My Experience at Al-Anon

|Field Experiment |
|Understanding Diversity Fall 2011 |
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|My experience at Al-Anon |
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|Mitch Bell |
|11/16/2011 |
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My Experience at Al-Anon

I have never had the opportunity to sit in on a meeting of Al-Anon and I have always been curious as to what a meeting would be like. Therefore, I knew this assignment would give me the perfect opportunity to attend a meeting. I have been to several meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and I also have attended a few meetings of Narcotics Anonymous. It was at those meetings, several years ago, that I first heard of a group called Al-Anon.

There was a Wednesday evening Alcoholics Anonymous meeting that I enjoyed attending in Jeffersonville at the Jeff Token Club. I found it to be a friendly environment and full of twelve step gurus that I learned tons from. At that time the Jeffersonville Token Club was where the majority of Southern Indiana’s recovery based meetings were held. The building has been remodeled many times over the years and during this time there was a large meeting room with a smaller meeting room off the back of the building. It was in the smaller meeting room where the members of Al-Anon would meet while the open discussion meeting of Alcoholics anonymous was being held in the larger room. Just before the A.A. meeting was called to begin, the mostly female crowd would shuffle to the back and the two wooden doors would be