Twelve-Step Alcoholic Anonymous Group Analysis

1253 Words6 Pages
I participated in one of the open twelve-step Alcoholic Anonymous (AA) group meeting in Chicago on Saturday morning. Generally speaking, AA groups are a type of voluntarily fellowship group aiming provides support to people with alcohol problem. Often it is compatible with “harm reduction model” and not a psychotherapy group (van Wormer & Davis, 2012). Therefore, most of the psychotherapy group rules and techniques are not being utilized in the AA meetings. However, everyday, all around the world, numerous people gather for the same purpose in the AA meetings, so that they share their problems, thoughts, feelings and support with each other. Thus, it is a therapeutic group, which has powerful and distinctive group dynamics and process. In this…show more content…
Even though group members have a sense of being a part of group, as of the beginning, group was divided into three groups mainly based on their age. Before and after the session, young adults, middle age adults, and two British members established their own groups and tend to make more interaction into their groups. Yalom and Leszcz (2008) discussed several disadvantages of subgrouping; however, they also said that these are true for psychotherapy groups. In contrast, especially for the supporting and twelve-step groups, extra-group contact could be beneficial for the members in many ways. This seems reasonable for supporting groups for example, cancer patients. However, when it comes to twelve-step group, I am suspicious of the benefits of extra group contact to some extent. There could be a possibility of affecting each other in a negative way. People who had an extra group contact may motivate themselves to drink alcohol, reinforce their drinking habit. In fact various types of AA open meeting are being conducted for a long time, and they differ from each other in some way, nevertheless, subgrouping was not addressed throughout the session in the group I
Show More
Related

  • Alcoholics Anonymous Case Study

    1397 Words  | 6 Pages

    individuals wish to recover and often turn to a program called Alcoholics Anonymous which is a community based rehabilitation program. This program focuses on the socialization of addicts and those that have successfully recovered. The purpose of this paper is to discuss Alcoholics Anonymous as a community based program for rehabilitation and whether

    Read More

More about Twelve-Step Alcoholic Anonymous Group Analysis

Open Document