Overeaters Anonymous Experience Paper

On Tuesday night, September twenty-seventh, my classmate Mariah and I observed an Overeaters Anonymous (OA) meeting at Woodford’s Congregational Church in Portland. The contact person for this meeting is Susie, though the person leading that night’s meeting was Edie, a recovering compulsive overeater herself. This was an open meeting, held biweekly, and had an attendance of thirteen people, Mariah and myself included.
The feelings I had leading up to this meeting were very mixed and fluctuated a lot during my hour drive into Portland that night. Besides observing a few minutes of a group therapy session on the chemical dependency floor at St. Mary’s, I had no experience with any sort of twelve-step program or addiction therapy. I am fortunate enough that I, as well as anyone that I have ever been close to, have never had to deal with any major addictions, so I didn’t have too much of a knowledge base going into this.
As I was …show more content…
After finishing the story, she reacted very emotionally as she really identified with it, and she went on to explain how her entire life has felt like a struggle to reach perfection and how she feels as though she always has to take everything to an extreme. For example, instead of deciding to cut back on sugar intake when joining OA, she decided to cut it, along with flour, from her diet completely and lost sixty pounds in just four months. After sharing this, and opening up the meeting for anyone else to speak, a lot of people shared that they recognized their own stories in her reading as well as in her reaction. People also decided to share what was going on in their lives and how these things were affecting their progress with their compulsive eating. This carried on for about an hour, until Edie announced that she had to start wrapping up the