foods for me for lunch and so I didn’t have anything to eat, so I never knew what I was going to have. I found out later that this is a common tool for people to tend to overeat in general, but since my issue is with a specific food, it really didn’t apply to my situation. She also wanted me to fill out this checklist every day. I found out later that it was part of the 10th step and I was on step 1. I thought. I wasn’t sure because she sent me these lengthy emails with a ton of reading to do and questions to answer. She contacted me and said I needed to start doing those things on a daily basis (which I really struggled with doing) or she would drop me as a sponsee. She was doubtless doing what she thought was best for me. Some people need the “tough love” approach, but I was doing fine, so I found another temporary sponsor online.

Tidying Up: Step 2: Books

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I LOVE books! I thought this step was going to be very difficult. Our bookshelves were overflowing with books. There also was no room on them for my husband’s small collection of books. I know Marie Kondo disapproves of keeping the same classification of items in different places, but I keep my spiritual (a.k.a. Pagan) books upstairs near my altar. I do this for many reasons. First, when I am at my altar is when I will likely be reading or using these books. Second, I don’t like to display my Pagan books when it’s possible that people will stop by who won’t know I’m Pagan and I don’t want them to know that I’m Pagan. I also keep our cookbooks in the kitchen, for obvious reasons.

Also I have seen a lot of memes on various social media sites poo-pooing Marie Kondo because they took a quote from her out of context, so I thought I should address it. She says that she has managed to pare down her own personal book collection to 30 books. People took that to mean that you should only have 30 books. On the contrary, she does not tell people how many books they should have. In fact, she just wants us book-lovers to have a bookshelf full of books that we absolutely love and gives us joy. Who wouldn’t want to love every book they have on their shelf!?

So, according to the directions for this step, I took all the books and piled them up in the middle of the room. I did get rid of a large box of books, as did my husband. I also had a number of books that I was “undecided” about. After the first round, there were two boxes filled with books and a few piles that I didn’t know what to do with.

I sorted those books into the following piles: sentimental books (books that belonged to my now deceased grandmother about Norway or teaching Norwegian), spiritual books that I might like to review on my blog before I get rid of them, books that I would like to keep for my son one day, books related to a hobby that I quit that I may start again, but that I am very emotional about (long story), and books that I might like to read again someday, and books I will probably need for work.

Before
After

I took the sentimental books and put them in a place to be sorted with my sentimental items at a later date. I separated the spiritual books I wanted to review for my blog from the ones I actually liked and resolved to get rid of them in a year if I didn’t get to them by then. I kept the books for my son until he’s old enough to decide what to do with them (there were only 4 of them). I also kept the books related to the hobby until I can come to a definitive decision whether or not to give up that hobby permanently. I separated the books that I might like to read again and resolved to throw out any that I did not read within the next year. The books for work went to work where I have bookshelf space for them.

Before
After
Before
After (but the top section has sentimental and craft items that need to be sorted)

I Think I’m A Compulsive Overeater

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I have been thinking a lot lately about my eating behaviors and how I have struggled time and again to follow an eating plan — any eating plan. It wasn’t that big a deal before. I blamed hypothyroidism and having a baby. To be fair, both contributed greatly to my current weight. Even so, I thought about how finding sweets, especially chocolate, to snack on almost seemed like a need. With my cholesterol how it is, following a diet may literally be the difference between life and death and I couldn’t even stick with it for two weeks. That’s when I realized that I had a problem.

My specific abnormal food behaviors are as follows:
– I eat when I’m not hungry
– There are times when I eat so much that I feel sick
– I have feelings of guilt, shame, and embarrassment over the way I eat and the way I look
– I eat sensibly in front of others and make up for it when I’m alone
– My eating is affecting my health
– My eating behaviors are making me unhappy
– I have tried fasting or severely restricting my food to try and lose weight
– I have eaten food that was very stale
– There are certain foods that I can’t stop eating after I have the first bite
– I have lost weight by following a diet, only to gain it all back by binge eating
– I spend too much time thinking about food and planning my next diet

After some internet searches, I found the Overeaters Anonymous website. I took their quiz and found that I had about half of the abnormal food behaviors on the list. I looked for some meetings in my area. The closest ones were 40 minutes away and happened at 10am on two weekdays a week. Wtf, do they expect only housewives to have this problem!? I found an online meeting group and an online support group. I posted there, explained that I was new, told them about my problem, and asked for advice. The advice was to get some of the literature, attend a meeting, and find a temporary sponsor.

The book and workbook came in and I found a Pagan sponsor! I was excited about this because it’s tough to trust in a higher power when I believe in so many. I was hoping since she understood the nature of Paganism, she would be able to help me with this when the time was right. I read the first two chapters of the book and really related with a lot of it. My sponsor asked me a lot of questions. I was surprised at the answers to some of them. One of them was that I was scared to start. After a lot of thinking and soul-searching on the topic, I discovered that I was afraid to give up sugar. i was afraid of never tasting it again. And that never tasting some of the foods that I really loved saddened me. I realized then that must be how an alcoholic feels about taking a drink. I understood in that moment that I truly am an addict — to sugar.

Over the holidays, we visited a number of people and I watched myself closely. My son is starting to notice these patterns and behaviors in me. My mom had a bowl of mini-m&ms set out. I kept going back for handful after handful. Every time I did, my son would hear my hand in the bowl and ran over asking for “more”. He’s learning my eating behaviors from me by watching me. I tried to control myself for his sake and failed. I kept going back for more and more m&ms. She must have kept refilling them because the bowl was never empty. I had a similar issue at my mother-in-law’s house with my favorite cookies.

Because of this, my sponsor and I decided that I should start by abstaining from sugary foods. Out of the four days I tried, I succeeded one. I suppose that was a huge success, but I felt like a failure. I am feeling a little lost in the process at the moment.

Tidying Up with Marie Kondo

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I started watching this show on Netflix one day to help me get some motivation to tidy up our house. I found Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. I binge-watched these over a matter of days (I know there are only 8 episodes, but I have a job and a toddler). I started to work on my clothes first. Clothes weren’t that big a deal for me. Since I had given birth, I was a larger size than before I got pregnant, so I needed new clothes. As such, I only had a few clothes that actually fit me. I did end up getting rid of stained clothes and a few pieces that I just don’t wear. Then I folded them up in the special way she insists on folding them. It was funny because as I ran my hand along the clothing to fold them in the right way, I felt a small energy exchange between my hand and the clothing. I actually enjoyed folding my clothes this way. I also liked how they looked when I opened the drawers.

Yes, I had officially drunk the Marie Kondo Kool-Aid. I visited my local library and took out her book since the shows really don’t address Step 2: Books or Step 3: Papers. It was a quick and satisfying read. I took a “before” video to show how our house looks on the average day. While I was reviewing this video I realized two things: this house is nowhere near as bad as some of the ones I have seen, but this house is worse than I thought it was in other respects.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ5TXZarLcI
My house before tidying up the Marie Kondo way (to be fair, I already did the clothes at this point)