Working the 12 Steps of Al-Anon gives you a chance to accompany loved ones as they discover a way to get their lives back on track. The program is designed to guide those affected by another person’s drinking toward a more healthy, productive life centered on the individual’s needs, not their loved ones. If you’re new to Al-Anon, this brief guide will explain what to expect and work the steps.
What Is Al-Anon?
Al-Anon is an alternative support group for those affected by someone else’s drinking. It follows a very similar structure to the famous 12-steps from Alcoholics Anonymous. However, in Al-Anon, the steps are meant to help families and loved ones of alcohol addicts. Keep reading if you’re interested in working the steps alongside your parents or spouse.
Al-Anon 12 Steps & Traditions
Al-Anon is a mutual support group for family members and friends of alcoholics. Al-Anon suggests its members use the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous as a guide to overcoming alcoholism. These steps are designed to help alcoholics achieve and maintain sobriety by assisting them in understanding how they became dependent on alcohol, why they refuse to stop drinking, and how they can overcome those tendencies in themselves.
12-Steps
Al-Anon recommends that its members work all of the original 12 Steps with its suggested modifications for the sake of their recovery from codependency. The 12 Steps are:
- We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
- We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
- We decided to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
- Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
- We admitted to God, ourselves, and another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
- We’re entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
- Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
- Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.
- We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when injured them or others.
- Continued to take personal inventory and promptly admitted it when we were wrong.
- We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
- Having had a spiritual awakening due to these steps, we tried to carry this message to others and practice these principles in all our affairs.
12 Traditions
- Our common welfare should come first; personal progress for the greatest number depends upon unity.
- There is but one authority for our group purpose — a loving God as He may express Himself in our group conscience. Our leaders are but trusted servants—they do not govern.
- The relatives of alcoholics, when gathered together for mutual aid, may call themselves an Al-Anon Family Group, provided that, as a group, they have no other affiliation. The only requirement for membership is that there be a problem of alcoholism in a relative or friend.
- Each group should be autonomous, except in matters affecting another group or Al-Anon or AA as a whole.
- Each Al-Anon Family Group has but one purpose: to help families of alcoholics. We do this by practicing the Twelve Steps of AA ourselves, encouraging and understanding our alcoholic relatives, and welcoming and comforting families of alcoholics.
- Our Family Groups ought never to endorse, finance, or lend our name to any outside enterprise, lest money, property, and prestige problems divert us from our primary spiritual aim. Although a separate entity, we should always cooperate with Alcoholics Anonymous.
- Every group ought to be fully self-supporting, declining outside contributions.
- Al-Anon Twelfth Step work should remain forever non-professional, but our service centers may employ special workers.
- Our groups, as such, ought never to be organized; but we may create service boards or committees directly responsible to those they serve.
- The Al-Anon Family Groups have no opinion on outside issues; hence our name ought never to be drawn into public controversy.
- Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we must always maintain personal anonymity at the press, radio, films, and TV. We need to guard with special care the anonymity of all AA members.
- Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our Traditions, ever reminding us to place principles above personalities.
Working the 12 Steps of Al-Anon
Although the steps and traditions seem to be written for the alcoholic, they also reflect on the family. When the first step says, “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol,” it means that the family cannot take responsibility for their loved one’s drinking. Working the Al-Anon steps is about rethinking the family unit after alcoholism. It encourages the family also to find forgiveness, hope, and a path towards recovery.
