To free oneself from addictions, the rise of anonymous support groups

Eight years ago Alice, 37, received a long apology email from a Canadian ex-lover. He said he was sorry for the turn their relationship had taken, for his too many text messages sent after their breakup, for his crazy way of being possessive and intrusive. He ended his message by explaining that he was accomplishing his “ninth stage”that of “honourable amends”. For more than a year, Nathan had been going to DASA – Love and Sex Addicts Anonymous – to fight his addiction to love and sex. Like all programs stamped “anonymous”, he took part in a discussion group on the subject and worked on his “twelve steps”.

At the time, Alice didn’t understand everything, but she found it sympathetic and folkloric. “Americans do stuff like that. It was benevolent, it suited me. » She didn’t think about it again until 2020. The day after the first confinement, her best friend, Myriam, 38, suddenly stopped drinking.

She sent him this email: “My name is Myriam, I am dependent. This sentence, Alice, I have been repeating it several times a week for more than three weeks. Three weeks ago, I didn’t dare tell you, neither you nor the girls, but I fell on my head. A real fall, not in a figurative sense, a fall so literal that it is grotesque. Bam, on the corner of a sidewalk on my way home at dawn. I fell asleep. I should not have. You don’t go to bed with a bleeding skull, black eyes and a broken nose. We don’t go to bed, we go to the hospital. I was lucky. I fell asleep and, the next day, the general practitioner whom I consulted urgently made me pass three scanners. Result: a small broken nose bone and nothing but immense shame and self-loathing. Sorry, I didn’t know that, but I’m totally nuts. I could have died from an evening that was too drunk. But a friend of a friend took me to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. You won’t believe this, but I don’t drink anymore and I like talking to these people. »

Alice called Miriam after this message and Miriam told her. In these meetings, everyone and anyone is there. Old and young, a cleaning man and a TV star, fashion designers and enarques, bankers and teachers. People who would have nothing to say to each other if they had met elsewhere, but who, in these little rooms lent or rented for three times nothing to churches and neighborhood associations, tell each other their lives, without interrupt or argue.

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