Honesty at the Office

When I came to program, I had been trying to find ways to comfort myself for years because I didn’t yet have the skills that I was taught when I came into Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous (FA) and started asking my sponsor for help and learning from more experienced members of FA. My mainstay for making the bad feelings go away (temporarily and which resulted in even greater pain and suffering later) was binging and purging. Some of the other behaviors that I adopted included stealing. Again, there is a theme of temporary distraction followed by devastating consequences. I started stealing food at a very young age, but when I was a child, it was charming. As an adult, it resulted in humiliation, financial repercussions and at times loss of freedom. And yet I couldn’t stop. Until FA, I didn’t have a way to stay stopped from bulimia or other behaviors that poisoned the possibility of having a good life where I felt safe, connected, healthy and whole.

I have been blessed to be in FA since the end of 2009. When I came into program, I had a lot of breaks in my abstinence so I asked experienced members to help me. They said that FA is a program of honesty. I wasn’t sure how to be honest and so it was very helpful to be able to ask my sponsor on our morning calls for help. Honesty started with the food. It was excruciating to ask her about my food, because I needed to change everything that I was doing with the food. However, one little question at a time, it was never too overwhelming and eventually I found myself with food practices that were simple and sparkly clean and that I happily continue to practice today. I never want to return to the hopeless food chaos of bulimia that I had been living in for nearly two decades before coming into FA.

I also learned that being honest is not blurting out everything that I know to everyone who asks. Additionally, I have been taught that being honest requires self-reflection and communication with my Higher Power in prayer and quiet time and the courage to bring things up on my calls that I am confused or scared or guilty or excited or happy about in that moment. In my past life, I did not share my joys and defeats because I knew that I wasn’t good enough and that nobody really cared. Today it is so different within my FA community. People genuinely care and I care about what my FA people share with me. The feelings of peace and contentment that I experience as a result of working my FA program have been what I was looking for in addictive eating and my stealing behaviors that I never found.

Recently, I have been noticing some guilt and fear popping up. As a result of doing AWOLs (A Way of Life, a study the Twelve Steps), I have learned to do spot check inventories and I didn’t see anything in my behaviors that would explain the feelings, so I asked God to take them and continued doing the next right action. However, I noticed the feelings returning here and there. Just a little. I mentioned them on my calls and when I would get a whiff of them, I asked God for help. This morning I brought it up on my sponsor call which, as it often does, helped me to see things in a new way.

As a result of Covid 19, I have been one of the few employees to continue to work at the office. I am single and I had volunteered to see critical need clients in the office as they need more than telehealth can offer. I realized that working in an empty office building has been reminding me subconsciously of my past life. I remember being a little kid in my parents’ home alone. When my parents left, I went for the food, the guns, the makeup and whatever else I was interested in. When I was older, I would often find ways to get access to empty buildings and then go through the contents of the buildings. I would raid refrigerators of office buildings, and rummage through vacant malls, empty houses up for sale, vehicles, schools, hospitals etc. I was always looking for something. (Today I know that I have found everything that I need in FA.) I wasn’t able to connect the dots until talking with my sponsor. I realize now that my guilt and fear are residual from the past. It is surprising to me how much damage to my psyche/soul I did prior to coming into program. Thankfully, I have been assiduously cleaning up the past with every additional AWOL that I complete. It is such a profound relief today to know that I am trustworthy and thus given full access to my office building and to churches where we will once again hold meetings after Covid restrictions conclude.

Certainly, I am grateful that I no longer binge and purge and that I need never fear gaining weight as long as I stay safely connected to my Higher Power and FA practices. But recovery is so much more than that. Working the Twelve Steps through my tools and AWOLs allows me to have the contented abstinence that removes the urge to seek false comfort through binging and purging, scavenging, theft, and trespassing. Contentment creates space for me to be curious about life and others and removes self-centeredness. Thus, I am able to do good work personally and professionally and feel a sense of worthiness and purpose. Today I have the Power and FA tools necessary to live a life that I had only dreamed was possible.