2025 Sex On Sunday Morning

[00:00:02] Speaker A: Oh, hey, good on you, pal. Let us start this session. Maybe we can leave it open for now or I'm assuming that some people will be filtering in. You lost one. Not even fading yet. Okay, wheel the topic of this one hour. No, no, no. It says, let's begin with the serenity prayer. Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Courage the things I can. Wisdom to know the difference. Topic of this one hour workshop is sex on Sunday morning. My name is Margaret Ann and I am a compulsive over time I used to eat compulsively. I exceeded with n. And we are the co leaders for this meeting. Each of us will have up to 20 minutes to speak and then we will open the room for shares on the topic for up to three minutes. This session is being recorded. [00:01:05] Speaker B: No way out. [00:01:07] Speaker A: Take some notes. I came into Overeaters Anonymous in February of 1990 as 215 pounds of chain smoking suicidal funds. And when I started thinking about how to lead this session and the convention, the program chair sent out some really good prompts to think about. And that really has helped me to how I wanted to lead this session. And as I started to do that, I realized that my OA recovery starting in February of 1990, my recovery in the beverage program started in May of 1989. But my recovery when it comes to sex based relationships was a long time coming after that. As a matter of fact, I would say the first 10 years of recovery for me were hitting hitting bottom with relationships that are sex. When I say that the big book talks about sex relations is, you know, it's very broad. But when the last time that I did a major fourth step, I was asked to consider sex based relationships where I'd use my sex powers, which is such a funny way of thinking about it. And I'll get more to how I really worked on that later. But as I was just this morning thinking about, well, what am I going to share them? I realized, oh yeah, my first 10 years in recovery were really continuing to engage in disease behavior. Not that I'm not still engaging in disease behavior. I don't want to say, well, I got the drinking taken care of, that's all good. Got the food all taken care of, I'm fine with. And then, you know, sex was still troublesome. No. But I was able to see is that my selfishness, you know, the basic root of my difficulties just progressed. So what I was like selfish in the extreme, unbalanced. I first had, you know, I first had crushes as young as, you know, like, I can actually, I can remember having sort of vague sexual stirrings as age. As early as age 4. But I first started having real crushes, I think in seventh grade. That was. I had a crush on my Spanish teacher. And all of my. So all of this was men. So I always think of myself as being very, very strongly heterosexual. Who knows if it had been different, if I'd been socialized differently. My sister is gay. We were raised by the same parents. But by the time I was really in much of a position to do anything about sex, I was already well progressed in both my alcohol addiction and my food addiction. So when I was in junior high, high school, my relationships were. Well, basically I had sex for the first time when I was 16 years old. And after that, I would only ever have sex with people who were willing to have it with me. So didn't have a lot of when it came to. Because it was the ultimate validation. That's what a sexual connection meant to me. You're okay, you're attractive. I was very overweight early on, and so by the time I hit adolescence, I was beginning to sort of use one drug against another. And so sometimes we'd lose some weight, sometimes I'd gain some weight some more. And so I had absolutely no sense of being sexually attractive. And if you look at pictures from me at the time, you're like, oh, there's a dork. You know, there's a drama club nerd right there. And so it really was that idea that if someone showed any interest in me at all, I just lit up. It was so important to me. I also had a father who had gotten sick and was really absent from the picture. Died when I was 13 years old. I had brothers who I adored who had both left the house early on. So at this time, there were no male figures. And I came to recognize that I was also really looking for that kind of older male protective energy. Sex was not only validation of myself as an attractive being, but it was also a security that I was looking for in these relationships that shouldn't be. There was really asking for a lot more from these people than they were there to give. Now I'll tell you what happened. I had, you know, so I had trysts and one night stands throughout my, you know, late teens, early 20s, not lots of them. I had my first serious relationship. It was a roommate that I had when I first moved to Boston. He was a drug dealer. Huge surprise there. And it was unbelievably selfish. Now, around that time, an Old friend of mine, you know, maybe a few years later, an old friend of mine who had moved away from the area wrote me a letter and she just took me to task for all of my selfish behavior. And years later, when I got into program, I was able to see, oh my God, this is horrible. I can't believe I behaved in this way. But at the time I was absolutely flabbergasted. What do you mean selfish? I really came to see in, in 12 step recovery that selfishness has a very broad meaning. This was the really classic one. I mean, selfish, self centered, only thinking of myself. But then I came to have a broader understanding which was simply seeing things from my own perspective. This though, this was, it was like trying to explain water to a fish. This was my orientation to life. This was how I was going to feel okay, about myself. And, and that relationship, which lasted for maybe a year and a half, which at the time seemed like a major emotional commitment, was really based on he was getting what he wanted, I was getting what I wanted, which was absolutely unfettered access to drugs that I couldn't in a million years have afforded on my own. And I behaved absolutely horribly. But then so did he. Eventually though, it was horrible enough that, you know, he really just rejected me. And I couldn't even call it a breakup. It just, you know, corroded itself to death. And I had moved out. My second one was another alcoholic like myself. And this was, this was after I had moved to New York City to pursue my fabulous career as an actor. I did not become a fabulous actor, was after I had joined one of the extreme diet programs and had lost an enormous amount of weight very quickly. And guess what? It didn't fix me. And so I turned to my favorite drug, which was male attention. We were in a relationship. We actually got engaged to be married. It was in that relationship that I finally came to terms with my own addiction and I got sober. My fourth major relationship was after I had become sober. I had become abstinent, of course I had, you know, I had lost weight, I started to feel more attractive and I attracted someone who was more suitable. But I was still using him for validation. I was still using him for security. And I, if you, you know, if you had told me, you are not being considerate of his wishes at all. Instead we sit together in a perfect way. He hated confrontation. And so he built up his resentment and unhappiness past getting married. He actually, I guess, at a certain point thought, well, this is the best I'm going to do maybe if we get married, it'll calm her insecurities. And that was something that. So he had what's sometimes referred to as the affair, the marriage ending affair, which is kind of the equivalent of biting off your own arm to get out of a trap. He had an affair, and that was the end of the marriage. And in the debrief, couples counseling after that, one of the things he said was, every time you run yourself down, every time you express your insecurities, what do you think you're saying to me? That I'm such a loser that I would be in a relationship with you? I could not make use of that information at the time. My wake up call. This was 10 years in recovery. And the funny thing is that that was what drove me into working the steps in a much deeper way. I did not lose my abstinence over this divorce. I did not lose my sobriety. What I came to realize was that if I did not, the only way that I could move forward in recovery was to reach a place of forgiveness. And I did not have the spiritual tools to do that. The way I was going to stay in recovery was to accept this horrible thing that had happened to me. And I couldn't. So I turned back to the program sat a little fruit. I have never had a situation in my life that couldn't be improved, whatever, back to the 12 steps. And this was really hard because I knew that the big work of this was to reach a place where I would forgive him and make amends. That took that point. But I did. And today, and that was over 20 years ago today, I wish him nothing but kindness, nothing but love, affection for him, was able to make amends. So after that, I worked the fourth step, and I worked the fifth step, 6, 7, 8, and 9. And part of that process was writing a sane and sound ideal for my future sex relations. Now, I am, as I said, I am inclined to be heterosexual. I am inclined to be monogamous. So that is a central tenet of my relationship with my husband. That's a base truth. That's an agreement that we have. That's for me. That is not for everybody. I really, genuinely love the fact that our program does not prescribe what your sex relations are to be, mechanics, number, duration, or anything like that. It prescribes how I am to be in them. And writing out my sane and sound ideal was not writing a description of my dream man, but how I wanted to be. The prompts that we were given for this were, how do you establish closeness in Intimate relationships. What holds me back from bringing my authentic self, my truth to a relationship? How do I show up? That's everything that's in my ideal. I do periodically take it out and check to see how I'm doing. And I'll say to anybody, if you want to know how my recovery is doing, if you are in program with me and you sit in meetings with me, I sound amazing. I show my picture and like, wow, yeah, you've got some physical recovery and you're still doing it. Good for you. You really want to know how I am in recovery? Ask my husband, Doc. He's the one who gets to see it every single day. And so we met. [00:13:46] Speaker C: Oh. [00:13:47] Speaker A: And I want to say that after my divorce, then I got into a very intensive big book step study process, and I got into a relationship, an absolutely total rebound relationship. That was my practicum. The writing and the sharing was the theory. And this allowed me to see that when you run your same old game of looking for validation from sex, of that excitement, that tingle, because that initial infatuation, you know, and bumping uglies, that's my favorite drug in the world. And security, a sense of, I can lean on this person and they'll take care of things. When that's my motivation going into a relationship, it is doomed to fail. It is doomed to cause harm to me and to the other person. And that's exactly what it was. And as I was doing this writing and sharing, my fifth step, I knew it and it did. It ended not too long after that time went on, I met my current husband. And I would love to say that the fact that it's just one thing, you know, for a long time, we shared one parking spot. In the previous relationship, it would be whoever got there first. In this relationship, it's the other one parked out on the street, if the other one's not home yet so that the other one can have that talking spot and how he behaved towards me. And so that made space for me to behave that way towards him. I would love to say that this is because of my immense spiritual growth. It's mainly because my. He's not even in the room. He's home having French toast. But the truth is that some of the questions that are on here are really. They're more about five minutes left. Thank you. They're more about how do I show up authentically, how do I. How do I establish closeness, intimacy. But this is Sex on Sunday Morning. So I do want to address that. I'm 65 years old and my libido left the building along with my menstrual cycle. It just like, okay, it's been fun out of here. And I wish, I mean, because I was, I was just, I was such a slut. No, I don't, I don't want to say that. I really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really enjoy sex. And I, I, I will say I still enjoy sex. It's just that I never want to have it. So this is really part of. One of the deepest pieces of intimacy is allowing my husband to find me sexually attractive. And at this age, with the things that are hanging that didn't used to hang, that's really difficult. Only a power greater than myself, only a recognition that this is true. He shows it to me and that every aspect of our relationship feeds that. So there is a part of this that is really me going, how can I show my love to him this way? It's also, you know, this is a really difficult thing. I feel I was very sexually repressed coming into my relationship, all of my relationships, and it was really difficult for me to allow my partner to give me pleasure, to really concentrate on that and make that be okay. Instead of, you good. You good. You having a good time? You having a good time? [00:17:18] Speaker D: Great. [00:17:19] Speaker A: Then I'm. That requires again an opening, a closeness, an honesty with my husband. And I really pray for it. I really do. And it really does arrive, not nearly as often as he would like, but they don't call it sex on Sunday morning for nothing. It's all of a piece when, you know, and again, my relationship is a long term, committed, monotonous relationship. I don't think that that's for everybody, but they all. I really do think there are some commonalities and part of it really is allowing, allowing my partner, my loved one, to know all of me. And that's still really hard. I will find myself having thought, you know, like plans. You're going to a convention. Did you tell me that? [00:18:19] Speaker D: I think I did. [00:18:21] Speaker A: That's part of intimacy is really allowing him into all of my life, all of my concerns. The kind of person who is a lot, you know, very much. And it's all wrapped up together, the physical piece, the spiritual piece, the emotional piece. Allowing my husband into every part of me, so to speak, is, you know, it's a fundament to having an honest relationship now, you know, if you're a serial monogamist or polyamorous or something like that, you might have different ways. And I do, you know, there are different relationships My relationship with Jen. I share things with Jen that I do not share with my husband. [00:19:04] Speaker E: Them. [00:19:05] Speaker A: It's a safe place. I share things in meetings. My husband is not an addict. I share things there. But I'm honest. And he. For him, this is a love language for him. Thank you. One minute left. This is a love language for him knowing that I feel cared for. So I don't know, this just occurred to me. The weird thing is that I kind of ended up with the thing that I wanted to begin with, somebody that I can really depend on. But I got. I think the thing that has enabled this relationship, besides him being a saint, to continue is that I. I work this step because I do 10 step inventories because I pray and meditate. And so I have a better catalog of what's going on with me as it's happening. That I am more able to be attuned to his love languages. What matters to him because we don't share those 100%. What's a good close out? I'm out of time. So I'm really, really grateful to be able to now turn it over to my co chair, Jen, because I got to read a poem at her wedding. I was there. But thank you. Thank you for this life of mine because without the 12 steps and you as my support, it wouldn't be possible. [00:20:48] Speaker C: Hi, I'm Jen Kompolso, overeater and addict. Hi, Jen. Welcome. My husband is not at home eating French toast. First of all, he doesn't eat French toast. [00:21:00] Speaker A: Secondly, [00:21:03] Speaker C: there's a really bad metaphor. But I think it's really important, especially just given that we're just here and that many of you know him, that I simply acknowledge that he's sitting in the front row with our dog. Am I not doing that? You're looking forward to a convention and you haven't really thought about service. And your sponsor says, let's do one of these co chair a session. [00:21:32] Speaker E: Yeah. [00:21:35] Speaker C: So I go online and it's. She says, what about the one about higher power? And I said, oh, good, I'm good at that. And there's already somebody signed up. And the only one that doesn't have two people signed up so far is Sex on Sunday morning. [00:21:55] Speaker A: I [00:21:57] Speaker C: remember when my food addiction started. It was. And I started compulsively eating when I didn't know what to do with all the feels. I think it really developed after relationship broke up. There were a couple of different things that happened that year, but one of them. And my first love broke up. This was a Very, very innocent relationship. We were best friends and we fell in love and we went to dances and for each other's first kiss, there was no sex. Lasted about six months because we had been such good friends when the relationship, it was really painful, really painful. And there were other fields as well, you know, I wasn't. My home life was horrible and [00:23:06] Speaker E: a [00:23:07] Speaker A: lot of [00:23:10] Speaker C: confusion and maybe even shame about sex around that time in my life, I think a lot of it was Catholic school, to be honest. This guy was a good Catholic boy and had lots of feelings and I didn't know what to do with them. And I didn't know I didn't have the skills to do it. And I had a good friend and she would say, come on, I'll come by, we'll go out of the house, we'll go to Denny's, we'll talk, we'll eat. And that's what happened. I ended up with an eating buddy through high school and I learned that I could use food to just deal with my feelings and talk and laugh and feel better. And you know, we have a progressive disease. And so it kept going. In college I remember having to use food to get through studying for a patient. And I remember a therapist saying to me, oh, it sounds to me like you needed food to get through that. And I was like, no, no, no, you know what? I went on for two more degrees and I got through it by eating. I ate my way through my doctoral disorder, disembodied brain. I didn't know how to deal with anything else. The intellectual stuff that was right in front and I didn't have a good relationship with my body. I didn't really see myself as someone who was attractive or who could, you know, always felt on the outside. Everybody would go to dances or go to parties or go out on dates and whatever. And that really wasn't part of my life. And I thought it was because there was something wrong with me. And the more I thought that the more I ate and the more my poor self esteem became a self fulfilling prophecy. And I just ate more and I gained more weight and the more weight I gained, the more I had this flashback when 12 and we were at the doctor's office and she had a weight problem. I didn't have a weight problem until again, high school. My sister had a weight problem and when she was 12 her doctor told her that if she didn't lose weight the boys weren't going to like her. I believed that that was my self esteem. That was pretty much occasionally Someone would express interest and I would kind of jump at the chance. I never thought, you know, am I interested in this person? None of that. It was more like if you liked me then I was gonna jump at it because I thought that was my only thing, a relationship. And needless to say, none of those relationships lasted. Did come up in my inventory years later. You know, the self centered part on my part was not love for the other person. In fact, I didn't even think about whether I cared about them or not, or about me using them to get experience or to be able to say I had a relationship or to. These turned out to be. And there weren't a whole lot of them, you know, maybe count and, and I. But they turned out to be wildly incompatible people, you know, great people, just people who I probably wouldn't have chosen to be in relationships. And after a while and I gained weight, it was more, I think, you know, I probably used that as an excuse to opt out of that part of life and just kind of accepted that that part of life was not for me. And that Cycle continued. In 2005 I came into program and I was 275 pounds. And by cutting out food between meals, eating three meals a day, cut out like maybe two foods that were my usual binge foods and I started to have life between meals. And to the extent that I was willing to follow suggestions, to the extent that I was willing to surrender, I did recover. I began to have a life. I began to get and have friends and whatever, but I was still opting out. And my weight plateaued at 225. I lost 50 pounds. And then what do you know, program stopped working. So I left and I went out and I thought, well, it worked to a certain extent. I'm going to go do my own research and figure it all out. And this was about 2009 and I did and I did my own research and I read this book and I read that book and I thought about going to get a second PhD. How I solved things education. And in 2012, at over 300 pounds, I was in my spiritual advisor's office and I was finally admitting that my way wasn't working. Convincing on his part. But I did get back into program that year and I came back into program in November 2012. My abstinence date is December 3, 2012. And when I came back into program, it was really hard. This time I was first. I was willing to do whatever my sponsor suggested in terms and I did different sponsor. She gave me a food plan. I said, fine. She says, do you have a scale? And I said, I don't even know where to get a scale. And she said, you know, well, she gave me all these tips and I. The next three months I went through detox. I slugged my way through my days just waiting for my next meal, not really knowing what was going on, but just willing to kind of all and let God and program catch me. Because by that time, food was my best friend. Food was my everything. Food was my higher power. And I needed to know that I was going to be safe. So I always talk about how I had to do steps one, two and three sort of all at once in order to give up, to be sure that a power greater than myself was going to take. And I sort of came out of that fog and knew that I was going to be okay without the food a couple of months later. And at that point I started the bigger book, step study Process. And I said, I started attending meetings that I learned in loa meetings, but in particular those meetings that I was not alone. I was not alone in thinking somehow that I was defective. I wasn't alone in thinking that being afraid of rejection. I wasn't alone in my fear that [00:31:04] Speaker A: I wasn't worthy. [00:31:06] Speaker C: I wasn't alone in my low self esteem. I wasn't alone in the narratives that, you know, the false belief we call them, that were, that were driving my fears and driving, you know, my behavior. I was angry at the world and I wasn't alone in finding out that underneath the anger there was fear. And I wasn't alone in not having a good relationship with my body. I wasn't alone in my low self esteem. I was alone in all of these things. People would talk about those things so freely in meetings and I would just be amazed and I'd laugh along with everybody else. And I realized that I was one among. I wasn't unique, I wasn't defective. I wasn't even uniquely defective. I was just human. And it was amazing to do that kind of listening. And so when it came time to do my writing, it was an amazing healing process. I started doing that fourth step inventory. And every time I got down to a fear, every time I wrote a resentment inventory and got down to the fear, I thought, oh God, really painful to realize, you know, And I started to have compassion for myself. I started to be able to kind of let that go because you know what? That fear is actually based on something that isn't true. And then I would turn around the fears and a lot of them, most of them had to do with body image, low self esteem, that cluster of issues that I brought into the program. And the amazing thing was, is that more and more, I went deeply into my fourth step. The more and more healing came. A lot of it came during the resentments and fears. There are three steps in the Facebook step study process. There's sort of three inventories that you do. Resentments, fears, and sex. And thank you. When I did the sex inventory, I was able to look back on the relationships that I had had, the beliefs that I had had, why I had gone into each relationship, what it is I wanted out of each one. I was able to distinguish between those where I really cared about the other person and entered with good intentions, even if the relationship itself wasn't perfect, and those that I had entered because I didn't, I'd have another opportunity, right? So that I was actually using the other person. And then around that time, I think it was toward the end of my fears. Ann, who was going to be my husband, asked me out in August. That time, a lot of healing had taken place. So a lot of my relationships with my family, for example, had experienced a lot of healing. A lot of I was able to forgive my parents in the process. Just a lot of really good stuff was taken. I came to, like, let go a lot of the resentment, let go a lot of the anger. And it was just felt lighter. I started to enjoy my own company. I had a life with friends and meaningful work and still not opting in to any kind of sexual relationship, but just really learning to enjoy my life. I thought, I love my life. I don't even know if I want someone else in it because I'm really enjoying this. Like, I am really. I've really become someone that I want to spend time with. I love the fact that I have my own space. I love the fact that I have my own apartment. I love the fact that, you know all of these things. I was loving the single life. He asked me out, and I said yes because I was kind of curious about it. [00:35:24] Speaker A: And so [00:35:27] Speaker C: we started dating. And we started dating because we were mutually attracted to each other. That doesn't sound like, you know, something new, but for me, it was like, whoa, okay. Yeah. And I just enjoy spending time with this person. And so I'm going to do that more. [00:35:51] Speaker A: And, [00:35:53] Speaker C: you know, so I'm sitting there and I'm doing my writing, and I text Margaret and I say, it's a picture of the two of us, right? Because of course she knows Both of us. And text back, it's great, but you still have to finish it. My sex ideal. And my sex ideal was everything I hadn't had. Right. It was a relationship of mutual attraction, mutual respect. One where we could each be authentically ourselves. One which we hear each other's wants and needs and listen to that [00:36:32] Speaker A: and [00:36:33] Speaker C: realized I was smart enough to realize that that was the kind of relationship that was developing. So neither one of us was in any particular hurry, dated for four years, lived together for one, and got married. Unless you think this is a fairy tale and everything's happily ever after, I can say that I'm not perfect. Neither is he. And we don't have a good relationship. [00:37:05] Speaker A: And [00:37:08] Speaker C: I am confident in the mutuality of our relationship in the very thing that I didn't have. The fact that we love each other and that whatever does come up, we will work on it. And that, to me, a safe place to be authentic and. Oh, I'm out of time. I rehearsed this. It was only six minutes long. Can I just say that. Anyway, that's my recovery story and I am incredibly grateful for the life I have now. [00:37:55] Speaker A: And let me just say, you have to be a happily married couple for me to want to spend six hours in a car. I have to say, it was a kind of an inducement to come here. It's like, oh, I'm going to spend six hours in a car with Jen and Steve twice. Yay. So we had a really good time. Oh, and Peter, of course. Yeah, Peter and I tried to have a tryst last night so that they would not try to sleep with them in their bed. So the meeting is open for sharing. If you'd like to share, please form a line at the front of the room. We remind you that this session is being recorded and your sharing demonstrates your consent to be recorded. If you wish to remain anonymous, please use a fictitious name or choose not to share. Please say where you are from and how long you've been in oa, but devote your share to your OA experience. People should be moving up to the mic right now. Devote Your share to your.08 experience, strength and hope on the topic of this workshop next Sunday morning. [00:38:56] Speaker C: And [00:39:00] Speaker A: there we go. I see some movement. All right, give it up. Let's give a warm Rochester welcome. You know her. You love her. [00:39:11] Speaker E: I'm Beth. I'm a compulsive overeater. [00:39:13] Speaker A: Hi, Brad. I just want to thank you for [00:39:15] Speaker E: sharing, both of you. Seeing, you know, I've been able to watch your recovery and your relationship. And I'm so moved, I can't stop crying and really moved by the idea of definition of selfishness. And I will have to do some work on that. I am doing work on it, but I just haven't quite gotten there yet. So this was very helpful. I am in the midst of doing, working the 12 steps on my relationship relationship and trying to see my part in it. You know, I wrote all those things and I probably wrote things under selfishness, but I didn't see it the way that I saw it today. And I just. Anybody could either here or with me afterwards on the idea of lethargy. You know, I'm like, well, I'm not sure what he's doing, so I'm going to just not do anything. And he's over there not sure what I'm doing, so he's just not going to do anything. And I think there is a mutuality. Another thing that I remembered. [00:40:47] Speaker C: Am I being timed? [00:40:48] Speaker E: Yes. Another thing I remembered was one time I was actually driving and I wrote and I wasn't thinking about the sex ideal from the big book, but I wrote, turned out to be 12 things that I wanted in a relationship or no, 12 things I wanted in life. And one was a relationship. And then 12 things I wanted in a relationship. And every one of them, it was quite difficult to try to find the words, how to say how I wanted the mutuality. You know, I wanted mutual respect [00:41:23] Speaker F: and [00:41:24] Speaker E: admiration for our intellect, mutual respect and admiration and curiosity about our bodies. You know, like just this whole thing. I came up with 2012 of them. And you know, I think very early on in my. In this relationship, which is 21 years, which is a record for me, as I say, mine are like, have been from three hours to three years. It is a record. But I'm having to learn. And we have been quite stuck, you know, very compatible, very happy with what we're doing and missing a major part of it. And so I need help. I'm available. I'm dressed in blue. [00:42:24] Speaker G: My name is Sarah. I'm a compulsive overeater from North Carolina. I've been in program for five and a half years and I'm really grateful to be here and I'm grateful for both of you for sharing and opening [00:42:37] Speaker A: up this topic and for all the [00:42:40] Speaker G: ways my mind kind of expanded and pondered. And I don't. [00:42:45] Speaker C: I don't. [00:42:46] Speaker G: I have way more fog in my head on this topic than I have clarity. I'm wondering about so many things that I still don't quite know. I don't know exactly what to say, but just a couple of salient points that came to me was I remember having a wild and crazy crush on a boy in kindergarten. And it didn't stop there. My parents moved a number of times when I was a kid and there was always someone, there was always some kid that I just really revered and wanted to snuggle up to. Gaining weight in middle school didn't help. And I was oftentimes on the outside of relationships that I really wanted to be a part of. And when people did express interest in me, I was certain there was something wrong with them. And so I was quick to even look down on them because how could [00:43:47] Speaker C: they be interested in me? [00:43:48] Speaker G: So much self loathing was a part of my life. And that just doesn't go away just because the weight does. And changing my mind has been a process of book step study work and humility and a really good sponsor. And I have noticed through my program that, [00:44:15] Speaker A: that I can be. [00:44:17] Speaker G: I'm married and [00:44:21] Speaker A: I don't see my [00:44:22] Speaker G: husband the way I used to. And I don't know why, where that switched at a pinpoint, the moment or the reason. But I used to think I could read all of his thoughts and I [00:44:34] Speaker C: knew just what he. [00:44:35] Speaker G: And I've let a lot of that go. And as a result we have a much more connected relationship. An intimacy between us that is tender and sweet. I know that it's because he was always there, but I wasn't. And in me, softening, allowing my program to make me humble, know everything. There's room for him to be himself. [00:45:08] Speaker B: Hi, my name is Noelle and I'm a compulsive overeater. [00:45:10] Speaker A: Hi, Noelle. I just want to thank both of you. [00:45:13] Speaker B: Two of you said there were so many things. The first one is sort of like wanting to be sexually. I was less interested in, like the most important thing was to know that I was attractive, right? Like it didn't really matter if I liked the person or not. Like me, like that was good enough. And sort of the separation also between my mind and my body when you're talking about getting degrees. And it was just like, oh yeah, [00:45:38] Speaker A: I love school, right? [00:45:39] Speaker B: Like it gives me a goal. It doesn't have anything to do with my bum. [00:45:43] Speaker A: And it's something that's really uncomfortable for [00:45:47] Speaker B: me to talk about this effort come to this. I was starting around the time I was about 4. I found out later that there was incest going on in my house. And so I'm not surprised that I quickly discovered that one of the ways to keep people from me was to beef them. Yet at the same time, it was 70s, I had three older sisters and my dad really believed, like, girls got married. So I was getting sort of lifting messages like need to be attractive. I was explicitly told, like, unless you lose weight, like, boys aren't going to like you. And I believed that too. I totally believed that. And so I was getting sort of these mixed messages, right? Like has to be attractive because what. At the same time, you need to protect your predator that is in your house. So it was very tricky. And as I got older, like, I would lose weight and then boys would find me as resentful because they didn't find me attractive when I. And then like when I was overweight in the olden days, when you. When you looked at. If people were like, you know, zofte is that, you know, like, then like, I didn't. I thought, oh, maybe they would be attracted to. But then I didn't want overweight. Like I was, you know, like I didn't want them to have a fetish about. So I was like, sort of screwing myself the way around. And, you know, I'm happily married now. It turned out that the person to, you know, find me attractive was my wife who was also in program. And I sort of have a problem, you know, uniting mind and body. It's still pretty. And I think that that's one of. Anyway, thank you for providing a space about that. [00:47:27] Speaker C: Thank you. Marlene Compulsive overeater from Toronto, Canada. [00:47:34] Speaker A: Hi, Marlene. [00:47:35] Speaker C: I've never been up to share at this. [00:47:38] Speaker A: Are you kidding me? [00:47:39] Speaker C: So the first thing I want to [00:47:40] Speaker A: do is just thank these two beautiful, lovely ladies. [00:47:44] Speaker C: You know, what you said, I related so much to. [00:47:48] Speaker A: And I really want to listen to the tape and write down what you said and learn from it because I have a lot of work to do [00:47:55] Speaker C: and it was so good to hear you. Oh, okay. [00:47:58] Speaker A: Sorry, Beth. So I don't really know what to say about this. All I can. [00:48:04] Speaker C: What's coming to my mind is I married my first husband because he had [00:48:07] Speaker A: the most beautiful blue eyes and he liked me. [00:48:11] Speaker C: Just like, you know, a lot of us overweight women, if someone likes you, we like them. [00:48:15] Speaker A: Of course, it didn't work out in [00:48:17] Speaker C: the end, but I did get my two beautiful. I think that's all I wanted to say. Thank you. I think we still have a couple minutes. [00:48:28] Speaker A: Hi, I'm Megan. [00:48:30] Speaker C: I'm a composable reader. [00:48:32] Speaker A: Hi, Megan. [00:48:32] Speaker F: Hi. From Manhattan And I wanted to say that my main character defect is people pleasing of sexual relations. I don't see it the same way as has been presented. I, I kind of see it as normal. You know, I think everybody wanted a boyfriend, everybody wanted approval. I think as an overweight, I was 60 pounds heavier. As an overweight person, I was particularly susceptible to that. And that's all that it was. As a people pleaser, I devoted my attention to the other person, were satisfied I was not. And that was fine with me as long as I had some intimacy and [00:49:12] Speaker E: you know, that was awful, just awful. [00:49:17] Speaker F: And I didn't know any better, I was fine with that. [00:49:22] Speaker A: And [00:49:24] Speaker F: as I lost weight, I did become more attractive and that was exciting. I had two long term boyfriends. [00:49:32] Speaker A: That was great. [00:49:34] Speaker F: And I had very good relationship relationships. And I am looking for a longer term relationship now. Yeah, my main interest and the thing that keeps my sexuality up is intellectual ability. Without that, I lose interest 10 minutes into dinner. And yeah, I give people a lot of chances. But if I continue to lose interest, I'm just, you know, go away. I did want to thank the speakers. What's important to me to hear in every topic that I listen to is extreme detail. That's really important to me is detail I don't understand, you know, over overarching points of view, concepts, that kind of thing. I like detail. That means a lot to me. So I really appreciate what you said. [00:50:34] Speaker D: Bring it home. I'm Michelle, I'm a Kapulta reader. Yeah, thank you for the topic. And I think after a couple of conventions I was like, even go to that. [00:50:45] Speaker C: And then it was like, I think I, I'll just go to see what it's like. [00:50:49] Speaker D: And now I'm like, okay, I want to learn and I want to, you know, hear other fans so that I can, you know. So I'm really grateful. It's definitely, I think this is the reason why I came into program, to have more love in my life, to experience that. So that's like an ongoing, I think with my higher power and timelines. Like, oh, try one year before a relationship podcast. One time they're like, oh, it was like nine years before my first relationship. How's that gonna work? I don't know, but it's been seven, so we're working on it. Yeah, in my fourth step of like, oh, I want to be with these people because I like or something else. And I had a friend in high school, I was like, yeah, I kind of like this guy. She was like, I told him. [00:51:34] Speaker C: And I was like, tell him why [00:51:35] Speaker A: would I do that? [00:51:38] Speaker D: So it's been different. Yeah. To have those reasons of like, well, they won't like that. And to live differently than me. Maybe I could be open minded. To me the spirituality is so important. So to know that the other person might also talk to their higher power about me and to also have. I'm grateful that some of those things are falling away and that there's more living. But it was like, yeah, how can I work just like them and on the outside, but do we actually work? Well, I was interested in Ask. Her project came up and I was like, go. Like, can I go with you? Because I was like, let's see how we work together. You know, putting some time and being like, nope, I didn't like that. Like I was doing something my higher, you know, seeing the spirit in people. [00:52:29] Speaker A: Oh, because of service. [00:52:30] Speaker D: Because I'm learning a lot through service of like sponsoring and like talking about things, you know, all the different kinds of. [00:52:40] Speaker A: Alrighty. All the time we have for sharing. Thanks for attending this workshop. And we will close with the Serenity prayer. Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Courage to change the things I can. The wisdom to know the difference. [00:53:04] Speaker C: Great. She's the next convention. Yep. [00:53:12] Speaker A: Well, not that. Not that round in New York City that.