Narrative Means to Sober Ends by Jonathan Diamond

Author:Jonathan Diamond [Jonathan Diamond]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781462506071
Publisher: The Guilford Press
Published: 2013-06-04T16:00:00+00:00

In a phrase borrowed from her AA recovery, when it came to her relationship with food, Cara was “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Cara was mad at herself, feeling she should have had the insight and perseverance to take care of her problem before this. She assumed that knowledge and recovery in one area of her life ought to have made her denial-free in all others: “Me, of all people, should know better,” she lamented. There are many reasons Cara’s assumptions were misguided. We shared a good laugh together at the idea that because she was, in her own words, a “recovery Diva,” problems would lay down in the presence of her “stardom.” Cara was operating under a delusion many recovering alcoholics subscribe to: that going to AA meetings and living by the 12 steps should be enough to control their obsessive relationship with food or any other compulsions. Many doggedly hang onto this belief in the face of horrendous weight losses or gains. To paraphrase Hollis (1986), they insist that since they practice AA principles in all their affairs, they shouldn’t have to attend OA meetings, for example, to relearn what they already know. Though this belief seems reasonable, people often continue to eat compulsively. Cara and I both agreed that if any of the approaches she had already tried could be effective in arresting her overeating, they would have worked some time ago.

Regardless of the spiritual or knowledgeable program she adopted in AA, Cara and I discussed her need for contact with people living out similarly troubling relationships with food. As Hollis (1986), speaking to fellow alcoholics and overeaters, asks: “Isn’t that what initially worked and attracted us to AA? Didn’t it seem like a miracle that so many of those people were actually living a life totally free of the comfort of alcohol or other drugs? That’s what we need to grab hold of in OA! We need to be with people who can say, ‘We know how hard it is’ ” (p. 4). When it came to food, powerlessness was Cara’s dilemma—not lack of knowledge. She needed to realize that all the work she had done had in fact gotten her this far. There was no wasted effort, no failure. Success for persons in recovery is not the contrary of failure. They are two dimensions of the same world. Success is the achievement of a goal known, open, given. Failure is the achievement of a goal not known, hidden. Everything she had learned in AA had prepared her to walk through the doors of OA and extricate herself from her maddening power struggle with food.

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