Step Study - Step 1
We’ve done this before, but we always lose our step studies in the crashes. I think it’s a good time for us to begin another step study here in the Friends and Family forum. Much of the information I will post here comes from the book Paths to Recovery: Al Anon’s Steps, Traditions and Concepts.Each step will have its own thread. That way people can continue to come in, read the information and share his or her experience, strength and hope as it pertains to that step.
Each of us works the steps in our time, and in our own manner. Most often, step work is done by those who attend face-to-face meetings and have a sponsor. That doesn’t mean that you MUST, it’s just a suggestion. Please don’t feel as though you must rush thru these steps… it took me a few years in the program before I began, and I found myself stuck on at least one of the steps for a year or more. The questions and postings here will be an outline, a framework from which you can begin your journey. If nothing else, the questions will provoke some thought and self-reflection, and some great discussions and dialogue.
Others who have worked the steps before will find that they wish to do the steps again. I know many people who work one step per month every year – 12 steps for 12 months. The more you learn about yourself, the more you know, and the more you wish to learn!
This is the suggested opening that is read at most Al Anon meetings
We welcome you to this Al-Anon Family Group Meeting, and hope you will find in this fellowship the help and friendship we have been privileged to enjoy.
We who live, or have lived, with the problem of alcoholism understand as perhaps few others can.
We, too, were lonely and frustrated but in Al-Anon we discover that no situation is really hopeless and that it is possible for us to find contentment and even happiness, whether the alcoholic is still drinking or not.
We urge you to try our program. It has helped many of us find solutions that lead to serenity. So much depends on our own attitudes, and as we learn to place our problem in its true perspective, we find it loses its power to dominate our thoughts and our lives.
The family situation is bound to improve as we apply the Al-Anon ideas. Without such spiritual help living with an alcoholic is too much for most of us.
Our thinking becomes distorted by trying to force solutions, and we become irritable and unreasonable without knowing it.
The Al-Anon program is based on the suggested Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, which we try, little by little, one day at a time, to apply to our lives along with our slogans and the Serenity Prayer.
The loving interchange of help among members and daily reading of Al-Anon literature thus make us ready to receive the priceless gift of serenity.
Al-Anon is an anonymous fellowship. Everything that is said here, in the group meeting and member-to-member, must be held in confidence. Only in this way can we feel free to say what is on our minds and in our hearts,for this is how we help one another in Al-Anon. The Al-Anon Family Groups are a fellowship of relatives and friends of alcoholics who share their experience, strength and hope in order to solve their common problems. We believe alcoholism is a family illness and that changed attitudes can aid recovery.
Al-Anon is not allied with any sect, denomination, political entity, organization or institution; does not engage in any controversy, neither endorses or opposes any cause. There are no dues for membership. Al Anon is self-supporting through its own voluntary contributions.