AA Help!
When I think of AA meetings I think of a group of recently sober people, sitting on rickety chairs formed into a circle in a dimly lit, open room during the evening time. Basically I think of everything Hollywood portrays it as. I think that when people are in AA meetings they are just going around in a circle introducing themselves for the 15 time, and sharing stories about the crazy exploits they got up to when they were drunk in an effort to remind people that life was not better when their inhibitions were lowered by liquid courage. Turns out though that I was wrong about AA, not surprising really because if that was all it was it probably wouldn’t be an actual, successful organization.
In all actuality, AA meetings follow a loose set of guidelines so that every meeting is at least similar to all the other one’s going on all throughout the country. You show up, introduce yourself, talk about “The Big Book” and how it’s 12 step processes are helping you, and possibly share life stories or thoughts with your group. It’s the last part that’s most interesting to me though, because it’s virtually sharing personal things from your life to strangers in an effort to remind both yourself and others that what you are doing is right, that it is the better option. That has a technical term as well; it’s called group therapy and it’s clinically proven to have helped people before, and not just for addiction.
According to Kendra Cherry of psychology.about.com, group therapy is a way for people going through similar experiences to not only see that they are not alone in what they are going through,
but to also show them that you can move on from the point where they are at. Group therapy shows people that you can overcome what you are going through by showing them people recovering from the same thing they are, just in different stages. It also provides a sense of camaraderie to those who believe they are alone. It’s just intriguing that these experiences are being explained to complete strangers and it’s helping them; being told something from someone else’s life is helping people get through hardships.
The effectiveness of group therapy has sometime been called into question because of how hard it is to evaluate whether or not it is helping someone, and I will readily admit that group therapy is not the best option in all cases. There are some things that group therapy are better at treating, such as depression and chronic traumatic stress while other things work best with either time or individual care. Tests have been conducted about the efficacy of group therapy however, and two such tests, performed in 2002 and 2003 respectively, based upon chronic traumatic stress have said that group therapy is a treatment option taken for elevating the symptoms of