"Who Are Al-Anon Members?"

"Al-Anon members are people, just like you, who are worried about someone with a drinking problem." See: https://al-anon.org/

Al-Anon is a very different sort of organization from Alcoholics Anonymous: "Alcoholics Anonymous is an international mutual aid fellowship whose stated purpose is to "enable its members to stay sober and help other alcoholics achieve sobriety." It was founded in 1935 by Bill Wilson and Bob Smith in Akron, Ohio. With other early members, Wilson and Smith developed AA's Twelve Step program of spiritual and character devel..." Wikipedia.com

I have gone to only one Al-Anon meeting in my life, and this is why. Throughout my life it seemed that every member of my immediate family had drug and alcohol addiction problems, they all drank to excess and each had their own particular drug-of-choice. In my thirties I tried to tone-down their drug and alcohol abuse, a temerity for which I was summarily kicked out of the family.

Chemical additions are supposed to be genetically based but somehow I escaped the fate of drug and alcohol addiction, maybe because my life has been too difficult to bog it down further with drugs and alcohol. Also I have had many hobbies and sports activities that would have been impossible to enjoy if I had been drug or alcohol impaired, so I chose not to do the stuff. I saved myself a lot of money, a lot of disorder, and avoided the risk of arrest because it is well-known that drug and alcohol consumption are associated with a vast array of illegal activities. Anyone who thinks not is delusional.

The reason I did not join Al-Anon was because as I sat in the small, starkly-lit Al-Anon meeting room for that first and only time, I realized that it adjoined the large, dark, boisterous party-style room where the Alcoholics Anonymous members were reveling through their meeting with shouts of encouragement and raucous laughter. In the Al-Anon meeting I watched the sober parents of one of those alcoholic druggies hang their gray heads in shame and weep openly. It seemed futile to stay, just the three of us. The fifty alcoholic druggies next door were overwhelming.

In my experience, the perdition of drugs and alcohol rests heaviest upon the innocent bystanders.

Caption: Perdition of Alcohol And Drugs

by Annmarie Throckmorton 2018