Dear Friends on our
Journey ~ ~ ~
My name is Mari and I am a compulsive overeater in recovery. Thank you for
letting me share my journal with you. We are talking about abstinence this
week and yesterday I wrote about how much feelings play a part in our abstinence.
I was rather graphic in that JTR ~ ~ ~ ~ and I sent it out within minutes
of when I wrote it. The feelings in it were still pretty raw. Today is a
much better day ~ ~ ~ and last night during the middle of all this ~ ~ ~
I came very close to heading to that drug of choice. Perilously close. I
don't like this disease. I don't like my compulsive nature. Thank God for
this program. And for some place that I can say that. Freely.
Helen Steiner Rice
I don't remember
ever praying very much for abstinence. Of course, for a long time I didn't
even know what the word abstinence meant .... but even if I did, I'm not
sure it would have been something I would have prayed about. Yet .... I have
found that this is really the only way to get it. To pray for it .... and
in God's time it will come.
When I first began to approach why I was overweight
and began probing into WHY I was the way I was, I spent much time on trying
to determine that. I think that many of us go through a stage like this...
some as even as long as a lifetime spending more time on WHY we are that
way than we should.
I believe doing this can be counter-productive.
As I continue my life and live with this disease on a daily basis the one
thing that becomes clearer and clearer to me is that analyzing it doesn't
make it go away. Dieting doesn't make it go away. NOTHING makes it go away.
It is an incurable disease. A disease with many symptons and side effects.
And it stays with us forever.
When I reached that stage of recovery that I simply
accepted my disease for what it is and that I was powerless to do anything
about it, something akin to magic happened to me. All of the theories, all
of the questions, every single one of the whys were suddenly unimportant
to me. They became moot. And what they were replaced with was the most important
word I have in my vocabulary which relates to my disease ..... and that word
is HOPE.
When we quit analyzing and we just say to God
... "Here we are" .... our abstinence will come. We can't beg, borrow or
steal it. It must be given to us. The word, HOPE, seems to be ever-present
in so many of us .... but there were a lot of years between analysis and
powerlessness that this simple four-letter word didn't exist. And now, because
it does, my whole life is better. Hope to one who had been hopeless as long
as I had been is the second greatest gift God has given me. The first is
abstinence.
Copyright © 1998,
The RECOVERY
Group