My father always taught me never to give up even if something was hard. You just had to keep on pushing, fighting the pain or the exhaustion or the emotional discomfort.

 

Giving up, surrender, was never an option.

 

While on the face of it, this sounds like an admirable and a courageous principle, the implied belief underpinning this principle, at least in my family, was that if you give up, you are weak, a quitter, a loser, a failure. You can see why giving up was just not an option for me.

 

And so, I pushed and I fought and in order to help me cope with the pain, the exhaustion and discomfort, I turned to my trusty tool, food, which was an effective and accessible, but only a temporary solution. Of course, I was simply substituting one discomfort for another but I knew no other way. Food really did and still sometimes does, offer the momentary nurturing that I believe I need in order to continue to push and fight.

 

Finding and then walking into the rooms of OA in 2015 was, in reality, my first act of surrender.  I must pause at this point to explain to the reader that my definition of surrender has acquired a subtle but significant change. Where it used to mean, giving up, it has now come to mean, for me, giving over or handing over.

 

So, to return to my entrance into the rooms of OA, when I finally realised that once I started eating I couldn’t stop, I metaphorically threw my hands up and said ‘I can’t do this….Maybe this programme can’.

 

At the time it felt like ‘giving up’ but what I have come to understand, with time, is that it was ‘giving over’. And, as with all true ‘giving overs’, it helped me release a tremendous burden of responsibility that I didn’t know I’d been carrying for 39 years. I gave it over in a flood of tears at my first meeting and I remember walking out of that first meeting feeling a lightness that my overweight body hadn’t felt in so long. I wondered, if perhaps, sometimes it was alright to give up, to say I can’t do this anymore. I wondered if perhaps, my father’s belief, was flawed.

 

And so began the first of many giving overs or surrenders….

 

• The first time I allowed another addict into my life to be my sponsor, I handed over my food (that dirty little secret) in a food plan. I also handed over the stories of how I had abused food and my body with food.
  
  
• I handed over my cynical disbelief that there was such a thing as a Higher Power and that this Power could help me with something as ‘trivial’ as my food. I began to hand over my prayers to this Higher Power.
  
  
• I handed over my red foods (triggers), which was the most terrifying surrender of all, at the beginning. Red foods were my armour against life and I was being asked to put them down, ‘hand them over to an HP’. And again, with my HP’s help, I surrendered them one at a time.
  
  
• I surrendered my fear of rejection every time I picked up the phone and reached out to another member.
  
  
• I surrendered my attitude of ‘know-it-allism’ by asking my sponsor for her advice before I acted and in time, I would pray to God when I didn’t know what to do and I would even wait for an answer.
  
  
• I surrendered my fear of imperfection. This happened the first time I accepted a service position in OA and the first time I agreed to sponsor.

Slowly, a lifetime paradigm that had guided my life’s actions and decisions was being eased away. With each surrender, rather than feeling like a failure, I felt lighter and happier.

 

Today, I still have to practice surrender on a daily basis. After all, a paradigm of 39 years doesn’t get completely transformed in five years. There are still aspects of my life that I have not surrendered: my children, my fear of losing control, my anger and yes, there are still foods that I am not ready to hand over. But this is, thank God, a gentle programme and these days I can pray for the willingness to surrender and I know that in time, it will come.

 

My God Box still sits on my dressing table and it is slowly being filled with little and big prayers or surrenders. One of those prayers will be to ask my HP for the willingness to continue to surrender.

 

– Rachel F