So I Went to an Al-Anon Meeting the Other Day
I walked into the room delighted to find that there were only two people there. I was nervous, but I told myself before I entered that I would participate to get the most I could out of the experience. I sat down at the large conference table across from them and told them it was my first time.
I wanted to ask their names to be pleasant but I wasn't sure if it would break some kind of rule. Are there any rules? I asked.
You'll start to get the hang of things as we go around, the woman who seemed to be the leader said. She asked if I wanted to be a volunteer reader for the meeting. Then she handed me a page titled, Al-Anon Family Do's and Don'ts.
I said sure. I took the page and started to read silently while the room filled up. Tears started to well in my eyes. I worried that I might not be able to read it to the group, but then I thought if there was ever a place it was okay to get emotional, it had to have been there.
As we waited for more people to arrive, it felt like I was in a movie. I was excited to see what was going to unfold even if the meeting offered me nothing.
I didn't even know until a few months before that there was a 12-step program for families of alcoholics. I'd heard the term 'Al-Anon' before but I thought it was just an updated, unstigmatized way to say AA.
Actually it would make sense that Al-Anon was a program for families because I can remember that my doctor once recommended the group to me. I visited him in high school to ask about anti-depressants after a particularly bad episode at home. He told me that those weren't really intended to be used for dealing with external stressors, but offered me the word 'Al-Anon' scribbled on a page from his prescription pad instead.
At the time I didn't look into it any further, and I think I probably would have died before attending a meeting like that anyway. I was way too shy, and plus I lived in such a small town I could have run into someone I knew. Such a large part of who I was at the time was a person acting as if everything was normal. Working a couple of jobs to buy the right clothes and play the part of a normal girl from a nice home. Never letting any of my friends over to see what home was like.
It's a lot for a kid to keep up, and I hadn't done much thinking about how living with that kind of shame and pretending for so long could be affecting me even today. It wasn't until I'd lived enough and struggled enough in my relationships and interactions with people that I considered maybe it wasn't to do with being in the wrong place or meeting the right people. Maybe it had something to do with the way I was interacting with the world. That maybe the mechanisms I developed to protect myself, though they served a very good purpose when I was younger, were now preventing me from forming connections. That's how I found myself in the meeting.
Once everyone was seated they opened with a prayer.
God, they said, 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.
Then they began to go around the table and as each person spoke I started to get a sense of the format. Anytime anyone had something to say they would first introduce themselves with their name, and then everyone else around the table greeted them by their name and listened to them intently until they were finished.
Once they finished speaking, everyone would clap. No one commented or made any suggestions about what a person shared. Then it was the next person's turn to share.
I thought it was a very good method. One that I thought I could adapt to other areas of my life after experiencing what it was like to just simply be heard. I noticed that as each person talked uninterrupted they started to sort things out for themselves, saying to themselves out loud how they could handle a situation or what their next steps should be.
It's therapeutic to be able to speak what's on your mind, and not only that but I also found it very helpful to hear these stories coming from other people. We tend to keep what we imagine as being so dark inside so as not to expose ourselves, but the paradox is that it's comforting to hear others share those same thoughts.
As I listened to everyone speak, the common theme was surely to do with control. The adult children of alcoholics wanted to be able to predict and manage every situation they were in. Like it was their own kind of addiction, an obsession with their willpower and a need to control things.
Where the alcoholic tried to solve the unsolvable by drinking, their loved ones tried just as well by keeping on top of every single thing, removing temptations, distracting them or trying to fix them. Even though the attempts were futile, they took it on themselves to try and prevent the next disaster from happening.
When I was a kid I witnessed things that I never should have seen. It took my innocence away, and at the time made me think I was an adult capable of being a caregiver and protector. It's only now, when I look at other children the same age that I can comprehend just how small I was, and how ill-suited I would have been to handle those situations.
I crafted fantasies for myself, fantasy relationships and fantasy homes and a fantasy life in Hollywood. Before I found this meeting, a friend of mine told me that there were 700 Al-Anon meetings in Los Angeles in a week, and I would guess I'm not the only kid that wound up here trying to escape from their predicament.
When I was old enough to escape I tried to manage my life in such a way that I would never have to see or experience those kinds of things again. By limiting contact, not drinking, obsessing over what I ate, getting to bed on time, running every day, being at work 16 hours a day, boundary after boundary so that no one could get close enough to hurt me.
A bachelorette party ended a friendship, where, as a sober person, I went to what I can only describe as the depths of hell inside a grungy male strip club, seeing people at 2am dancing in a sexual way, wasted, all smushed up against each other in an overpacked club, inhaling smoke. I crossed the boundaries I had without even ever expressing them, letting my resentment build.
In the meeting people shared their breakthroughs, too. The freedom they felt for not taking it on to manage other peoples expectations of them, or trying to control what the people around them did at all. Or to feel safe in the presence of unfamiliar people or in a new environment.
I learned very quickly that one of the main concepts of Al-Anon was learning to relinquish our supposed control. As in the 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.
When I shared a bit of my own story, I mentioned that my new years resolution was to forgive. It just so happened that I wound up at the meeting two days after the new year started. When they read the Open Letter from the Alcoholic, I realized that the alcoholic in my life wanted just as badly as I did to not have to drink. And that trying to fight, blame, or scold only ever made it harder.
When I finished speaking everyone clapped for me, and even though I knew it was only part of their procedure it still felt good, encouraging. It can be difficult once you start to bring all of this stuff up, but it's a necessary step on the path to recovery. I'm going to go back to another meeting right now.
Al-Anon Family Do's and Don'ts
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