Had a “different” kind of meeting today. An alanon member asked for permission to attend our meeting. The group agreed and we opened the meeting to this person. A little strange since this was different than the group attempting to carry the AA message to the alcoholic, who still suffers. The groups primary purpose.
As a basis for this meeting the group agreed to basically to hang around the first three Steps. But overall most talked about what it was like to be an alcoholic and the process we all went through to get sober and what that meant to us to be sober.
I don’t know what all this meant to this person. My guess is that they wanted to know what alcoholism is all about. Probably trying to understand what the person they were attending alanon for is going through. We had no idea if this person was in recovery or still out there.
Overall I think the meeting was helpful for those infected with this disease we have. The word “chronic” alcoholic kept flitting through my mind. That’s a word I would use to describe myself. I had that word inserted in my mind ever since I read There Is A Solution in the BB. It’s what Dr. Carl Jung said to the young man in that story. I knew the minute I read that I could identify with the man he was talking to. It certainly described me.
The reason this came to mind was that my experience with family members of alcoholics is that they have difficulty believing that people like myself were suffering from a disease, which compelled them to drink and that we were powerless to stop drinking. We had to drink. Will power was overwhelmed by alcohol. Most family members I know never believed this. My take is that they believe we could stop drinking any time we made up our minds to stop. Like I said, my take on this. Of course that isn’t true of all family members.
Anyway almost all of us stressed our being powerless to stop drinking. We also told about our hitting painful bottoms, which compelled us to seek a solution. And the solution was also stressed. That it was spiritual in nature and that this was accomplished through the Twelve Steps of AA.
In fact, just before we entered the meeting room, a man came up to me and told me about a priest, who worked in a rehab he had gone to for treatment, who helped him with the spiritual life. That thought rang a bell in my head and I told the group and that person about it. I had spent several years in two seminaries studying to be a priest. I remembered all that time in the seminary I was relieved of the burden of alcohol. And that was because I was leading a spiritual life. That thought has hardly ever entered my head. It did today. And it made me wonder why I never realized that while struggling with the Second and Third Steps and the spiritual nature of this program.
Anyway, I don’t know if we were of any help to this person. I never got a chance to talk to them afterward. I think some in the group were wondering if they were having a problem with alcohol and that’s what got them to introduce themselves to the group. But I do know, like a lot of others said, it did help me.