I've had a sponsor now for a little over two weeks. She tells me that working the steps is the way she learned to be and stay abstinent. I am already abstinent, but I do feel a little bit like what I think AAers mean when they call someone a dry drunk. In other words, perhaps I'm not overeating or bingeing, but I certainly am clinging on for dear life at times. I certainly don't feel like I've had any moment of great surrender. The only way to get to that, though, I suppose, is working the steps. Maybe not the only way, but a pretty tried and true way it seems.
I didn't really understand at first what "working the steps meant," but through talking to my sponsor I came to see that a part of it is about spending time studying literature on the steps and responding to what I am reading--responding by talking to my sponsor, by writing about what I've been reading, and by contemplating what each step means to me as I gain greater understanding of what it means to others who have written about it.
Of course, for some steps, there are also actions to be taken (such as the "moral inventory" making required by Step 4). I am in no particular hurry to get to that one. ;)
To me, Step One is about a.) realizing that I cannot do it alone b.) fully recognizing the degree to which I am addicted to food, and the spirals I will continue to go through if I do not seek help for this addiction.
It's kind of humbling. Easy to get a little down on yourself thinking how unmanageable your eating has become. I know though that what I want more than anything is to be able to eat normally. I don't have the ability yet to do that. Do I know about nutrition? Yeah. Do I know what a healthy amount of food would be? Yeah. But I am a compulsive eater and what I know about healthy, moderate eating I am too weak to put into practice.
Even now, though I may be abstinent, I am not by any means "eating normally." Normal people don't have to go to meetings about their food addiction! They don't have to submit their daily food plans to a sponsor. They surely do not feel so neurotic about every meal and bite as I do in my abstinence so far. Their brain is not still consumed with thoughts of eating even between meals, as mine is.
Step One is humbling also because it asks us to admit we are "powerless." I had a lot of trouble with this at first. In fact, I am just now kind of coming to understand it. We are powerless. It is just a simple admission of the truth. If I had the power to change my compulsive eating, I would have done it a long time ago. I know this is true because I have wanted to stop eating compulsively, but all my efforts to do so have failed. So if I've wanted to stop overeating, but have yet to do so, then obviously I do not have the power to do so (at least not on my own).
If we stopped just at the admission of powerlessness things would look a bit fatalistic, but fortunately peeking ahead to Step Two we see how a Higher Power greater than us has the power that we do not, and we can trust that Higher Power to deliver us from our addictive behaviors, and even more than that, to deliver us from the "insanity" that goes along with it.
"It followed that, if we had no power of our own, we needed a power outside ourselves to help us recover." --Overeaters Anonymous, published 1980, pg. 3. *
*(I have a masters degree in English and know this is not any formally correct way of citing a source, but I don't care enough to remind myself how to do it :P ).
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