"A fairly usual idea in some Al-Anon groups is that we attend meetings only to hear other people’s tragic stories—blow-by-blow descriptions that we can perhaps identify with. This is one—but only one—of Al-Anon’s functions." (One Day At A Time In Al-Anon)
Imagine if, for one month, the members of a group prohibited themselves from referring to any third parties, anyone else, past or present, alcoholic or non-alcoholic, and a loud buzzer went off every time someone said 'he', 'she', 'they', 'my qualifier', etc.
Firstly, I don't think we would last three minutes. Secondly, it might be very interesting to see what one finds to say instead.
I've learned:
When I mind my own business, there's almost literally nothing left to say, except about such interesting topics as morality in the Iliad, commodity prices, or suchlike.
When the topic of 'How those wicked people are making my life a misery' is swept from the table, I start to sober up.
Being an untreated Al-Anon has been for me like being drunk: drunk on the heady, sickly oloroso sherry of self-righteous victimhood, fragility, sensitivity, touchiness, on a permanent linguistic bender of constructing narratives and stories about the past and the world that bear little substantive resemblance to reality, and either keeping those to myself like sickly plants in the attic or spreading them around like muck.
Alcoholics, one is told, have to have a rock bottom and be 'done' with alcohol.
In Al-Anon I had to be 'done' with the drunkenness of attributing my emotions to anything but my own thinking. And possibly what I had for breakfast. That has a bit of an impact as well.