Heard in a Meeting, December 2019

I've been jotting down notes whenever I hear something great in a meeting, and I want to start to share some of them. None of this is mine; it's all from others.

Food protected me for a long time from things I couldn't feel. But eventually, the food hurt me more than what I was using it to avoid. The steps and the fellowship have given me other tools to use when I'm in pain. 

This resonated so much with me. When I was new in program and my food got clean, my life got really big really fast, and it was too much for me. I didn't know how to handle it so I ended up back in the food. Then my life got really small again, because when I'm in the food, I am in my bedroom eating in secret and eating in private. I can't have much of a life otherwise. 

Through slow and steady progress (not perfection), I've learned how to have a big, happy life without needing to rely on food to numb out. 

I've also heard "we are only as sick as our secrets." This share was all about how the 5th step helped her get the ugly secrets out so she could move on. 

The 7th step has not been a straight line for me. It's not like I worked my first seventh step and all my character defects were instantly removed. I've worked the steps a number of times and still have  most of my defects, but most of them have been lessened and lightened.  My defects are improved enough that I believe in the process, but I'm not sure they will ever go away entirely. 

Sponsorship has been such a gift of this program to me. If I had my way, when something hard comes up, I would rather just figure it out all on my own and then call my sponsor when I know what to do. And if I'm being honest, I still do that sometimes. But when I bring her in early, it usually works so much better. I always think I know what she's going to say, but I'm only right a small percentage of the time. She has time and experience and recovery in this program that I don't have, she's willing to give it to me freely . . . I must be crazy not to avail myself of that as often as possible!

This is an Al-Anon lesson for me. One of the goals in Alanon is to detach with love, and I swear it is just about the hardest thing. I often don't even know what it means or what it looks like. I'm good at detaching with hate or enmeshing with love. It's very hard for me to find the middle ground, but I'm slowly learning. I aspire to grow in this skill more. I usually get to practice it when people are not doing what I think they should be.