an open letter

Dear AA members,
I love you dearly, I do. I know how hard many of you work to maintain your sobriety and I admire your recovery. I have many of you as friends and I value your opinions. I admire your stories and you make me realize how glad I am that alcohol (and drugs) are not my problems.

However, when I go to an Al-Anon meeting, I want to be at an Al-Anon meeting. I don't want to know how long you've been sober. I don't care what your addictions are. It doesn't matter to me what non-CAL you are reading. I've come to an Al-Anon meeting to hear about Al-Anon. Not AAs promises. Not the Big Book. Nor how wonderful your sobriety is. I don't care what your AA sponsor thinks. This is Al-Anon.

I want to hear about how you've finally learned how to keep the focus on yourself, and not the alcoholics. I want learn how you've managed to stand up to your dad/mom/wife/husband/etc and respect your own boundaries. I want to hear the story of learning what it meant to truly take care of yourself and be gentle with yourself. I want to hear about how you respect that while this is a family disease, you no longer preach 12 steps to your family but instead try to embody the spirit of our principles.

I find it incredibly frustrating that you can't respect our the clearly stated reminder at the beginning to not break your anonymity in regards to other programs. While in your head this may all work out, what you actually do is make the room much less safe for people like me. So much so that I often don't return to meetings that have serious problems with this issue. While I might handle the alcoholics in my life a bit better today then when I first got into the program, there are still days I find them scary. There are still days that I feel the little 8 year old trapped inside me cowering as my parents argue in my memories. The 13 year old is also still inside me who remembers being told she wasn't old enough to have an opinion. See, I still don't like alcoholics many days, and I'd rather not know you are one, especially within the confines of a meeting.

It isn't that I don't care about your or your sobriety, but when I sit in an Al-Anon meeting, I want to hear about Al-Anon. If I'd heard these sorts of things early in recovery, I might have gotten confused and even more scared and never returned, but thankfully I didn't. I kept coming back. I do however worry about what message I send a new comer when I allow things like this to happen in a meeting. So maybe this letter isn't really to you, but rather to myself, and as a warning to you. That maybe the next time this happens I will be the person who reminds you after the meeting that I don't appreciate hearing about AA in my Al-Anon meeting. Maybe it is I who needs to stand up for my boundaries, and that includes not hearing your AA story in my Al-Anon meeting.

--A Very Irritable Pumpkin