A Story of Recovery:

Two-Way Street

Apologies do not always come easy. In FA, I have learned to accept that I am powerless over food, that my life had become unmanageable, and I made a decision to turn my will and my life over to a higher power of my own understanding. I’ve been taught to take a long hard look at what my part is in the situations or conflicts over which I carry resentments and anger.

Early in my recovery from food addiction, an FA member told me a story about a time when her husband bullied her and was driving the car in a dangerous manner to scare her. When she told her sponsor about it, the sponsor said, “Apologize for your part.” I gasped when she told me that, and I said out loud. “I don’t know if I am that evolved.”
Now I have come to understand, through personal experience, that rarely is a situation or conflict a one-way street. I was in an abusive marriage and am just now, four years after moving out, willing to look at my part.

A few years ago a work colleague referred me to conduct a training at a conference. I did not adequately prepare and coasted on past successes. The reviews were mixed, some great and some not great. Of course I focused on the bad ones, felt shame and guilt, and worried that I had shed a bad light on the colleague who referred me. It was eating me up.

Not long after, I ran into my colleague at a different conference. Instead of ducking behind a pole and hiding, I walked up to her and said, “I owe you an apology.”  She said “For what?” I said that I had been unprepared at the training she had recommended me for and had received some bad reviews. She said, “Oh, that conference. Those people are only there because they have to be, and I have gotten bad reviews there, too.”

By acknowledging that I had made a mistake, I could let go of the fear, guilt, and shame I felt and did not have to hide every time I saw my colleague. The AA Big Book says that if we are to live, we have to be free of anger. If we don’t take responsibility for our part in conflicts, we are hanging onto the precipice of anger and resentment. We, as food addicts, cannot afford that.

In FA, by weighing and measuring our food and working the Steps, we are learning a new way of life, and what better way than to take responsibility for our actions and admit when we are wrong? This is a big part of what it means to have emotional and spiritual recovery.