The Second Step
Part 1 - Updated

"Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity."

My name is Dave, and I have a progressive, chronic, and possibly fatal compulsive eating disorder. I am in recovery today. I am truly grateful for this.

This month I’ll be sharing on the Second Step. For many, Step Two is the point in recovery where they recommit to their respective religions, often on new profound levels—and that’s all fine and well. However, we must keep in mind that there are those among us who have other paths—some of which we may not agree with or even understand. The Third Tradition states: “The only requirement for OA membership is a desire to stop eating compulsively.” That desire is the ONLY thing required to become and remain a member. It doesn’t say we have to believe in a supreme being, become members of any religious organization, buy into any religious belief system, or have a conversion experience. It does not say there are two separate classes of members; those who believe in a supreme being and those that don’t. There are strict Atheists, agnostics, neo-pagans, and all manner of the more traditional religions represented among our members. We must be mutually respectful and engage in no proselytizing. We must not judge or condem each other's choices about a higher and/or helping power(s). I will try to represent these Steps in a form that speaks equally to everyone and hope and pray that I offend or exclude no one. I personally find both the religious and the non-religious views of the Steps entirely compatible. To no degree do I find them as mutually exclusive. I also hope and pray that this forum does not degrades into a debate over religion or spirituality. This is an easy trap to fall into but its only purpose would be to divert us from our real purpose here—which is recovery.

"…We abstain from public controversy and will not quarrel among ourselves about those things that so rip society asunder: religion, politics, and reform. We have but one purpose, to carry the AA message to the sick alcoholic who wants it."

Bill Wilson, co-founder of A.A., in an article written in January 1955

In the AA book called “Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions" a sponsor is talking to his charge about Step Two and says: "…First, Alcoholics Anonymous does not demand that you believe anything. All of its Twelve Steps are but suggestions. Second, to get sober and to stay sober, you don't have to swallow all of Step Two right now. Looking back, I find that I took it piecemeal myself. Third, all you really need is a truly open mind. Just resign from the debating society and quit bothering yourself with such deep questions as whether it was the hen or the egg that came first. Again I say, all you need is the open mind."

Reprinted from Alcoholics Anonymous, with permission of A.A. World Services, Inc

Step One is sometimes called the "I Can’t" Step. In the First Step we realized how our eating disorder affected our lives. We admitted the truth about our situation—that our best thinking and all our personal will power could not keep us from our compulsive eating problems. But fortunately, this sort of powerless does not mean hopeless. It just means we cannot do it by ourselves. In Step One we quit trying to fight our disorder alone.

Step Two is sometimes called the "We Can" Step. In working Step Two we identify a source of help and a direction for sane living. We freely choose a higher and/or helping power(s) that is believable and makes sense to us. This source of help, or "higher power", may be spiritual in nature or it may not be—it can be a combination of things. The main point is that we begin to believe that with this new source of help, we can change our thinking and actions and learn to manage our compulsive eating disorder in a healthy and constructive way.

I like to start with the last part of Step Two. It implies that we had lost our sanity by suggesting it needs to be restored, "…could restore us to sanity." We have already delved into our distorted thinking and peculiar behaviors while working the First Step, but this word, sanity/insanity, seems awfully strong. As a person who lives with and has to manage a chronic psychiatric disorder on a daily basis, I am not entirely happy with this choice of words. But then again, I find it uncomfortably accurate and accept it as it relates to my thinking and behaviors where eating food is concerned.

Irrational thinking and motives, compulsive self-destructive behavior, obsession, unmanageability, chaotic, painful or pain filled, denial, loss of self-control, self-delusion, a pattern of lying and secretiveness, isolation, cognitive distortions, disordered thinking, and shame. All of these phrases could describe elements of my binge eating and yo-yo dieting, or they might be used to define the term insanity. One dictionary I have defines sane as, “marked by sound judgment, and mentally healthy." It certainly wasn’t sound judgment that directed me to continue eating way past the needs of my body until I was sick and do it all over again the next day. It wasn’t any measure of self-control that caused me to binge within hours of starting a new diet. It wasn’t a healthy self-image and self-esteem that kept me hiding indoors for months by myself. It wasn’t any measure of honesty that triggered my countless diets thinking each time that this would be the one that finally worked. It wasn’t even reasonable to think that I was actually fooling anybody when I bought two or three Happy Meals at the burger joint only to go home and secretly eat all of them myself. I was behaving in ways that were a horrible burden on my body and I could not stop myself. No. I don’t like the word insane with all the useless/destructive stigma attached, but my behavior was indeed not sane. There is no more accurate word. When I think in these terms I can easily see that I need to be restored to sanity, to be restored to sound judgment and to begin living in a mentally healthy way.

Another description of sanity I like is, "stability and balance based on sound beliefs and behaviors." That certainly could never describe my behavior where food and dieting was concerned. Nothing stable or balanced there—no sound beliefs and almost no reasonable behaviors. Some of us have been affected by our eating disorders from very early ages or for so many years that our sick behavior and thinking is all we know. Maybe we don’t really know what “normal" is. These things have never been in our personal frame of reference. Some of us may have spent our childhoods in households that were in some way dysfunctional. Perhaps a parent was alcoholic, or engaged in compulsive overeating. Stress and unhappiness may have been the rule and not the exception. We may have lacked healthy role models. How can we learn things like what “normal" is. How could we learn what dynamics make up a healthy relationship, what are appropriate personal boundaries, how to make and keep real friends, how to properly give and receive love, or how to truly forgive ourselves and others. How could we learn what a healthy relationship to food is—all by ourselves. We need help to learn the healthy beliefs and behaviors that lead to stability and balance.

The best description of the insanity of having a compulsive overeating disorder I’ve seen is in the book called “The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions of Overeaters Anonymous" that is put out by Overeaters Anonymous (Chapter on Step Two that starts on page 9). I highly recommend that book. The first three chapters of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous are also filled with descriptions of the insanity of addictive thinking and its resulting behaviors.

Food of course is not an intoxicant like alcohol or drugs are so this insane and unsound thinking is more fundamental to the disease process than to the substances we consume. Actually, this is true of alcoholism and drug addiction too. This is the big reason that simply removing the substance is only the very beginnings of recovery. This is one of the main reasons why diets don’t work. This is why few if any alcoholics can’t "stay stopped" without help from a power greater then themselves and, why we who suffer from chronic compulsive overeating can’t control our eating with willpower, self-knowledge, and even with the help of all our diet books and self-taught nutritional expertise. Booze, drugs, and even food to some lesser degree, can all impart a sort of chemically induced poisoning of our brains and various systems that can change our moods for a short period of time, but it is the thinking that we do before and after we overeat, get drunk, or high, that is really bazaar and difficult to explain. In our most sober moments we forget how powerless we have been to control our compulsions. We recall in exaggerated detail all the good times and good feelings associated with stuffing ourselves with food but remember none of the bad—this is called euphoric recall. We seek relief from the pain of obesity and life in huge bowls of ice cream or bags of chocolate drops yet overeating those very foods are the cause of our misery. We try repeatedly to change our unhappy world by means that, at best, can only temporarily modify our feelings. We behave like addicts, blindly chasing that elusive state of escape or euphoria—if indeed it actually ever really existed. Perhaps all we were really doing was shifting the focus of our attention away from our boredom or unhappiness to the food.

Since the Twelve Steps are a suggested guideline for rebuilding our lives and Overeaters Anonymous is a program of personal freedom and choice, it really helps to have an idea of what this "sanity" thing is really all about. We each can define the sanity we want. Of course we can’t know precisely how our future will unfold as we continue on with our recovery, but it is worth having some reasonably realistic and moderate idea of the direction we wish to go. For instance, we may wish to work at reducing the chaotic frenzied pace of our lives by building some more order into our days and learning relaxation techniques. We may decide that improving our ability to communicate more effectively would greatly aid our self-esteem and problem solving skills. We may feel that more education, new hobbies, and improving our social life are areas that we would like to work on. We may decide that some personal therapy would be helpful in dealing with depression or abuse issues. We may want to learn how to become less reactive or stop being overly sensitive to those around us. We may want to heal old resentments and wounded relationships. And of course we want our weight stabilized and the obsession with food and diets lifted. We want to be able to make sound and reasonable choices about our food. Most of these goals require a teacher, a coach, some instructional materials, a therapist, a friend, a doctor, or other help that is greater in knowledge and experience that we are. Even my O.A. home group is a power greater than myself in that there is a lot of practical experience there and understanding.

Questions for journaling and contemplation.

Feel free to explore these questions in their entirety, in part, or selectively, with the group, but please understand it is not required. My only wish is that you will find them useful.