What is Al-Anon?
Someone else's drinking can affect your life - be it a relative or friend, male or female.
Someone else's uncontrolled, and uncontrollable, drinking can:
- turn love to hate
- bring you to the depths of despair
- affect you financially
- lead to violent outbursts
- make you doubt your own sanity so that you wonder if you have driven your partner or family member to drink and that you are the problem.
Whatever your relationship to the drinker, whatever your story, Al-Anon can help.
Al-Anon Family Groups hold regular meetings where members sharing their own experience of living with alcoholism and of how they cope. Al-Anon does not offer advice or counselling, but members give each other understanding, strength and hope.
I am married to an alcoholic who has been drinking for about thirty years. The enormity of the problem of alcoholism did not present itself immediately but was a progression over time. In the early years, I perceived a change in behaviour in my husband, I didn't really understand what was happening but I knew I didn't like it. I tried to discuss our problems, suggested he was forming a habit, that our lives were being impaired. Outbursts came from nowhere and about nothing. I felt I was living with Jekyll and Hyde.