We hope you will find, in this fellowship, the help and friendship we have been privileged to enjoy!

“You can see what the drinking is doing to the alcoholic. But can you see what it is doing to you?

-How Al-Anon Works Family and Friends of Alcoholics

• Al-Anon is a program with the single purpose of helping families and friends of alcoholics, whether the alcoholic is still drinking or not.

• In Al-Anon, we do not give advice. We offer our own experience, strength, and hope.

• We talk about the problems we ourselves have encountered and how we have used the principles and practices of the Al-Anon program to help through our problems.

• We share our feelings, our growth, and our pain. We listen and we learn, identifying with the stories others tell and discovering new ways to approach our particular circumstances by hearing how others have dealt with similar issues.

• We encourage you to attend several different Al-Anon meetings because each meeting has its own atmosphere and its own personality.

• We suggest that newcomers to Al-Anon make no major decisions for quite some time after coming, because we find that our perspective on our circumstances undergoes a dramatic change during that time.

• We suggest that you take what you like and leave the rest.

• What we don’t do is spend a lot of time talking about the alcoholic. Instead, we learn to put the focus on ourselves.

• Our compassion and support might make a loved one’s struggle with illness easier to bear, but it is simply not within our power to cure someone else’s disease.

• We are powerless over another’s alcoholism. We didn’t cause the disease. We can’t control it. And we can’t cure it.

We encourage you to find a meeting. Your healing starts…one day at a time.