A Discussion About Rule 62

An open letter to men in recovery: stop using “Rule 62” to dismiss women, comorbidity and intersectionality.

To ring in 2020, I spent New Year’s Eve with my friends who are sober–most if not all of whom are qualifying members of Alcoholics Anonymous (I am not; however, I understand the fellowship and framework quite well).

I was discussing sobriety with a man I had just met upon walking in the door to my good friends’ house on the water on the south shore of Long Island–the designated gathering place for 50+ sober people at any given time on a holiday such as July 4th, MDW, and this year, NYE.

I mentioned the unfortunate lack of consideration for folks with eating disorders like myself in the program of AA–especially considering that so many women (approximately 50%) experience comorbid symptoms of eating disorders and substance abuse including alcoholism.

The man in question simply said, “Rule 62,” and looked at me blankly.

Rule 62. 

Don’t take yourself so damn seriously. 

Rule 62, for those unfamiliar, is a rule that has found its way into recovery circles as unspoken tradition.

The backstory, from what I understand, has to do with tradition four (“Each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or A.A./E.D.A/whateverA as a whole.”) in anonymous programs, which discusses the  idea that individual meeting groups can operate on their own volition without involving or compromising the integrity of the fellowship as a whole.

When AA was expanding, a group attempted to be “all things to all people”–they resolved to take care of meetings, residential treatment, and other facets of recovery life all under one roof–and realized that their goal was way bigger than they could manage in the context of the AA program.

This group came up with 61 rules and sent them to AA as a manifesto or proclamation for beginning their ambitious program. Then, they realized just how daunting a task it would be to take care of every single person’s needs in the realm of addiction treatment–and before scrapping the idea, they came up with rule 62. 

So, what about it? 

Last week, I read a really powerful and thought-provoking opinion piece in the New York Times about the patriarchal foundations and history of AA as an organization. We all know the names Bill W. and Dr. Bob, two men who were alive during the first world war and became alcoholics due to a perceived spiritual malady that they believed had to do with an inflated ego and sense of self, as well as a lack of presence of a higher power in their lives. They were their own higher power for the duration of their relationship with alcohol and drinking–which, as the NYT article suggests, is the essence of white male privilege. 

They sought to recover from this sense of ego, but did it also heal their harmfully separatist sense of rigid gender roles and toxic masculinity?

Alcoholics Anonymous itself has, seemingly ironically tried to be all things to all people; opening itself to women, people of color, people with doctorates, average folks, and everyone in-between, but how can it do that if it still holds itself in the principles, practices and ideas of a world that was designed by and for white men? How can a fellowship with such a marginal number of women attending compared to men even say that “anyone can do it” if they have the capacity to be honest? 

The problem is, this claim is dishonest in and of itself.

Rule 62 was meant to be an ego-check on a group of alcoholics who thought (mistakenly) that their individual group’s program could be a one-stop shop for recovery. When they failed, they wrote this rule as a way of softening the ways that their ambitious and admirable mission had not gone to plan. Well intentioned? Maybe.

In this conversation in my friend’s kitchen, Rule 62 was used to dismiss my very real concern about the harm still being done to people like me in the rooms who are not having their eating disorders addressed–a problem backed by statistics, as I shared before.

I know, I know. If AA were to take on eating disorders too, they wouldn’t really be AA anymore. But this is 2020; and we really need to start accounting for the more than half of the fellowship that needs access to a safe place to express the comorbidity of their alcoholism with other issues like disordered eating and, in the case of my region, opioid abuse. By not being sensitive to issues that clearly and empirically intersect with the problem of alcoholism, there is an imminent danger of making full recovery inaccessible to so many members and potential members.

“At least you’re not drinking” (I hear this one a lot, too!) isn’t good enough anymore. Eating disorders have an unbelievably high mortality rate, especially anorexia nervosa. And I’d venture to say that MOST eating disordered alcoholics can relate to the feeling that alcohol sets off their ED, and vice versa. This is serious.

Food is available at tons of AA meetings without supporting the people for whom food might be a trigger. With over 50 percent of addicts and alcoholics also having an ED–it seems a little insensitive not to address this, and to tell those who are authentically worried about it “not to take themselves so damn seriously.” 

It’s not really a coincidence or an accident that this “rule” is probably most often bestowed upon women, as it was done unto me.

Having an ego and unwarrantedly flaunting your ability to quote a book that is, dare I say, just as fallible and subjective as we all are is…confusing, and honestly, a form of gaslighting imo.

Women don’t need to be powerless, and we don’t need to be told not to take ourselves so seriously. The world outside of those church basements and sober gatherings already does that to and for us. 

Now, I know that this individual’s use and interpretation of Rule 62–like the fallible interpretations of a lot of things in AA and other anonymous groups–speak to the person, not to the fellowship as a whole, hence, the fourth tradition. Hell, Rule 62 was created so that a bunch of people who created a plan and failed, like any human might do, could laugh at themselves and not be bummed that they hadn’t succeeded. We all need a little of that in our lives, certainly.

But I wonder how many times this rule has also been used to drive women into silence about the things that bother them about the world that they live in; things happening inside and outside the rooms. Because the fact is, we absolutely need more power in the world at large and in the daily context of our lives, not less.

And that’s not going to come to us when we are told that the realities of the things we face–pay gaps, the motherhood tax, harassment, assault, violence, dismissal, diet culture, body shame, objectification, legislation made against and about our bodies, repeated interpersonal abuse and marginalization–aren’t serious, problematic or important enough for the men who claim to be united in recovery with us (while, might I add, segregating themselves OFTEN) to take seriously.

I’m a member of a recovery fellowship that isn’t AA, but since AA laid that foundation, I’m addressing it directly, I guess. Any if not all of my closest friends are members of AA. Some of them may cheer me on for saying this, and some might not. That’s okay. However, if anonymous recovery groups, and recovery as a whole, isn’t the same boys club that it says it “used” to be, I’m going to need some of the recovering men I see, know, and love, to start proving that. In fact, I demand it, because (gasp!) I take myself seriously. Out of nothing more than self-respect.

 

Why Overeaters Anonymous Works

This week’s post: 

• How OA was just another form of diet culture
• A re-examination of why I left
• Reclaiming recovery 

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June 25, 2016.

This is my self-acknowledged “recovery date.” It used to be my “abstinence date” in Overeaters Anonymous. I lasted four months there. But my recovery kept going.

A lot of people would tell me, including people in those rooms, that leaving OA meant that my attachment to this particular date was over. That I had no right to claim being “in recovery” without Overeaters Anonymous. 

I have been out of the Overeaters Anonymous rooms for about exactly a year.

In this year, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking. Last October, one of my first posts on this blog was dedicated to all the reasons why I left OA.

But I’ve also spent the past year self-educating about my own core values, about diet culture, about diet and weight loss myths, my own limiting beliefs, self image, the society that created my reality up to this point, and my disordered perception of my own body in relation to the messages I have received my entire life. 

My initiation into OA came from having a partner who could not, would not see me as an equal if I didn’t have a 12-step program. This person went to meetings with me, gave me “support” (when they were really just supporting my restriction), and took my inventory so often that we would find ourselves in irresolvable arguments about my program.

OA didn’t work for me. But in general, it works for thousands, even millions, of people all over the United States and even in different countries. Since last September, I have exited that program and entered a new one that stands on the basis of balance and body acceptance rather than abstinence. This program, I have come to believe, is less well-known because it rests on the idea that weight loss is not a requirement for health, happiness, or recovery. 

My last post on this now feels inadequate as a reflection of my understanding of body positivity and recovery and what all of that means to me. I have learned to form a value-free, objective opinion about my body…which is something that OA doesn’t teach you, but is so integrally a part of our relationship to food and exercise.

Here is why OA “works” for so many:

1. It presents itself in alignment with diet culture.

So much of what goes on in the rooms is fat-shaming discourse that aligns with medical perspectives on fatness, weight, and “health.” I knew many members who were also doing Weight Watchers. Every speaker I encountered brought a “before” picture with them, as a testament to how happy their lives were now that they didn’t look like “that” anymore. 

It is both explicitly and implicitly clear that the goal in OA is weight loss and weight loss maintenance. Some of their “helpful slogans” include (straight from an intergroup website):

“Service is slimming.”

“I won’t starve to death between meals.”

                                                                                              “Floss and brush after every meal.”

“Nothing tastes as good as abstinence feels!”

“Food is not your friend.”

These slogans, promoted and affirmed by OA members, intergroups and individual meetings, encourage people to get the taste of food out of their mouths after eating, as if there is something inherently bad about a meal so much so that one must resort to “washing away the evidence”. When thinking in binaries (as our society conditions us to do), one’s mind immediately goes from “food = not your friend” to “food = enemy.” This one especially is not a value-free statement, and it is an extremely dangerous one. 

They do not call the “food plan” a diet, but these terms are generally interchangeable semantically. Diet, by working definition, simply means what/how we individually eat. Our society has come to mean “diet” as a period of restrictive eating, counting, cutting out foods or entire groups of them, and exercising to the point of exhaustion and at which our movement lacks any shred of actual joy. 

Overeaters Anonymous literature contains suggestions for a “food plan” and claims it to be between you and your sponsor. They say in the readings that this is not a diet program, but how could anything with a “food plan” not be about diet? Their literature includes pamphlets like “Dignity of Choice” and “A Plan of Eating” to make it seem like it’s softer than dieting. I found myself at pre-meeting dinners with a lot of OAs who would basically make it their job to assign meaning and value to the things I ordered off the menu or even the things I simply considered ordering. Their comments sounded a lot like my mom’s, and were just as policing.

I intended to live without restriction for the what, but it was made clear that I was being judged for even thinking about eating something that wasn’t in someone else’s food plan; they were projecting their values about certain food and assigning that value to my eating habits. 

Overeaters Anonymous as a global organization does not endorse specific diets. They used to, in the 1960s and 70s, have a diet plan called “gray sheet”, which prohibited sugar, desserts, starches, and snacks between meals. They abandoned it for “Dignity of Choice”, which presented eight different food plans, before abandoning that and leaving the food plan up to the individual–but still maintaining weight loss as the ultimate goal and marker of a compulsive overeater’s success.

2. It integrally contradicts itself.

If you’re familiar with any Anonymous program, you already know the serenity prayer.

“Grant me the serenity

to accept the things I cannot change

the courage to change the things I can 

and the wisdom to know the difference.”

I say these words to myself countless times daily. But in OA, I experienced the opposite of serenity–I found obsession about what time I needed to eat, how much I needed to eat, and felt a sense of guilt and shame if I ate when I was hungry instead of when I told my sponsor I was going to. It created insanity in my life rather than restoring any sanity I did have.

As Dianne Bondy says in the Recovery Warriors podcast she was featured in a few months ago, there is no connection (in her opinion) to be made between body positivity and weight loss. I tend to agree. Body positivity has indeed been co-opted by weight loss programs and systems of dieting. Overeaters Anonymous, in general, doesn’t really have body positivity built into its system of “abstinence,” despite the body diversity that presents itself in the rooms. 

There is absolutely nothing serene about being angry at myself for being hungry between lunch and dinner, and listening to that hunger by feeding it. 

OA’s language is the language of diet culture. It perceives fatness as the default character defect. I witnessed many people, myself included, work a program of perfectionism and obsessiveness rather than spirituality. And I don’t mean to take inventory. But when you’re in a business meeting that’s arguing whether or not you can chew gum or bring a caloric beverage with you to a meeting, there’s not much program going on. Only internal chaos, judgment, and value assignments being given to food and food behaviors.

In Linda Bacon’s book Body Respect (currently reading and LOVING!) she talks somewhere in the first 100 pages of the book about our bodies’ regulatory processes and our set point weight.

She refers to set point weight as:

• “The weight you normally maintain, when you eat to appetite.
• The weight that results from behavioral and metabolic responses to signals of hunger and fullness
• The weight you maintain when you don’t fixate on your weight or food habits
• The weight you return to between diets (which creeps up the more you diet)
• A result of your biology, biography, and current circumstances

(Bacon, L., & Aphramor, L. (2014). Body Respect: what conventional health books get wrong, leave out, and just plain fail to understand about weight. Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, p.62.)

If I was given a set point weight by the same higher power and the same body that I am fighting against to weigh a different number on the scale, isn’t that the definition of insanity?

I’d have to say yes, and Linda Bacon and Lucy Aphramor’s research does, too. Their book explores our individualized relationships to genetics, body composition, water makeup, our bodies’ responses to social/anthropological oppression as a manifestation of our fluctuating weight, and how much we have already put our bodies through by dieting. They deconstruct the myth that “BMI is a meaningful health indicator” (2014, 31) and that weight is a fundamental indicator of both health or disease.

It is known biologically that our brains teach our bodies to store fat in response to diet restriction; which is exactly the behavior that was perpetuated in OA. I ate three meals and three snacks a day, and that was just my meal plan. I had to eat at exactly 8 am, 10 am, 12 pm, 3 pm, dinner before 7 pm and absolutely no more food after 9 pm. And I sent what food was to be consumed any given day to my sponsor the day before. This type of micromanagement sent my body into starvation mode and made me more obsessed with food, as diets do.

When humans evolved, we evolved out of food scarcity. The first humans didn’t have much to eat, so that’s why they were probably “fat” (67). (Explaining why Venus of Willendorf is a cultural symbol for this time period). Our bodies hold on to whatever they can and literally will yell at us through our mid-sections to feed it and feed it fast. It may also explain why people who live in poverty are “heavier” (and assigned the value of “less healthy” by the medical industry”).

This mechanism built into our brains to maintain homeostasis is kind of like the alarms they’ve installed in cars that beep until you buckle your seatbelt. Your body is just trying to keep you safe. 

I was trained to ignore that and sold the idea that “I won’t starve between meals.” While this was true, it didn’t help my body shut up. It helped me cling to the idea that I was more powerful and resilient for ignoring my own body while it ate itself.

When we ignore our hunger and go on diets, our body loses water first. So that 27 pounds I lost in two months in OA was actually just my body being so dehydrated and having no nutrients to use; and having to resort to my supply of water (39-40). Water is what’s used to regulate our temperature (sweat) and make our organs function; so my stomach, in essence, was stealing energy supply from all the other parts of my body that could have used it, just because I wanted to be a “model OA” and keep my “abstinence.”

My body’s set point weight and all that I have learned to be true about “yo-yo” dieting is exactly why I’ve been the same weight since I left Overeaters Anonymous. My body needs me to be 210 right now.

The trick has been learning to deviate from making any sort of meaning from that. 210 is just a number the same way I am just 23 years old. I have no feelings about it anymore.

3. OA widens the gap in our already problematic understanding of eating disorders.

I never felt comfortable saying the words “compulsive overeater”–not because it’s a really long expression, but because it just does not describe me. I see it as more of a euphemism than an identifier. 

In a culture that produces shows like To the Bone that depict eating disordered people as skinny white girls with anorexia and bulimia, Overeaters Anonymous helps widen this gap in our universal understanding of eating disorders. 

For instance, our society also produces shows such as My 600 Pound Life; but the message that we are sent by these two very similar examples of pop culture are starkly different. Fat people are lazy, gluttonous, uncontrolled eaters who must secretly hate themselves from the inside out; anorexics are people who “just need to eat more” and are seen as “sick” and worth our pity, attention, and most significantly, worth treatment.

Think about it: if fat people want surgery to decrease their weight so they can help mediate problems like sleep apnea, they have to “earn it” by losing more weight and going on “pre-surgery diets.” Treatment is only available to fat people if a medical “professional” decides they deserve it. So they recommend OA to people to help them get there. 

Those fat people are seen as examples of what not to be; while anorexic-but-not-too-anorexic is seen as the thing to aspire to.

Calling myself a compulsive overeater instead of someone with an eating disorder always felt like a cop-out. Compulsive overeating is only one of the behaviors I exhibit in my relationship with food–I have been a restricter, exercise addict and calorie counter, body dysmorphic, binge eater and person who struggles with eating in front of other people. 

OA is a space where the word “eating disorder” is never even uttered, even if people self-identify as bulimic or anorexic when they share. I didn’t understand how any eating disordered person could truthfully relate to “compulsive overeaters” in a space where body dissatisfaction and dysmorphia were normalized. In this way, it fails to make a connection between those examples in My 600 Pound Life and eating disorders, as if eating disorders only mean dangerously thin. They don’t seem to want to relate to eating disordered people. 

Since leaving Overeaters Anonymous, I have become a tremendously self-aware disordered individual. I think I’ve gone about six months reading nothing but self-help books that help me squash shame, demolish body negativity, and see weight and food as value-free, neutral things. And I’ve taught my sponsoree to do the same.

She is one of those people about to embark on a weight loss surgery journey (and she gave me permission to mention it here), and we are navigating the messages she is receiving from the medical community together, and using messages of recovery and “spiritual principles” to heal those messages. The most fundamental thing is, she wants a life free of obsession and restriction and self-loathing, just like I sought when I left, too.

And I’m proud to be learning all this information from Linda Bacon, Kathryn Hansen, and Jessica Raymond to help me not only live a life that has purpose outside of my eating disorder, but to extend that purpose to others by delivering the messages I receive in a responsible way.

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Note: The opinions expressed here are strictly my own, and don’t reflect the written or established values of Overeaters Anonymous or any of the authors referenced, but rather my interpretation of them. It also speaks specifically to my geographical OA meetings, and may not reflect the way OA groups behave individually or work a program in other regions or countries. I identify as an eating disordered Health at Every Size advocate, body positive, and culturally critical, and this article is a reflection of how all of those things have intersected in my recovery experiences. 

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Twitter: @caitsrecovering

Email: caitisrecovering@gmail.com

Eating Disorders Anonymous