I Walked Out of Al-Anon and Never Went Back

Photo by Jimmy Kovacic on Unsplash

*Note to reader: This piece was originally published in Human Parts on Medium in October of 2019; there is an update at the end, which I just wrote (June 2025).

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“God grant me the serenity…”

I was failing before the first line was over. I had zero interest in serenity—I wanted solutions.

By the time I walked into that church basement, I was desperate. My partner couldn’t quit drinking or wouldn’t quit drinking, I’m still not sure, but maybe the important part is that he had no interest in quitting drinking. It took me far too many years to accept this.

Our lives were unraveling. I was unraveling. For the first time in my adult life — and I recognize how obnoxious this sounds — I found myself in a situation I couldn’t figure out on my own. I assumed these Al-Anon people could help me solve it.

It turns out that’s not what they do. Nor do they claim to. It says right on their website that sobriety is not the goal. So I’m not blaming Al-Anon; I just misunderstood what it was all about. Al-Anon is a support group, and I wanted a think tank. I’ve always been more oriented toward fixing than coping. It’s probably a character flaw.

The goal of Al-Anon is to help people find their own happiness in a way that is separate from and not dependent upon whether their loved one is drinking. And here’s the problem that presented to me: My partner had been my happiness. He had been my best friend. If he was gone — and it was clear by then that the person I fell in love with was gone, replaced by this terrifying stranger — I didn’t see the point.

What Al-Anon teaches you to do is to separate yourself from the alcoholism, and by extension from the alcoholic. The point is to create distance and relinquish all attempts at control. The program teaches you to tamp down the emotion — to subtract the emotion, really — so that you can survive from day to day. I understand the utility, and perhaps the necessity, of these efforts. And I concede that they are logical and practical.

But I knew it wouldn’t work for us. We were never together for logical reasons. We believed practicality to be an inferior dimension over which we floated like vapor. We were all emotion, all raw spirit, all mystical communion. There was zero distance between us and we weren’t capable of operating as if there were. We were watertight and tongue-and-groove, or we were nothing at all.

This, I now understand, is part of the sickness. My partner was addicted to alcohol, he was addicted to intensity, he was addicted to chaos, and he may or may not have been addicted to me. I was definitely addicted to him, which is apparently typical. Eventually, the addictions intersect and then double back on each other until everyone involved is spinning around in a tangle of calamity — grabbing and clawing, retreating and hiding. But no one ever escapes.

Al-Anon acknowledges that the more you love the alcoholic, the more you will suffer. And then it teaches you how to dwell within that suffering. But it seemed to me, as we progressed from woman to woman telling her story around the circle, that the suffering did not abate. It just changed forms.

These women were not furious like I was. They were not distraught. They did not rail and smolder. They didn’t plead for renewal, didn’t rally for revolution. But what I saw in their faces, in the slopes of their shoulders and in the heaviness of their bones, seemed far worse. Resignation had settled into their skin and pulled their faces down into the jowls. It had muted everything into a graying sameness that reeked of decay.

One young woman, when it was her turn to talk, shared a story about her husband having an episode of alcohol-induced psychosis in front of their little daughter. The child was terrified, just like the last time and worse than the first time.

The next woman spoke of the drug Diazepam, how it had been a godsend until it morphed into the agent of evil itself. She seemed almost nostalgic for the good-old-days of straight-up alcoholism. If the withdrawal drug for alcohol was Diazepam and he was addicted to that, then what was the withdrawal drug for Diazepam? Was there an end to this? There were not enough drugs in the world.

An elderly woman described her husband collapsing in a seizure, vomiting on himself, and losing consciousness. She was physically unable to move him. She called 911 and reported this to us as though it equated to scheduling an appointment for teeth-cleaning, which only seemed absurd until she revealed how frequently this particular incident had occurred. She sounded sad about it, not shocked or disturbed. The others in the circle nodded sympathetically, commiserating.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to throttle them all. I know that’s unfair.

But at what point does “coping” or “serenity in spite of” become sanctioning abuse? At what point does it become complicity? It seemed like a very fine line.

I felt like I was being given a sharp glimpse into a horrifying kaleidoscope of the future — fragmented, confusing, and endlessly repeating its own chaotic patterns. And it was my future.

When it was my turn to talk, I said that my partner was an alcoholic. I said that I was leaving him. In what I now recognize as not only absurdity but also ignorance, I believed I might empower someone else in that circle. I’m almost certain I did not. No one gave me a hard time, but they didn’t look inspired, either.

And maybe that was the worst part: It wasn’t just that their husbands were drinking their own lives away. It was that in the process, they’d already sucked all the air out of their wives. I could barely breathe myself. This was acute enervation, if that’s even a thing.

I’d expected intensity, wailing, gnashing of teeth, and rending of garments. But this absolute void of any life force at all — empty of anger, fear, hope, or curiosity — it scared the living hell out of me.

My partner liked the idea of “radical acceptance.” I did too, in theory. I wanted to radically accept him. I would have done anything for him. I would have done anything to keep him and to save him, had he wanted to be saved. But beyond a certain point, acceptance takes on a darker shade. I was now lost in that blackening wilderness. I was both terrified and obsessed, frantic to escape him and heartbroken with longing for him — or for who he used to be or who I’d mistakenly thought he was. I still don’t know which one of those things is the true one.

The meeting was nearing a close, and I glanced once more around the circle. There were no tears. There was no hope for improvement. If there was serenity in this room, I could not locate it. There were just these women who reported dutifully to their jobs, to their struggling husbands, to these godforsaken meetings at 7 p.m. every Friday night, to sit in this soul-crushing entropy. And why weren’t there any men in this room?

Al-Anon does exactly what it’s intended to do. It works. The research confirms it. It effectively supports people who remain entangled with their alcoholics, by choice or by necessity.

But I wasn’t going to be one of those people. I walked out of the meeting and never returned. I packed just what I needed, and I left him, in the middle of a rough night in the middle of my life. This is not a victory—it’s probably a failure of grace. It’s possibly a failure of love. But it was an option, and it was an option I could see rapidly receding from my grasp. I could take it or succumb to the addiction forever. And then what? Where’s my Diazepam?

Cold turkey is a brutal withdrawal method, but for those of us who are addicted to the addicted, it’s the only option. There are no exhilarating highs, but there are no humiliating lows, either. I learned to live along a spectrum of normalcy that ranges from pleasantly stable to mind-numbingly boring on any given day.

Since then, I’ve remained alone because the pain of loneliness is less piercing than the pain of being with anyone else. I know that, for me, no one else will ever be as good as he was. I just hope no one is ever as bad.

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Update: June 2025

At the point I wrote this piece, I fully believed every word of it: that I’d walked away from the love of my life; that there was something sacred and special about that particular love that rendered it “higher” than other forms of love or even than other people’s love; that “radical acceptance” was a construction of mutual support rather than weaponized empathy.

What I believed to be a “mystical communion” was in actuality a sick and twisted entanglement at that point, a chaotic sculpture sutured to an increasingly shaky foundation.

I believed that I would never be with anyone else ever again, because there could never be so powerful or “right” a match.

I was absolutely convicted in these beliefs and absolutely wrong.

When I lived within that space, my perception was warped by addiction, misunderstanding, confusion, and fear. When I left, there was no moment of triumph or freedom or glimpses of a brighter future; I left because I had to, and then I started over. I don’t know what would have become of me had I stayed, but I know it would not have been good.

I also know you wouldn’t be reading this right now, there would be no “Burned Haystack on Substack,” there would be no Burned Haystack at all, there would be no community of women like this, there would be no book deal, there would be none of any of that.

I don’t want to spin this as one of those “It was so hard and so terrible, but it made me stronger, and I wouldn’t trade it” stories. The things that happened during those years: what I lost and missed out on, the sacrifices and compromises I made, the hard-earned money forever gone, the reverberations now wired into my nervous system that I know I’ll never fully shed . . . I am not contextualizing it in a cost-benefit analysis. I will never say it was “worth it” because that’s a false and unsolvable equation.

I’m also not telling anyone that if you leave a bad situation there will be better days on the horizon. For the record, I do believe that, but I know it’s not a compelling argument or even an inspiring one to women who are in such situations. You leave when you have to leave, when you don’t have a choice. I’m not sure most people get this. So I don’t want to claim any kind of wisdom or strength or determination or courage; I left because I had to, and the details beyond that aren’t necessarily important to this piece.

If there’s a takeaway here, it’s this: You can have deeply-held, intense feelings about someone or something and just be dead wrong. There are times that the people surrounding you are going to have a more accurate impression of your situation than you do, and if you realize there’s a major disconnect between what you believe to be true about your situation and what your trusted family and friends are seeing, it might make sense to suspend your own conviction long enough to listen to them.