Hi -- and I hesitate to say "welcome back" because I'm really sorry you have reason to come back. But I'm glad you're here because here is a good place to be.
So you're disappointed in your first Al-Anon meeting.
Let me tell you, so was I.
I walked in expecting to be handed a tool kit that would explain to me how I would get my husband to stop drinking. Instead I sat around and listened to a bunch of people talk about
themselves. About how they handled their emotions and reactions to someone's drinking. Or how they were trying to change their attitudes and thinking about something. I thought it was pretty darn useless.
But here's the thing -- and it took me a good while to understand this -- that I NEEDED those meetings. I didn't think I did. My husband was an alcoholic who refused to go to AA because
he wasn't like those people and I was a wife of an alcoholic who didn't want to go to Al-Anon
because I wasn't like those people…
Truth is -- those people got me. They understood me like nobody else. I'm no longer married to an alcoholic but I still go to meetings just for that feeling, the feeling that nothing I say or do or feel can shock anyone there. I'm at home there. Safe there.
So the ladies are right. Al-Anon isn't for HIM. It's for YOU.
It's for you to figure out that you can't control him.
His choices.
His drinking.
To figure out that he's an adult who will do what he will do.
And your choices are to accept him as he is, drunken stupors and all, or to choose a different life for yourself.
Al-Anon made that a much lighter decision for me.
Because I came to understand that it wasn't about abandoning my husband -- it was about saving myself. It wasn't about leaving him -- it was about letting him be to lead his life as he saw fit so that I could do the same.
Al-Anon meetings are not question-and-answer sessions with people handing you ready-made solutions for how to fix drunks. They're a support group for you, and you may not feel you need it, but trust me, you do. I hate group ANYTHINGS -- whether it's team projects at work or exercise classes; I'm a loner, and independent, and most of the time I can't stand other people. But Al-Anon saved my life. And my sanity. Or what's left of it.
You're a fixer. We all are. We don't need any pats on the back, we just need the stinking TOOLBOX for crying out loud. Those Alanannies can sit there and cry while we go home and fix our drunks.
At least that's how I felt in the beginning. Like "what's the use if they don't have the key to making him stop drinking?"
Give it time. Trust me. Don't expect. Just go, and let the meeting happen. I know. That, too, goes completely against everything you want. What a waste of time, right? You don't have time for BS like that. Except you do. And all of a sudden one day you'll walk out of one of those meetings and feel like you put down a fifty-pound bag of flour on the floor in there and walked away.
At least that's my experience.
