Food Addiction – Renew. Refresh. Recover.

October 2025 Edition

“Unmasking Ourselves: From Pretending to Presence”

A Note From Your Editor

October brings with it the season of Halloween, a time of costumes, masks, and playful pretending. For many of us in recovery, pretending wasn’t just for one night. It was how we lived for years. We became performers, wearing different masks depending on who was watching.

Recovery calls us to something new. It invites us to set the masks aside and show up as our real selves, day by day.

This month, we’re talking about the roles we’ve played, the masks we’ve worn, and the courage it takes to let them go.

 

Recovery Radar – The Roles We Play

Instead of secrecy, let’s talk about performance. Many of us learned early on to put on masks to survive. We wore the mask of the perfectionist, always striving to do everything right. We wore the mask of the clown, laughing to keep people from seeing our pain. We wore the mask of the strong one, carrying burdens silently so no one would know we were struggling. We even wore the mask of invisibility, trying not to be noticed at all.

These roles may have helped us survive, but in recovery they no longer serve us. They keep us from intimacy, connection, and the freedom of authenticity. Recovery invites us to lay down the performance and be present instead.

Reflection Prompt:

• Which mask do I tend to wear most often?
• What would it look like to live one day without it?

Healing Highlights Through The 12 Steps

Several steps help us with unmasking and stepping into presence:

• Step 3: We surrender the mask of control, admitting we can’t manage everything alone.
• Step 4: We inventory the roles we play and the patterns behind them.
• Step 5: By sharing honestly with another person, we break the illusion and let ourselves be truly seen.
• Step 11: Prayer and meditation keep us grounded in reality rather than performance.

The steps don’t ask us to become perfect. They ask us to become honest and actively work on continuous improvement. That’s where freedom begins.

Affirmation:

“I don’t have to perform for love. I can show up as I am.”

Affirmations are personal, positive, present and potentially true. Do you know about the 40-40-40? Write an affirmation 40 times, record the 40 sentences and listen to it.  By doing this we can change our brain messages since our brains are neuroplastic.

 

Member Spotlight: Celebrating Kay Sheppard

Celebrating Kay

Join us as we celebrate Kay, her leadership and honor her story. For those of you know may not know, Kay Shephard is the one that founded Freedom from Food Addiction and the one who created our food plan that has helped so many find peace, safety and prosperity in food addiction recovery.

A Community Gathering of Hearts she Touched and Lives she Changed

Saturday, Oct 4, 2025 7-8 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

4 – 5 pm Pacific Time

Please have a candle and a lighter with you (optional)

Link: https://beaconout.com/celebrating-kay

Meeting ID: 834 7141 3727

Passcode: 269905

Freedom in Action: Tools for Real Recovery

Tool of the Month: Mask Reflection Exercise

Draw three columns on a page:

1. Mask I Wear (perfectionist, clown, strong one, invisible, etc.)
2. How It Helped (what safety or comfort it once gave me)
3. How It Holds Me Back Now (how it limits connection, honesty, or peace)

After filling it out, ask yourself: Which mask am I willing to take off today, even in a small way? Talk it over with a sponsor, share in a meeting, or journal about it. Each step into presence matters.

Closing Encouragement:

Halloween reminds us that masks can be fun for a night but exhausting to wear for a lifetime. In recovery, we don’t need costumes to belong. We don’t need to perform to be loved. Our courage to be real, raw, and present is what sets us free.

This October, let’s take off the masks together. Presence, not performance, is where healing happens.

Support what supports YOU

At FAB, we believe in the community, not just the kind that helps you stay abstinent, but the kind that reminds you you’re not alone. This digital newsletter, the stories, the resources, the reminders, it’s all made possible by people like you.

If FAB has ever helped you feel seen, heard, or understood…
If you’ve ever read something here that kept you going that day…
If you’ve ever said, “Yes, these are my people”…

Then consider being part of what keeps it going.

We’re 100% community funded. Based on our analytical estimates, if every member of the group contributed $3 per newsletter, that would fully fund the newsletter and make it 100% sustainable.

Every single donation is a way of saying, “This matters.”
It’s not about the amount. It’s about the heart behind it.

You’re not just donating to a newsletter, you’re investing in your recovery, in someone else’s breakthrough, in the community that’s walking this road with you.

Contribute to your recovery and the recovery of others: PAYPAL LINK or use the QR code below:

Thank you for being part of this. We’re here because of each other.

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We are not Alone. Together, we can unite to treat food addiction one day at a time.