Food For Thought

If one throws salt at you, you will not be harmed unless you have sore places.
-Latin Proverb

So as many of you know, I'm in the Drug and Alcohol Addictions program, and for a paper I'm working on I had to attend an Al-Anon, AA, and NA meeting. I want to talk a little bit about what I got out of the Al-Anon meeting. Going into the meeting, I had no idea what to expect. I assumed it would be just like the AA meetings you see in movies. Well there were some similarities, but it was also very different. I'm not sure if any of you reading this are familiar with Al-Anon, or even care what Al-Anon is.
This is from their website: "For over 55 years, Al-Anon (Alateen for younger members) has been offering strength and hope for friends and families of problem drinkers. It is estimated that each alcoholic affects the lives of at least four other people...alcoholism is truly a family disease. No matter what relationship you have with an alcoholic, whether they are still drinking or not, all who have been affected by someone else's drinking can find solutions that lead to serenity in the Al-Anon/Alateen fellowship."

Al-Anon doesn't get as much attention as AA or even NA does, and I think that is unfortunate. While members are there because of the alcoholic(s), the focus is on themselves. So many friends and family members of alcoholics give and give, and their lives focus around the alcoholic, well Al-Anon helps to bring the focus back to the person who is affected by alcoholism.

Al-Anon does not advertise but I wish they did. This would have been so helpful a few years back when a lot of the most important people in my life were alcoholics, had I even known about Al-Anon. So many people in this world are affected by addiction, there is help even if you are not the addict. Sorry, I'm not trying to make this sound like an after-school special, but there are a lot of silent sufferers out there. You aren't alone.

Anyway, the quote that I put at the beginning of this post is from one of the readings we did during the meeting from the book Courage to Change. The quote really hit home with me. It is so true for me. I try to not let what people say/do get me down but some things (and some people) really just know where to "put the salt" so it hurts the most. This proverb really brought to my attention that as much as I'd like to say I don't, I really do still have (several in fact) sore spots. I'm hoping to use my new perspective I gained from reading that proverb to really identify my "sore spots" and work on making it so they are not sore spots anymore.