The Next Right Thing

One of the unexpected “benefits”—or perhaps “penalties”—of taking a searching and fearless moral inventory of myself is discovering memories I thought I had long forgotten. Sometimes those memories reach all the way back to childhood. Today, I found myself remembering a time when I was very young, perhaps seven or eight years old. But this wasn't simply a recollection of events. As the memories surfaced, I found myself reliving the emotions I had experienced as that little boy. I remember being terribly lonely. I spent much of my playtime, both at home and at school, by myself. School was especially difficult. I was often bullied by my classmates, and I hated going there! Somewhere along the way, I found a way to cope with that loneliness. I created two invisible friends. They were both girls my own age. They were actually my cousins, although I didn't think of them as cousins in my imagination. They were simply my best friends. And they accompanied me everywhere! I can ...

This morning, while meditating, I recalled something I said yesterday about a film my wife was watching. I had commented that the lead actor’s performance wasn’t very good. As I thought about that remark, a deeper question came to mind: What makes someone a bad actor? Perhaps we don’t believe they are the person they’re supposed to be. Their emotions seem unconvincing. Their responses don’t feel natural. Perhaps the script has poorly defined the character—or the actor was simply the wrong choice for the role. Then I turned the question toward myself: Am I a bad actor in the portrayal of my own life? Who is writing my script? Am I living my own story, or following someone else’s version of who I should be? In the story of my life, what character am I trying to portray? How do I think I’m supposed to act? Looking through the lens of recovery, I can see many times when I adopted a persona that someone else expected of me—or imposed u...

Recovery · Emotional Balance I’ve been journaling about my experiences in recovery and comparing different Twelve Step programs and their areas of focus. Looking back over where I’ve come from, I can see that I’ve made real progress—but I can also see that my understanding of my problem has changed. Recently, in an eating-disorder Twelve Step meeting, someone shared that they had originally been a member of Overeaters Anonymous but eventually came to realize that they were not powerless over food . That stopped me in my tracks. Yes. That’s true for me too. I came to the same realization a few weeks ago. Food Isn’t What Overwhelms Me I’m not powerless over food. Food itself doesn’t overwhelm me. What overwhelms me is my emotional reaction to people, places, things, and situations that don’t conform to my expectations. My overeating has often been a response to those feelings. I’ve used food to fill an emotiona...

One Step at a Time…. One of the most liberating lessons I am learning in recovery is remarkably simple: All I can do right now is what is right here in front of me. I don’t have to solve my entire life today. I don’t have to understand everything about myself. I don’t have to settle every question about my past or predict what might happen tomorrow. I only have to ask: What is the next right thing? And then do it. Powerlessness Is Not Helplessness When I first encountered the language of powerlessness in the Twelve Steps, it was easy to hear something negative in it. I am powerless. It can sound like defeat. But I am beginning to understand powerlessness differently. Powerlessness does not mean helplessness. It means recognizing the limits of my control. There are situations I cannot change. There are people I cannot control. There are feelings and desires that arise without my permission. Ther...

I often hear people in recovery meetings—or read in recovery literature—that they have a problem with “the God thing.” I used to bristle when someone said, “I don’t believe in God.” I don’t react quite that way anymore. I still believe in God with my whole being, but I can understand the resistance more clearly. In fact, recovery has helped me recognize something uncomfortable about myself: there have been times when my problem wasn’t that I couldn’t believe in God. My problem was that I didn’t particularly want God to be there. When I want to run things my way, control people, manage outcomes, arrange circumstances to my liking, and insist that life conform to my expectations, God can seem terribly inconvenient. God gets in the way. Recovery has taught me that perhaps the deeper question isn’t simply, “Do I believe in God?” but “Am I willing to live as though I am not God?” That is a very different question. The God We Reject ...

Surrendering Even My Powerlessness When Honesty Means Being Willing Not To Know Something unexpected happened as I began trying to go deeper into Step One. I had assumed my task was fairly straightforward: examine my life, uncover the evidence that I am powerless over food, acknowledge that I am a compulsive overeater, and recognize the ways my life has become unmanageable because of it. But after deep self-reflection—and sitting with some difficult questions—another possibility emerged: What if I am not yet certain that the description of compulsive overeating offered by Overeaters Anonymous actually describes my experience? That is not an especially comfortable question to ask while participating in a recovery program. Yet recovery, if it is to mean anything, must begin with honesty. And honesty requires me to admit what I know—and what I don’t. What I Know About My Eating ...

Step Two “Came to believe that a Power greater than myself could restore me to sanity.” I have always believed in a creative and sustaining power in the universe — I didn’t always call “it” God — but that personal awareness of an infinite being was a foundational part of my life. It wasn’t until I became an adult that I began to seek a more definitive definition of God. I spent, or invested, a lot of waking hours in identifying the nature of this infinite being or reality. I believe I had found God in Christian beliefs. I was a reluctant Christian — I wrestled for years with all the various forms of Christianity. How much of the established churches were influenced by the “true” foundation of the teachings of Jesus; and how much were they impacted by the thought and desires of the society through time? I made a very deep commitment to honest research and ultimately accepted that there was more than enough evidence in history to support the truth of Ch...

September 2026 I “resigned” from Overeaters Anonymous. I put resigned in quotation marks because OA isn’t an organization from which one formally resigns. You simply stop attending. But for me, today represented something more definite: I acknowledged that I no longer accept one of the fundamental premises upon which my participation in OA had been based. I no longer believe that I am powerless over food. That realization has been developing for some time. OA has helped me. I don’t want to deny or minimize that. It introduced me to the Twelve Steps, encouraged me to examine my behavior honestly, and helped me recognize patterns in my relationship with food that needed attention. But as I continued looking beneath those behaviors, something became increasingly clear to me: Food wasn’t the root of my problem. My emotions were. I wasn’t powerless before a cookie, a piece of cake, or a plate of food. What overwhelmed me...

A Daily Recovery Practice AA Big Book, pp. 86–88 Fill it in on your device. Download the interactive three-page checklist, type into the reflection spaces, check each box, save your answers, or print a clean copy. Download fill-in PDF ↓ Morning 1. Consider the day ahead. What are my plans for the next 24 hours? 2. Ask God to direct my thinking. May my thoughts be free from: ☐ Self-pity ☐ Dishonesty ☐ Self-seeking motives ☐ Self-will 3. When I am uncertain… Pause. Relax. Don’t struggle. Ask for: ☐ Inspiration ☐ An intuitive thought ☐ The right decision ☐ The next right step Then become quiet enough to listen. 4. Morning Prayer God, show me throughout this day what my next step should be. Give me whatever I need to meet the problems before me. Free me from self-will and d...