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Looking Back on What Went Right

From the 2020 Spring Issue of Freedom From Bondage Print/PDF Newsletter

60 years of OA.  I feel blessed to have had OA in my life for nearly the last 2 years.  I am so thankful that it has survived this long, to help me and other newcomers continue to recover from compulsive eating.  After all, if we were all cured, there would be no OA to help future sufferers!

It’s times like this where it’s interesting to look back and see what happened to make us last this long.  What did we do right to get us here, 60 years later?

The Tools of Recovery have been essential.  Through sponsorship and service, we give back what was freely given to us, and by giving back, we encourage those we help to help other compulsive eaters.  Meetings, in any form, keep us from isolating, keep us in the solution, and build fellowship among us; this fellowship keeps OA going. The telephone, which can be expanded to include video calls, keeps us connected even when we physically can’t be, and it gives us a way to have fellowship or a meeting without having to find an in-person meeting, especially in tight spots when you need a meeting right now.  OA literature, published by everything from small individual groups to the WSO, reminds us of our common solution, regardless of where and when we are; this literature can be carried around with us in print or on a phone, giving us access to recovery wherever we are.

The most important tool, though, is anonymity.  OA would not have lasted 60 years without this. It allows us to know that we can speak our truth  rooms.  It is only with this freedom to share ourselves that we can recover. This freedom allows us to see how similar we are to others in OA, allowing us to no longer feel alone.  Knowing that our program is kept anonymous helps us open up because we know that our reputations will be protected outside the rooms.

Meetings above the group level are also important.  Small groups have business meetings where events can be discussed, group consciences can be held, and more,  Intergroups and regions have meetings and assemblies to discuss bylaws, events, resources, etc. The WSO has conferences where the same things happen, but on a world wide scale.  This global unity throughout OA keeps us going because it reminds us that we are part of a worldwide fellowship. We receive resources from our intergroup, region, and the WSO to help us when we struggle financially, when we desire to do a workshop and need help planning it, when we want to print or publish things, and so on.

This unity within OA is also a closely guarded tradition; our recovery depends on OA unity.  This unity allows us to be a part of OA as a whole while maintaining that individual groups are autonomous.  We follow our Higher Power’s will, not our own desires and wishes. We are inclusive, accepting anyone who wants to recover, regardless of how we are different.  We have a singular goal, to help other compulsive eaters. We remain unbiased, self-supporting, non-professional, we do not give opinions on outside issues. We use attraction rather than promotion.

All of these things, the tools & traditions, have brought us to where we are today, but we can’t forget the steps.  It is the 12 steps, as adapted from Alcoholics Anonymous, that have allowed us to recover. Without recovery, none of us would be here, and the fellowship never would have lasted this long.  It’s times like this where I wonder what my life would be like if the Big Book had never been written, and I wonder how addicts like me lived before the Big Book existed. I am truly blessed to be alive when and where I am, with OA and my fellows to support me.

I hope to keep passing it on, so that 60 years from now, someone like me will have the help they need to be freed from food obsession.

— Christina H.

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A Personal History in OA Meetings

From the 2020 Spring Issue of Freedom From Bondage Print/PDF Newsletter

I came into OA in 1986 suffering from panic attacks and nightmares. That year my oldest daughter got married and moved three states away. 

I consider that Monday Night Meeting my home meeting. It was large enough that we would split into three groups to share after we read “How it Works” from the AABB. This meeting was also my first introduction to 12 Step Programs. We had For Today, Lifeline, and Lifeline Sampler, and a Hard Cover OA Brown Book, otherwise we used Hazelden Literature. 

My youngest daughter, still in high school, would ask me if I was going to my meeting, if she noticed I was still home at the regulat time for my meeting.

In 1990 we had to move our meeting place, the church was being sold and torn down to build an Outpatient Surgery Center for a Medical Center. 

We have been at our present location since then, so it is thirty years this year. 

We had many meetings in Janesville then and two meetings at our current location (Monday Night and Thursday Morning). Over time we have met in 4 different room in this facility. 

By the mid 1990’s we had one meeting, barely surviving, with mainly three people attending. 

We now have six meetings (of which I attend four). I have done two of the “OA Step Study” and more members just completed a third Study.

I hear very good responses about our new “12 and 12”. I especially like the way it is written. 

We currently do the latest format with minor changes done by a group conscience at our meetings. 

After missing many of our meetings the winter of 2018-2019, due to storms and other weather issues, we have two people that have stepped up and we have Zoom/phone capabilities at our meetings or if the meeting is cancelled we can still connect and have our meetings remotely. 

We celebrated the OA Birthday with Unity Day because of a snowstorm in January. We also get together for Sponsorship Day and IDEA Day. For 12-12 we suggest that people contact other members that have been absent. 

We are currently working on starting one or two groups of an AA Big Book Meeting. The first meeting will be Friday, March 27, 2020. 

Rock River Inter Group is located in Central Southern Wisconsin and follows the Rock River.
— Shirley L.

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Overeater Anonymous Literature in the Early Days

From the 2020 Spring Issue of Freedom From Bondage Print/PDF Newsletter

Old timers say that in the early days, “We only had the Alcoholic Anonymous Big Book.” It seems hard to imagine that OA had nothing of its own to explain the program or guide members onto recovery. It turns out that in the beginning, OA had literature that did not use AA’s steps and traditions. That change came later. Compared to Alcoholic Anonymous, OA had to struggle with a different problem. Members still had to eat while they tried define what it meant to be abstinent from compulsive overeating.

In her book BEYOND OUR WILDEST DREAMS, Rozanne S. told a rocky, but encouraging, story of how OA really got started. Rozanne recalls in 1960
she was a rebellious newcomer with no knowledge of what the AA Twelve Steps were about. She wrote her own Twelve Steps of Overeaters Anonymous and The Twelve Unifying Rules because she thought she could do a better job than AA. These first steps and rules reflected the diet mentality, common in most compulsive eaters. The first piece of literature, a four-page booklet explaining OA, included Rozanne’s revised OA Step and Rules (not Traditions). Also included in the booklet was an introduction and a history of the OA organization, which was less than a year old.

Rozanne later worked with a sponsor more familiar with AA, who explained to Rozanne the value of surrender and dependence on a Higher Power. Other members who had experience with AA also felt that stronger spiritual language needed to be used. In February, 1962 a meeting of nine women, representing six Los Angeles meetings, voted to change the OA Steps to read exactly like the AA Steps substituting food and COE for alcohol and alcoholic.

The literature handed to newcomers to evolved from that first pamphlet. Individual meetings developed their own newcomer pamphlets. The desire to give people guidance continued to center around the “diet” people should use. Some favored very structured programs of eating, while others allowed members to develop a plan based upon advice of a health care professional. Over the years factions developed in the fellowship, mostly centered around the the use of low-carbohydrate diets. The meetings in favor of carbohydrate limitations published specific food and meal guides that members were required to follow if they wished to attend and share at those meetings.

Theses diets were printed on colored paper. Different forms of the low-carbohydrate diets were printed on lots of different colored paper, whatever was available. Later one low-carbohydrate food plan was published on gray paper and was known as the “Gray Sheet”.
Many “regular” OA members objected that excluding members was against OA principles and Traditions. If a member who had been following a different plan came to one of the carbohydrate abstainers’ meetings, they were told they are not abstinent and could not share.

In 1966 the OA National Conference approved the pamphlet “To the Newcomer”. The pamphlet said that in OA abstinence was abstaining from compulsive eating. An eating plan was a method by which one learned to abstain. It also stated that OA does not endorse any particular eating plan. Meetings still remained autonomous, but no one could prevent anyone from attending a meeting based on food plans.

The issue of OA approved food plans continues today. We now have the OA approved pamphlet “Dignity of Choice” which helps compulsive eaters find a way of developing a plan of eating.

World Service Organization today has a robust process to develop and revise the OA literature. Publications are carefully reviewed and reflect all the OA traditions, polices and principles. All members can rely on Overeater Anonymous approved literature to support their recovery. 
— B. E.

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Maintaining your Anonymity with your Email Address.

From previous Issue of Freedom From Bondage Print/PDF Newsletter

In today’s ever more complicated digital world it is becoming challenging to maintain one’s anonymity in the public. It is important to consider how the use of your email address might impact our own or anyone else’s anonymity as we recover and help to carry the message of recovery offered by the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions of Overeaters Anonymous.  A few simple suggestions can protect your identity and in turn your fellow OA members.

Overeaters Anonymous has published a wonderful set guidelines for protecting your anonymity in a digital world.  Nothing suggested in the guidelines is particularly difficult to achieve. All of the suggestions go a long way to making a safer place for all of us.  I strongly encourage you to take a few moments to read this document and to encourage others to read it as well.  You can find the PDF at: https://oa.org/files/pdf/Anonymity-Guidelines-V2-proof.pdf.

This guideline sys “Within the OA Fellowship, members have the right to decide for themselves what they reveal. At the same time, we share a responsibility to guard the anonymity of our fellow members.”  The problem is most of us don’t think through all of the ways we reveal who we are. One way is our email addresses.  It is common to create email addresses with personal information including names, addresses, birthdates, etc…   It says in the guidelines “We need to use caution in OA-related emails. We are publishing at the public level when we post on social media or blog. What we send or post may easily be seen, even repeated, by others within and outside the Fellowship. When we break our anonymity in digital media, we may inadvertently break the anonymity of others. Others may rightly or wrongly assume that our “virtual friends” are OA members.”  When you give your email address to someone in OA, you can be assured that you have not broken your anonymity.  When you give your email address to someone outside of Overeaters Anonymous, you cannot guarantee that your email address will be used in a responsible way.  Likewise, when you put your email address in a document that is then posted on a website or distributed to people outside of Overeaters Anonymous, you are taking a chance that it will be used in an inappropriate way.

No, I don’t believe there is a nefarious organization who is trying to figure out who are the members of Overeaters Anonymous.  But there are automated programs we call Bots and Spiders that are actively scanning the internet looking for information it can use for advertising and other ways of classify and categorizing people.  Who knows what they are using this information for?  The anonymity guidelines suggests that if you are in a service position that you create a new email address that identifies the service and not you.  Just as you would not post your full name on a website, you should avoid putting your personal email address that identifies who you are into a website.

For example, John Smith would be losing his anonymity because his personal email address of “john_smith@ MyEmail.com” was posted on the internet.  Even if his email address was jsmith@MyEmail.com or jhnsmth@MyEmail.com or smith1959831@MyEmail.com,  too much information would be available that people in the public sector could easily figure out it is you.  Adding address information makes it worse not better. For example jsmithwestervloh@MyEmail.com narrows down the Smiths with a J to Westerville Ohio even with the missing letters.  It cannot be underestimated the sophistication of automated bots and spiders that are crawling over the internet.

Including your personal email address in a newsletter or flyer is not advised as well. You cannot guarantee the newsletter or flyer will not be shared with people who are not in OA. In fact we often give our newsletters and flyers to the public as a way of attracting people to OA. The newsletter or flyer may be posted to a website as a PDF document.  Even though the document is a PDF doesn’t mean it is protected in any special way. When Mabel Brown in New York reads your email and they see john_smith@MyEmail.com, she knows that John Smith is a member of Overeaters Anonymous and thus, his anonymity has been compromised. So avoid putting personal email addresses and full names on any document that may be released to the public.

Instead create a new email address. There are many email services that are free or inexpensive to use that are available on the internet. You should do your due diligence and research which email service would best suit your needs.  When you create the email account, you will be asked to create an email address. This is the time to be creative and avoid using email addresses that would identify you in anyway.  Examples of good email addresses are: RecoveryIsCool@MyEmail.com, BananasIsntAFruit@MyEmail.com, AbstinentToday@MyEmail.com, or CSSISecretary@MyEmail.com. Email addresses should be short and easy to type but memorable.  Using a phrase or the service position is better than something cryptic.  While rcvyfrevr1@MyEmail.com is anonymous it is also difficult to type and not easily remembered.

Creating an anonymous email doesn’t mean you are abandoning your personal email address.  What a pain it would be to contact everybody to let them know you are changing it.  There are better options.  For example, you can simply maintain two email addresses that you check; one for your private correspondence and the other for public communication.  I maintain three email address, one for work, personal, and the last for my OA service position.  I have all three setup on my phone, at work and on my personal laptop computer.  The only problem I have found is that sometimes I am thinking I am sending email from one account and instead it gets sent out from another. However, I am getting into the habit of checking the from email address every time I send an email. 

While this works you may not want to be checking two email accounts for your email.  Another option is that you can forward the email from account to your personal email address. Much like when you move from one house to another, the post office sends your mail to your new address, you can configure your OA email account to forward the email to your personal email account.  You also have the option save the email or just forward it.  When you create the email account open the email program and look for the configuration, preferences, or options button / link.  This will open a set of choices that you can use to customize the email account. In this case, look for the mail forwarding option. Add the email to the box provided.  You can even forward the email to multiple addresses by adding the extra email addresses separated by a semi-colon.  There may be a checkbox option to delete the email after it is sent on.  Leave this checkbox unchecked to save the email in your inbox. 

The nice thing about doing mail forwarding is you will get all of your email in your personal email account.  This gives you a chance to read the email and decide if you want to respond.  Avoid replying from your personal email account for emails you receive from people or organizations outside OA. It would be better to log into the second email account and send the email from there.

Setting up an anonymous email address is a very good idea that requires very little time. If you need help ask for it.  There are many individuals in OA who are technically astute, who would be more than willing to give a helping or guiding hand. Before you give your personal anonymity away, take a moment to read the OA Guidelines and create an anonymous email address to use. As it says in the Anonymity Guidelines “A good idea to remember about anonymity in all environments, digital or otherwise, is to never share anything that you would not want to appear on the front page of the newspaper. While you may keep the anonymity of others, you cannot ensure that other people will keep yours.”

—Joel I.

–Region 5 Secretary

–R5Secretary@Outlook.com