Alcoholics Anonymous (AA)

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Hot to Find an AA Meeting

How to Find Alcoholics Anonymous Meetings Near You

12 Step Meetings, Alcoholics Anonymous / By / 4 minutes of reading

There are Alcoholics Anonymous meetings all around the world. Just about every country has chapters, and most big cities have multiple meetings every day. Meetings types vary. Some are open to the public, while others are closed and designed to protect anonymity. There are meetings designed exclusively for men or women and co-ed meetings as well. Therefore, every member of the fellowship should be able to find the right arrangement for them.

Regional Service Centers

Many cities and counties have service centers dedicated to local AA chapters. Many of them operate hotlines, sometimes 24-hour ones, which you can contact to find a meeting nearby.

Volunteer members of the fellowship answer the hotlines and are eager to help newcomers. They will tell you which meetings are currently available and open. They can also help newcomers find an individual to meet with them and prepare them for the first meeting.

Local AA directories list all of the meetings in their areas. However, the guides are often closed to non-members.

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Alcoholics Anonymous Success Rate

What is the Alcoholics Anonymous Success Rate?

Alcoholics Anonymous / By / 7 minutes of reading

Many members of Alcoholics Anonymous swear that the program has saved their lives and changed them profoundly for the better. For some critics of the program, AA is essentially a cult, built on pseudoscience with no tangible benefits for members.

This has been a difficult argument to settle. Until the last 20 years or so, it was particularly difficult to get good figures on the success of Alcoholics Anonymous.

However, the high-quality research that has been done, shows that AA has an impressive success rate. In comparison to other forms of treatment, the 12-step program has fared either equally well or in most cases somewhat better.

According to one particularly good study, 67% of those who attend AA meetings regularly remain sober in the long-term. It is important to note that this is the success rate for those that stick with the program over the years and not the success rate for those who were members briefly.

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12 Step Meeting for Heroin

12 Step Programs for Heroin Addiction Recovery

12 Step Programs, Heroin Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous / By / 5 minutes of reading

When it comes to the disease of addiction, finding a 12-step program is crucial to one’s physical, spiritual and emotional health. In many cases, it is a matter of life or death. For struggling addicts, 12-step programs are commonly used in order to help one arrest their addiction because there is no cure for this disease. Although there may not be a cure for drug addiction, recovery is possible within the rooms of 12-step meetings.

12-Step Programs

While there is no cure for drug addiction, it has proven to be a treatable and manageable disorder. 12-step programs are usually non profit organizations that come together in order to help individuals recover from their addiction. While Alcoholics Anonymous was the first 12-step program, many groups began forming after its founding in the 1930s and started addressing other problems, such as substance abuse and behavioral compulsions. Because there are so many different problematic areas, it is important to find a group that can specialize in the addiction that one is suffering from.

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12 step AA meeting concept

Different Types of AA Meetings – Meeting Types Explained

12 Step Meetings, Alcoholics Anonymous / By / 5 minutes of reading

When you imagine going to AA meetings, you may think of a fairly simple set up. People introducing themselves as alcoholics and telling their stories. Indeed, the official purpose of AA meetings is for members to “share their experience, strength, and hope with each other that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from alcoholism.” Almost all meetings have certain characteristics in common. The serenity prayer starts the proceedings. Some AA material is read and people share. Finally, there is almost always coffee involved!

However, aside from these common characteristics, meetings can differ greatly. Indeed, as the fellowship has grown and evolved, different types of meetings have been pioneered to suit its growing needs. Here are the main types of meetings currently open to attendance.

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Big Book of AA

What is the Big Book of AA and where can I get one?

Alcoholics Anonymous / By / 5 minutes of reading

What is the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous?

Originally titled Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How More Than One Hundred Men Have Recovered from Alcoholism, the first large work released by AA was referred to as “the Big Book of AA” due to the thickness of the pages used in the first edition.

The most notable contribution of the “Big Book of AA” is the methodical presentation of the vaunted “12-Steps of AA”, the cornerstone of the recovery of millions of addicts. The “How it Works” chapter, which contains these steps, has since appeared with minor adjustments in the literature of all other related fellowships such as Narcotics Anonymous and Sexaholics Anonymous.

The entire Alcoholics Anonymous program stands and falls on the success of the 12-step concept of recovery presented in that chapter. It is hard to conduct scientific studies of the effectiveness of 12-step programs, due to the anonymity factor. However, those studies that have been conducted have conclusively pointed to its usefulness in fostering recovery.

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