We have a long-timer here in Los Angeles who likes to say “We are hugging ourselves to death” in the various food recovery programs.  She goes to about 4 meetings a week, but makes 2 of them AA meetings because she feels there is more strength in those rooms and serious consideration of the fatal nature of the disease.

One of the main differences that I have seen between the food programs and AA is that AA does not invoke the mantra of “keep coming back.”  AA has a different outlook on this:  “If you’re not willing to go to any lengths – there’s the door.  When you come back – if you make it back – there is a solution and we have it.”

It isn’t that AA members are hard-hearted, they just know certain truths about addiction.  Firstly, you have the have hit enough of a bottom to do what the Big Book talks about:  “willing to go to any lengths,” “half measures avail us nothing,” “fearless and thorough,” and “we grasp this program as the drowning grasp a life preserver.”  Until this level of surrender is hit, both the person attempting help and the person needing help are all but wasting their time.

The trouble that I have observed with “keep coming back” is that it allows a person whose disease has a death grip on his or her thinking to feel as if they are doing something about their disease when in reality all they are doing is coming to meetings.  Of course, the reality is that one needs to be in the program to experience recovery, but that involves action, not attendance.

There is also the concept of staying just comfortable enough in your disease to never find recovery.  Perhaps the idea of going out and getting truly miserable and hopeless is what some people need to find recovery.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, when a person is in the disease, the best intentioned program ideas and slogans often work against recovery.  When I was in my relapse, I would bring my mess to the meeting and announce how I had had another slip.  I would then get lots of loving responses like “don’t beat yourself up,” and “relapse is part of recovery.”  The problem was that my diseased brain would interpret that as “Okay, relapse is part of recovery, so as long as I’m relapsing, I’m on the road to recovery!”  And when I was told to not beat myself up, my sick brain would think, “I won’t beat myself up!  In fact, if (when) I binge tonight, I won’t beat myself up again tomorrow!”

The indisputable fact that I couldn’t see was that my binge yesterday and today was itself an example of “beating myself up.”  I couldn’t willingly do self-destructive actions and then go stand in front of a mirror and tell myself “you’re a good person, gosh darn it.”  This is a huge example of cognitive dissonance at work.

And then there were my enablers.

The idea that not beating myself up would provide me some form of temporary relief might have been true, but was it helpful to getting me on the road to recovery?  I would contend it didn’t.  Yet, my immature mind gravitated to the comfort of hearing those well-meaning people try to give me “support.”  The last thing I really wanted to hear was the truth.

What I needed was not a harsh “you’re a terrible person for eating,” but something in the middle between that harshness and those nostrums I was being fed that were feeding my disease.  Something like “yes, you messed up… what do you think you could have done to not pick up that first bite?  Could you commit to me that you’ll do that before picking up that next bite?”  That would have gone further to put me on the road to recovery than all the “hang in there” and “tomorrow is another day” messages I got from my friends.  In the end, they were doing more for the person saying them than person receiving them.  

Today, I tell my sponsees that are recovering from a relapse that while relapse is part of their recovery in the past, it doesn’t have to be part of their recovery in the future.  And for those who have come in and gotten abstinent without relapse, I tell them that it is not true for everyone that “relapse is part of recovery.”  It only will be if they make the conscious choice to slip (and I only use ‘slip’ as shorthand sometimes, because it is way too passive a word for what we do when we relapse).

Today, when I give support to people declare themselves in relapse, I’m careful about what I say to them.  I don’t want to say anything that might feed their disease.  Nobody needs that – only words to guide them back onto the path of recovery.