Originally Posted by
sober4m 
Do you think attending an AA meeting is beneficial in my case? I have absolutely zero cravings for drinking, I would solely go there to talk about how to deal with being around people who drink. Is an AA meeting appropriate for that? Actually I am a very shy person. Haha. I would not feel comfortable sitting in a circle talking about my private life...
I think there are a few different meeting options that might help. And you would not have to talk at ANY of the meetings if you didn't want to. We learn most by listening, not talking anyway. (If I have a personal issue I usually have a quiet chat with my sponsor or one of my closer AA friends rather than bring it up in the main meeting. But that's just me.)
1) If you have stopped drinking yourself because you had problems with it yourself, then AA can help you manage the feelings and situations (for example: being around others who are drinking) that many of us recovering alcoholics struggle with in sobriety. It sounds like those feelings are threatening your happiness with a partner (who sounds pretty nice to be honest) and fear of what might happen is taking over. Even once the obsession to drink has left us, then we still benefit from the 12-step work (if you look at the steps, only step 1 even mentions alcohol - the rest is all about changing our perspective, and managing negative emotions and painful thought processes.) To be honest, most of my more useful work was done after I'd been sober for 8 months and the obsession had left me.
2) Al Anon meetings can help you manage your feelings around dealing with a partners alcoholic drinking, but it doesn't sound like he is drinking alcoholically.
3) CoDa can help with Codependency issues more generally - I have found their literature and meetings really helpful for understanding how some of my experiences in the the first 15 years of my life may have impacted on my thinking and some of the faulty strategies that I have used to deal with life problems. This understanding really complemented the step-work I was doing in AA.
I know some people who go to all three of these, and some who got to two different types of meeting, and others who just go to one.
I hope you find some relief. You might find '
Living Sober' a useful little book to read. You can order it from Amazon - I got it for my Kindle, cheap as chips. It's got lots of advice for dealing with 'life' once we've stopped drinking. I often wonder how they fitted so much wisdom into so few pages.
