Alcohol Abuse Advice

Please Start A Men’s Al-Anon Group In Your Community!

You Need a Men’s Al-Anon Meeting In Your Community!

 

Al-Anon is a support group for the families of alcoholics. Twenty years ago, almost 100% of all Al-Anons were women. However, with the increasing rates of alcohol abuse among women and the waking up of so many about this disease, men in increasing numbers are discovering Al-Anon. As of 2006, 16% of the roughly 300,000 Al-Anons in America were men. I am an Al-Anon man with 35 years in recovery who has sponsored over 30 men throughout the years through the 12-steps of Al-Anon and started several men’s Al-Anon meetings that are still growing and helping families in our hometown vicinity. Below is what I have learned about why, how, where, and when to schedule Al-Anon meetings for men. I know that this writing will save the lives of many family members, including those who are addicted to the alcohol!

Why. The value of a Men’s Al-Anon Group.

 

Codependent men are like mute coyotes in the wild. They are loners, self-sufficient, and silent. When a men’s Al-Anon group is finally found the man with the alcoholic wife, for example, finally finds a PACK. He gradually begins the movement from a coyote to a wolf again. Here he finds other men he can trust, men with whom he can meet once a week and howl. Here, he can “spill his guts” in a safe place devoid of women. It sometimes takes months, or even years, but he will grow within the nurturing atmosphere of the group. Some day he may even wag his tail again!

 

Why? Because there are issues, conflicts, struggles, and worries that men share. These are issues many women have a great deal of difficulty understanding. It is important that men come together in groups…twos, threes, fours, or 25’s. In these groups they learn, working within the structure of the 12-steps and the principles of the Al-Anon recovery program, that there are other men who are comfortable enough within themselves to speak openly about topics that the newcomer has not even been able to dredge up into his own consciousness!

During the early days of recovery, he will also face tremendous external opposition, the most intense of which will ultimately come from his addicted loved one. First, he has to muster the courage to face her and admit that he is attending these meetings. Only a true co-dependent knows the level of courage that attending your first meeting requires. This is in some respects more difficult for the man in Al-Anon then for the Al-Anon woman.

 

Even though he now knows that attending meetings, reading Al-Anon literature, and spending time with his sponsor is intrinsically healthy behavior, all of these fly in the face of the denial and isolation created by his disease over many years. Still, if he continues to recover through the Program, these behaviors will serve as antidotes to the diseased thinking in his own head. When his diseased thinking starts to heal, that translates into healthier behavior. Healthier behavior leads to changes in the way he reacts to his alcoholic wife, and so the growth from the program starts to encroach on the interactions between he and his wife…right there in the battling arena…their living room!

 

He sees where these other program people, men and women alike, have gone through precisely what he is experiencing night after night, and he sees that there is hope

He is becoming part of a new community, a new family. This family is growing up together. As the oral tradition of the Program states, he is growing up in public. This public, this new pack, is a pack with true values. It lives, not by a set of restricting absolutes, but by a set of written, spoken, and practiced principles.

 

Contrary to popular PC wisdom, most men crave instructions. They cherish systems…especially systems that work. For example, at his very first meeting he hears a simple system read out loud called “The Do’s and Don’ts. This was beautifully simple. Stop doing the things on this list, and start doing the things on this one!

 

It takes huge reserves of experience, wisdom, courage, and just plain love from the pack to extricate a single coyote from his personal Hell. Unfortunately, most men cannot resist the internal forces alone to even consider stepping put of the dark habits of their “stinkin’ thinking, to attend a meeting.

 

Where?

 

1. Local Churches. Meetings are often conducted in Sunday school rooms, family rooms, prayer rooms, the fellowship hall, the pastor’s study, offices, or conference rooms, and in chapels. Once when our church was sponsoring a large conference for other churches there were no rooms available for our noon Al-Anon meeting so we had a really meaningful meeting outside in the memorial cemetery, with most of us just sitting on the grass under a tree!

 

See the church secretary, learn what room is available every week at a specific time, and schedule your meeting.

 

Advantages of church meetings: most mainline churches are cooperating with community recovery programs, many have such programs already established, and there can be a nice synergism between their programs and meetings such as Al-Anon and AA.

 

Disadvantages of church meetings can include: anonymity can be lost, especially in smaller communities; there may be resistance from church leaders who view 12-step programs as totally separate from Christianity, or may even view 12-step programs as cults.

 

2. Community Centers. There may be community centers in your area that are supported by voluntary contributions or any level of government. These are usually provided through local tax dollars at the county level. Community centers often have smaller rooms where meetings can get started behind a closed door which easily protects anonymity. If the meeting grows, there are often craft rooms or larger halls where meetings can happen every week. In our community center we solved the issue of anonymity in a larger room surrounded by windows by using some of our weekly contributions to purchase nice custom-made blinds, which the community center maintenance people gladly installed.

 

See the Center Director. There may be an annual contract that needs to be signed by one of the group leaders. Some community centers wave their usual monthly use fees for legitimate non-profit groups.

 

Advantages for meetings in community centers are many. They are usually well maintained, modestly priced, centrally located, and non-denominational.

 

The greatest disadvantage is probably anonymity. We felt a need to purchase blinds for our meeting because we had high-profile local men such as physicians, CEO’s, clergymen, teachers, and political leaders in attendance every week.

 

3. Hospitals. Hospitals can be ideal locations for conducting meetings. We have seen weekly meetings conducted successfully in hospitals for years in places like classrooms for continuing education, the hospital cafeteria, and the administrator’s office. Other imaginative locations might include medical libraries, family counseling rooms, or the physician’s conference room.

 

See the administrative person assigned to community relations in larger hospitals, or, in smaller hospitals permission might be granted by anybody in authority such as the hospital administrator, chief of medical staff, or the director of nurses.

 

The advantages of hospital meetings are many. The hospital may already have inpatient and/or outpatient care for

patients suffering with addiction and so they will be able to form a mutually beneficial relationship with your group. Upon discharge family members sometimes feel comfortable attending weekly meetings to work on their own recovery at the hospital where their spouse or child found sobriety. There is often no charge for community organizations, or if there is it is nominal.

The disadvantages of hospital meetings center on anonymity and availability. Your group may have to be moved to other rooms when the hospital is very busy. If you or a member of your family is employed in the medical industry there is a possibility that your anonymity will eventually be broken among your coworkers.

 

4. Community libraries. Libraries are publicly supported institutions so they are available to your group. There are usually smaller study rooms where your group can meet in the beginning when attendance is small that are by nature private. As the group expands there are usually larger conference rooms, reading rooms, or even computer labs where meetings can be conducted on a weekly basis.

 

Contact the head librarian or those in the reference desk who maintain room schedules. In our community we have found the local library to be a safe bet when our usual meeting place is unavailable on a last-minute basis.

 

5. Private AA clubs. Most cities host private AA clubs where a small room is set aside for Al-Anon meetings. These clubs are maintained and operated by a board of directors so the attitude towards family members is contingent on how the board members feel. It is true that there are still some AA members who are hostile towards Al-Anons in general, and this is unfortunate. However, among men in AA this trend seems to us to be changing. Anecdotally, the people responsible for pubic relations in the Al-Anon World Service Office report that they are seeing in influx of AA men, often called “double-winners” to Al-Anon meetings.

 

Contact a board member to discuss adding a weekly Al-Anon meeting for men to their schedule.

 

The most obvious advantage to conduction men’s Al-Anon meetings at a private AA club is that a man with anyone in his family with alcohol addiction will have his own meeting at the same time and building as the person he loves. This also affords the Al-Anon man easy access to open AA meetings where he can learn a GREAT deal about the disease of alcoholism as well as about how the alcoholic mind works. Here he will also find a whole new group of men with whom he can often relate well.

 

There are some disadvantages to private AA clubs as well. They are sometimes not in the best part of town, they are almost always “smoky,” and there is often a hefty monthly fee charged by the AA board of directors because these clubs are usually short of funds. Half of the weekly collection from the Al-Anon group is not an unusual arrangement, which leaves little money left for literature, coffee, contributions to the local intergroup board or World Service Office, chips, etc.

 

6. Colleges. Colleges are excellent places where men’s Al-Anon meetings can be started for a number of reasons. Some colleges have classes and programs to train drug, alcohol and chemical dependency counselors. These are usually housed in either what is termed the “Human Services Building,” or in buildings where there are classes for nursing programs, psychology, or within medical schools. Classrooms, conference rooms, labs, counseling office waiting rooms, college cafeterias, sometimes even portions of student lounges are available for public non-profit support groups such as Al-Anon, Nar-A-Non, and ACOA. An ACOA group for men could serve many because of the number of young men in need of support after being raised by one or more alcoholic parents.

 

The greatest disadvantage is the seasonality of room availability. Rooms may not be available except during the school year. Also, room assignments change so rapidly on a college campus that maintaining a consistent time and place for a weekly meeting is not always easy.

 

When?

 

Week nights at 8:00 are the most popular times for family support meetings to avoid conflict with work, school, and family time.  However, we have seen popular meetings flourish at 10:00 AM on Saturday mornings, or during the late afternoon on Sundays. Chapter 9 meetings, meetings focusing on the entire family to include both the addict in attendance with the family members are sometimes held on Friday or Saturday evenings. Pot luck dinners with speakers after dinner from AA, Al-Anon and Al-Ateen are popular around the country. Having a men’s Al-Anon group in your area adds a great deal of strength to the entire recovery community.

 

Noon meetings are also popular. We have “lunch bunch” meetings at a church every Tuesday and Friday at noon. Many who work in the area enjoy a casual lunch meeting as a break from the workplace. This also means that they do not have to give up an evening with their families during the week.

 

How?

 

One easy way to establish a men’s Al-Anon meeting in your area is to begin attending the established meetings in you area and watching for the few men who attend them. Just approach a few of these guys and ask if they could meet you at a coffee shop to discuss forming a men’s Al-Anon group. If only three men use the guide above and do a little exploring you will soon have a location, a start date, and an established time and day of the week. From that point it is just a matter of announcing when the new men’s meeting will begin as often as possible during the time before every AA and Al-Anon meeting when the chairman asks for announcements.

 

If you plan your first meeting far enough in advance, you are likely to have an amazing turnout .It only takes a few men who form a loyal core every week to start a meeting. In our community we saw months of small meetings of about 3-5 men in tiny rooms within our community center grow into weekly meetings in a large craft room of over 20 men. The meeting has been in existence now for about ten years, and there are about 60 men listed on our roster. There have been so many families that have been helped in those rooms. Miracle stories abound among us.

 

During your first meeting, bring the book you are holding and ask someone to make copies of the readings in the appendices and insert them into protective plastic folders into a binder. Maybe somebody can find an old briefcase or salesman’s leather bag that they are no longer using in a closet or garage for this binder, a sign-in spiral notebook, and a few pieces of literature that you can borrow from an existing meeting.  Maybe you can ask for a volunteer to serve as a temporary literature chairman to find or buy a starter supply of books and pamphlets. Probably the most important materials to find or purchase in the beginning is a “newcomer’s packet.” It will all come together quickly and you will have created a new body of men who will be doing God’s work to help literally thousands of family members…possibly for decades!

 

by Ken P., co-author of the new book We Codependent Men-We Mute Coyotes, copyright 2011, Recovery Trade Publications.