(N.B. - this post will be sent off to the OA Lifeline. Now, I'm not saying that it will be PUBLISHED there, but it's my intention to send it there)

Well, the Mon/Tues/Wed/'Thurs night meetings of Overeaters Anonymous at the North Scottsdale Fellowship Club formed themselves into a group - the Into Action group of Overeaters Anonymous.

We got ourselves a chairman, two co-secretaries, filled all of the office, got a checking account - and, when we tried to get registered with the World Service Office in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, we ran into a little hitch.

OA doesn't have "groups".

Forgive me - OA has groups, that are MEETINGS, but if you have more than one meeting, each meeting has to be a group. We do NOT allow "groups" to form that have more than one meeting.

Now, this is Overeaters Anonymous, the bunch who says "...we use AA's Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, changing only the words "alcohol" and "alcoholic" to "food" and "compulsive overeater"." Now, that's not entirely true - we got rid of a comma in the Twelfth Step, and we added "television and other public media of communication" to the Eleventh Tradition.

I don't know how we got smarter than the Big Book and decided to rewrite the Step - I suppose that we, as a fellowship, must have approved that.  And I can see how "television and other public media of communication" is in the spirit of the Eleventh Tradition, although I've noticed that AA has managed to get along without updating that wording; folks aren't stupid, and AAs seem to be more concerned with leaving openings for weirdness to sneak into their program than they are with having to cover all of the bases.

But this particular bit of strangeness - forcing each meeting to be a group - seems, right off, to violate the Traditions immediately by blowing off group autonomy - I can just imagine what would happen if AA's General Service Office tried to tell some group how many meetings that they could have.

In addition, it messes with the Second Tradition, by (it seems) allowing folks to belong to more than one group, thus allowing their votes to be reflected more than once at Intergroup, Region and World Service levels.

But more than that - it's a concept, a restriction, that is completely foreign to the AA way of implementing their Traditions. Most AA groups have more than one meeting - many of them have as much as (say) 35 meetings/week (early morning, noon, early evening, evening, late night, for seven days a week).

But OA has decided that we won't do things the AA way.

So why are we still saying that we follow AA's Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions? There is nothing about the difference between compulsive overeating and alcoholism that would require a different interpretation of these Traditions.

I reckon that this is just a small part of a much bigger issue - that being that we keep moving away from the way AA does things. It seems to me that the further away that we get from the AA way, the worse the results get.  Yet we seem to keep trying to be creative; trying to prove that we are more than just an AA knockoff.

And that's just a bad idea. What in the world is wrong with copying the Miracle of the Twentieth Century? - it reminds me of some NA bumper stickers that I've seen - "My book isn't Big - it's Basic" - loudly proclaiming "Hey, look - we're different than AA!".

Yes, we are different from AA. And the more different we get, the more obvious it is.