lillamy

Perhaps.
I know I did. For a looooong time. I even drove to a meeting and didn't go inside.
I don't know what it is for you.
For me, it was that if I went into that meeting, I somehow acknowledged that there was a problem with alcohol in my family. And I thought that if I did that, there was no turning back. I could not "un-know" or "un-acknowledge" that the problem existed. That part was true. The part that wasn't is that I also somehow thought that once acknowledged, the problem had to be immediately dealt with. By me. So I built this entire mountain of "musts" that would happen if I walked through those doors to my first meeting.

In reality, I was frustrated because nobody at Al-Anon told me how to make my AH stop drinking. They didn't even talk about the alcoholics all that much. More about themselves, how they were handling their day-to-day life with an alcoholic husband/wife/child...

Most of all, though, I realized that even if I was married to an alcoholic and went to Al-Anon, it didn't mean I had to act. It didn't mean I had to fix him. Or indeed anything. The meetings were for me -- to spend time with people who got it, who understood that you can at the same time love someone and want them dead, that you can at the same time hate someone and cry about their addiction. And that there were things I could do for myself that made the situation more bearable, whether I chose to stay in my marriage or leave.

I finally got to the point where I was desperate enough that if someone had told me to go down to the creek at midnight and throw a penny over my shoulder at full moon, I would have done it. At that point, going to Al-Anon didn't seem like such a big step anymore...