Re Lil I think I remember Lou saying one time that he went to a meeting and was put off by the fact that you couldn't get any advice or solutions there Yes, that was me. I went to one group of Adult Children of Alcoholics,1X a week, a new and in thing to do at the time, and there was this guy in a masters program that had to finish writing his final paper to graduate. Week after week, he said the same thing. After the third week I asked him if I came over on Monday night, "WOULD IT HELP." Simple solution, right? I got stares I didn't like from the group. They abided by the no cross talk rule.
I was in another similar group EA, (Emotions Anon.) on a different night during this same college time. The EA group allowed some cross talk and people could ask for opinions. I felt the EA group was about 5X more helpful.
Both groups were comprised of college students, some in college, some working for a long time. A couple of times the group met at the PTSD, Vietnam Vet's center where there was a LSW that did a little steering and gave us a little direction, or advised someone to get individual counseling because the individual might need professional advice/help for some problems/topics.
I also believe many of our fixes to problems we have are internal and just need to be expressed. I think the right AA group can be very helpful if the individual is close to a solution.
Where the person is not even close to being up to speed or way off track, sometimes the cross-talk, if allowed, helps people move forward faster.
An example is if there are 10 people in a group and a person speaking something and at least 6 people disagree with the speaker, I felt it helped move the person speaking closer to a solution.
The cross-talking EA group always endorsed the philosophy, the individual had to make the final decision.
We (the EA group)always said, to everyone, speaker or cross-talker, "thank you for sharing."
When I was working with the boys in the group-home, I had to take then to AA meetings so I went to the AA meetings to make sure the boys were not hooking up with other local "just going through the motions of court mandated AA but no intention of not drinking members, or I attended the ALANON meeting in the next room. Strictly by the book and rigid. Not the growth I saw in the one EA group but certainly much better than not going at all. The meeting was mostly about the books and lacked some of the personal ups and downs of the common everyday man or woman.
I suppose different groups, different strokes. I know some groups would break up if cross-talk/questions/advice was allowed.
This board kind of runs counter to that... but I still enjoy giving advice and hearing advice. While I think AA type groups are good, I see 10X more wisdom here on the forum because we can ask questions and we can offer advice. We can also say "thank you for sharing" and "take what you can use and leave the rest behind."
The strictly AA form meetings I attended did not endorse/allow much talk about books like "Come To Your Senses" and all of the other related books talked about here on SSM forum. BTDT and got the "please stick to the AA literature" Lou.
I will say some aspects of an "in-person meetings" are beneficial and am not discouraging anyone from attending and AA based, group meetings. I am mostly saying how much I like this forum because it embraces many forms of literature, has a wide variety of participant's and with the exception of a few cyber punch-outs, gets along well.
