Traditional wording: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageble.”

Practical wording: “Admitted we were caught in a self-destructive cycle and currently lacked the tools to stop it.”

There are two parts to this step and I’ve known for a long time that i am totally powerless over certain foodstuffs (mainly chocolate and chocolate desserts). It’s less easy to see where our lives become unmanageable with food compared with alcohol which is so obvious in its impact. However, I wouldn’t have ended up in OA if life was manageable! And this was being acted out over food this time.

When i fell off the wagon on Easter Sunday, the mental obsession was back after the first mouthful and by Easter Monday, i was hoovering up Child3’s Easter stash and everything else i could get my hands on. i was back to calling into supermarkets on the way to work to get sugary snacks and doing ridiculous detours to go and seek out my latest sugary craving.

Jeffrey Munn says that this step is done when you know it is absolutely true and that you know that you can’t step out of it through willpower alone. Last time I did this step, i did it thinking “ok, i get the concept of something bigger than me, but ultimately it’s still down to me to put it all into action”, however the last three weeks I’ve really applied the use of prayer out loud or mantra-like in my head to ‘hand it over’ and it’s added a whole new dimension to it. It doesn’t feel like willpower this time.

In the traditional twelve steps of OA, there is a particularly powerful paragraph which talks about how we micromanaged and controlled so many aspects of our lives to make it seem manageable and that everything was tickety-boo. It says “if only others around us would do as we wanted. We thought everything would be fine if only… our spouses would give us the attention we need, if only our children were well-behaved, if only our parents would leave us alone.” I have a low tolerance of all those things and am like “if you don’t do as i want or think is best then i’ll just walk away and do just fine without you in my life”. The chapter goes on to talk about “the childish self-centredness of our willful actions. By trying to control others through manipulation and direct force, we had hurt our loved ones…. Even when we succeeded, it wasn’t enough to make us happy. We hid from our pain by eating compulsively, so we didn’t learn from our mistakes; we never grew up”. Guilty as charged.

it tells us that in step one we acknowledge that our current methods have not been successful and that we need to find a new approach to life.

it says that at “first we grasp this knowledge intellectually, and then finally, we come to believe it in our hearts”. I think that’s where the last few weeks have truly brought me.