Aa Meeting

AA Meeting After reading and hearing about everyone’s experience with alcohol I decided to attend an AA meeting. I chose this for two reasons, one because I wanted to see if these meeting are effective and second because after hearing everyone’s stories I began to doubt myself. I consider myself a social drinker because I like to go out and party mostly every weekend. After learning so much about alcohol I started to wonder if I depended on it in order to have fun. Honestly it is quite scary to imagine that I could possibly be in the first stages of alcoholism. The biggest impact I had this semester was while watching the film where the mother hits her daughter because she is under the influence. My parents never did that too me so I do not think my future children should have to go through that either. The AA meeting I decide to attend was in Santa Ana, CA named Fuentes de Vida. The meetings were held in Spanish because I went with one of my uncles who has a DUI. The location is open 24 hours a day and is free to attend but they do accept donations. In the beginning of the meeting they ask if anyone is knew, I said yes and they asked for my name. Then they dedicated the service in my name. The rules are quite simple people volunteer to speak and have 15 minutes to share their experiences. They start by saying their name, admitting they are an alcoholic and say what type of alcoholism they I identify with. Once that person is done another volunteer stands up to speak. Overall the meeting lasted about an hour and they gave coffee, water and donuts. At first I expected everyone to be serious and emotional about his or her stories, I was completely wrong. Everyone was laughing at each other’s stories and making funny comments. In most cases the person speaking had a funny story about when they were drunk. I was a bit confused on how people are suppose to get better from these meetings if all they do is joke around. One thing I did pick up from the meeting was