First thing yesterday I went to the AA meeting I've been going to pretty regularly in the last few years, particularly since my home Al Anon group sank too deeply into questions of equity and then failed to re-emerge convincingly enough from the pandemic. As I've said before, I love AA and I always will, but it's not in all cases all that.
Yesterday the speaker floated a somewhat open-ended question about where I go when I am in need of support and I thought it through, I realized that it's definitely no AA. It's my family, Mary, Leslie, Mom, or friends and colleagues or whatever, depending on the situation. Of course, I wouldn't be in any shape to have good relationships with them had I not been through decades of retooling first via AA then via Al Anon, but that doesn't make them always and in every situation the first line of defense. They are key elements in my arsenal of sanity and balance, yes, but not the be all and end all.
I thought about sharing that in the meeting but I dared not. because the genre of the 12-step share mandates that one at all times sing the virtue of the Program. On the narrow theory that the primary focus of the meeting should be newcomers and providing them with the tools to keep living without whatever they're addicted to, I get it. But in the end it does ring a little hollow, this eternal need of these marvelous quasi-organizations to hear their own praises sung, as if any admission of an imperfection on their part would dash them against the rocks of unbeing. In the end it's unnecessarily limiting.
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