One Day at a Time in Al-Anon:
Once upon a time a woman came to Al-Anon to find out how to make her husband stop drinking. She was extremely well-informed about alcoholism; she’d read a lot of books. Now she was about to give Al-Anon a chance.
After six months of attendance at meetings, and reading all the Al- Anon literature, she could certainly talk wonderful Al-Anon, except that she wasn’t really powerless over anything. She had her own way of using the program.
She went to AA open meetings and made friends. She introduced them to her husband (when he could navigate enough to go to a meeting with her). In time she built up quite a stable of sponsors for him. Every day she’d call somebody to remind him to call her husband, to come over and talk to him, or to take him to a closed meeting.
Her husband was dragged off to seven meetings a week. He agreed with everyone that AA was great. He was a mechanized puppet, powered by his wife’s Determined Will. When it was discovered that she had set up a Great Big Multi-Sponsor Operation, the sponsors bowed out.
She wasn’t powerless. Oh, no! But her husband kept on drinking. It was the only way the poor man could escape from the Terrible Domestic Powerhouse.