Welcome to the Newcomer
At an Al-Anon meeting, the newcomer is the most important person in the room. The influx of new people, with their own experience, strength, and hope, continues to keep the Program alive.
The following text taken from the “Suggested Al-Anon Meeting Opening Statement” is aimed at helping the newcomer transition into Al-Anon. It describes to newcomers what they can expect to achieve from the program and from attending meetings:
We welcome you to this Al-Anon Family Group meeting and hope you will find in this fellowship the help and friendship we have been privileged to enjoy.
We who live, or have lived, with the problem of alcoholism understand as perhaps few others can. We, too, were lonely and frustrated but in Al-Anon we discover that no situation is really hopeless and that it is possible for us to find contentment and even happiness, whether the alcoholic is still drinking or not.
We urge you to try our program.
It has helped many of us find solutions that lead to serenity. So much depends on our own attitudes, and as we learn to place our problem in its true perspective, we find it loses its power to dominate our thoughts and our lives.
The family situation is bound to improve as we apply the Al-Anon ideas. Without such spiritual help living with an alcoholic is too much for most of us. Our thinking becomes distorted by trying to force solutions, and we become irritable and unreasonable without knowing it.
The Al-Anon program is based on the suggested Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous…
…which we try, little by little, one day at a time, to apply to our lives along with our slogans and the Serenity Prayer.
The loving interchange of help among members and daily reading of Al-Anon literature thus make us ready to receive the priceless gift of serenity.
Al-Anon is an anonymous fellowship. Everything that is said here, in the group meeting and member-to-member, must be held in confidence. Only in this way can we feel free to say what is on our minds and in our hearts, for this is how we help one another in Al-Anon.”