Yikes, I wrote a huge post here the other night and lost it.
Sarah, you can find online OA meetings here:
www.oa.org. Click on the "Find a Meeting" link and keep following links until you get to the online area. There are meetings online at least every 15 minutes...but usually way more often than that. It's impossible to not find a meeting when you need one online.
Like you, I don't have the ability to make it to the one night when there's a meeting in my area, so this is the only viable option for me right now.
I highly recommend any book by Geneen Roth. I just finished "When Food is Love" and thought it was amazing...I underlined almost every sentence!
Here's a section that I really related to:
Quote:
“Later, alone at the table, I was thinking about Lyn’s visit. I was thinking that compulsions are rarely what they seem to be. I was thinking that concerns about our bodies cover deeper concerns about other things that cover even more basic concerns about ourselves. Being a terrible writer, I thought, is not what Lyn is afraid of. [When Roth asked her, Lyn told her that she was afraid of being a terrible writer and that’s why she felt she needed to lose weight. Later on, Lyn calls her and says that she wasn’t entirely honest…]…’I know this is going to sound corny, but I think what I am afraid of is not being good enough. That something deep down is wrong with me and that I am not worth loving.’”
--Geneen Roth, When Food is Love, pp. 19-20
What do you think? Do you think that we eat to cover up our deepseated fear of not being good enough--not being worth loving?
Roth says that we overeat to compensate for something that makes us sad/hurt/angry that we cannot control. We can control our eating, so we turn the problem into one that we are able to control. For example, as a child, our father is absent. We can't make him be present, but we can eat or not eat. We overeat and then tell ourselves that he's absent because we are so fat. If we get thin, he'll come back/be more present. It becomes something we have control over. And when it involves people we love and don't feel comfortable being mad at (like our parents), we are able to transfer the anger to ourselves (which is comfortable) instead of on them, where it really belongs.
I see a lot of truth in what she's saying.
The question is...how do I learn to put the anger back where it belongs? And even more importantly, something I figured out while talking in group therapy last week--as long as I'm overeating, I can see a reason for people not liking me and things not working out. If I'm thin and no longer eating compulsively, I'll have to accept that people might just not like me because of who I am or because I really am not good enough. I'll have to accept that things happen to me because of reasons beyond my control. Can I actually deal with that? It's terrifying!
I'd love to hear what you all think. There's so much peace in not being alone in this fight.