Frequently Asked Questions
Is my anonymity protected?
Yes. Our system requires everyone to register, and email addresses are only visible to our trusted servants. You may make an email visible in the member directory if you are open to or desire other members directly contacting you. (You may use the same email you registered with or another more anonymous email in the directory, and these can both be changed by you by editing your profile.) You may pick your own user name, as long as it is not offensive. This user name is not able to be changed once registered, but you can request that the user name displayed in shares be changed by using the “contact the list administrator” link on the home page if you want to make sure you cannot be identified from it.
How do I become a member?
Fill out the Registration Form. Within 24-48 hours your membership will be approved, and you can go to the site and start participating in the meetings.
Are meetings at a particular time?
Our meetings are open 24/7. If you want to participate in today’s meeting, go to the Sharings and choose the top item, which is today’s meeting. . You can read the meeting lead, any sharings (in the comments) and leave a sharing if you wish. We have daily meetings that are posted at midnight and stay up for 30
days. There is no set time. Members may post at any time and also have access to read the meeting Conference Approved Literature (CAL) and chair’s opening at anytime.
Our meeting topics have a weekly schedule:
Monday-Steps meeting
Tuesday-Slogans meeting
Wed-Traditions meeting
Thursday-Al-Anon Conference Approved Literature (CAL) selection meeting
Friday-Concepts meeting
Saturday-New Comers meeting with 6 rotating themes and open questions and answers
Sunday-Open Topic
Our meetings are lead by a Chair. Chairs sign up for a day of the week for one quarter. They choose a selection of CAL relevant to the day’s topic and then share their own Experience, Strength, and Hope (ESH) based on the topic and CAL selection. Then any member can share their own ESH by typing in the “comments” box at the bottom of the meeting.
Though our meetings are not at one particular time, our group tries to follow the general structure of face-to-face (F2F) Al-Anon Family Groups. The daily meetings are meant to follow the same pattern of F2F meetings with the same Suggested Welcome, the 12 Steps, the 12 Traditions as hyperlinks at the beginning of each meeting and Suggested Closing at the end. We follow the principle of not engaging in Cross Talk (also a hyperlink at the beginning of each meeting) so that every member feels safe to share their own Experience, Hope, and Strength without fear of judgement, comment, or advice. The exception to Cross Talk is our Saturday Newcomers meetings format, where questions are welcome in the meeting. We also follow the principle of only using Conference Approved Literature. The strength of Al-Anon Family Groups includes the informal conversations before and after meetings and between meetings. We try to replicate this by enabling members to email one another privately (and then even talk on the phone if they so decide.) Email is also the way that members can be contacted about being a potential Sponsor. Note that if you want to be open to this informal communication and/or if you are willing to be a Sponsor, you must make your email address visible in the Member Directory. You can easily make your email visible by going to the Member area and editing your Member Profile.
What Does This Acronym Mean?
We have a lot of acronyms in this group. A full list can be found on the Acronyms page.
How Do I use this Site?
The Home Page (Home Icon) is a good place to start. In the middle of the Home page is a section “Is Al-Anon Right for You?” followed by some hyperlinks about the Al-Anon world-wide fellowship. At the bottom of the Home Page is the form to complete if you are interested in joining this group, A Safe Place for Recovery. At the very top right of the Home Page there is a search function (Looking Glass icon) and “Member Area” (which on a phone or tablet may just be three horizontal lines. The Member Area includes your profile where you can change your password or email, make your email visible or hidden to other members, and declare whether you are willing to be a sponsor. The Member area also has the Member Directory. If you would like to privately communicate with other Members you can find their name here and contact them if they have made their email available.
In the middle of the Home Page are Shortcuts:
Start Here: has many helpful hyperlinks about Al-Anon overall and our own Al-Anon Family Group
Member Log In: this is where you can log-in. Note that once you leave the site, you will usually have to log back in. This helps protect your anonymity. Some may find it more efficient to bookmark the Sharings Page so you can go directly there each day. You will still be asked to log-in
Sharings: this is the page where our daily meetings are posted. Each day’s meeting stays up for 30 days so if you have not been able to log in daily, you can still catch up and read past meetings. There are helpful hyperlinks at the top and bottom of each day’s meeting page, including the Suggested Welcome and Closing.
Contact: you can use this page to contact one of the A Safe Place for Recovery List Administrators (elected volunteer Trusted Servants) who can answer any questions you have or try to solve technical problems. These may not be answered until the next day depending on when you send them.
What Are The Rules?
We believe in the power of our 12 Steps, 12 Traditions, and the 3 Obstacles to Success
Conference Approved Literature (CAL): We use only CAL in our meetings. Each Daily Meeting has a CAL selection chosen by that day’s meeting chair. Any Member is welcome to use CAL in their sharing, but because we are an on-line electronic meeting, we have to abide by the Al-Anon Family Groups policy about posting CAL electronically. In short, a Member can quote up to one paragraph only per day and must use Al-Anon’s Permission language (as you see in each daily meeting’s CAL selection.) A copy of our annual letter from Al-Anon granting us permission and details of the policy can be found here.
I’m new to Al-Anon. How do I begin?
You already made a good beginning by having the courage to find this on-line Al-Anon group and joining. Its normal to feel confused about how all this works. A very important message of Al-Anon is that it is about ME, MY recovery. It is not about the person(s) in my life who suffer from alcoholism, or how to get them to stop drinking. It is about my recovery from the family disease of alcoholism.
Al-Anon is over a half century old and has helped tens of thousands. You may find that it is unlike most groups you belong to. We come together to support one another in our recovery. We do this by sharing our Experience, Hope, and Strength (ESH). We encourage all to consider attending a Face -to-Face (F2F) meeting to get the full benefit of an Al-Anon Family Group (AFG). Our electronic meeting here is patterned after F2F meetings. As in a F2F meeting, when we share our ESH in our on-line meetings, we do not respond directly to one another’s comments (“Cross Talk”). This is very different than most social media. The major reason is that we should all feel safe and free to share whatever is on our hearts and minds without fear of criticism, judgment, or advice (which can be a form of criticism). We are free to privately contact one another for direct questions or communication, just like we would after a face-face (F2F) Al-Anon meeting. The member directory has a list of members. That directory has the email addresses of members who have chosen to post them as well as whether they are willing to be a Sponsor.
Recovery in Al-Anon is an individual effort. We are all responsible for our own recoveries. There is no right or wrong way. Members of Al-Anon have found that growth, recovery, and serenity requires more than just attending meetings, whether electronic or face to face. Here are some suggestions that may help:
- Click and begin reading the Newcomers FAQ’s from the Al-Anon.org website.
- Join this daily on-line meeting by going to the “Daily Shares” section. Each calendar day has its own title section. Click on the blue “Continue Reading” button at the bottom of that day’s title section to go to that day’s meeting. Each daily meeting has a section from Al-Anon Conference Approved Literature (CAL) followed by the comments of the Chair of that day’s meeting. Members then post their own comments about that topic below. You may not feel like sharing anything at first. That’s fine. Just “listen” by reading. The meetings stay up for 1 month, so you can go back and catch up on meetings you have missed.
- Read the other hyper-links on this site.
- Consider ordering from Al-Anon one of their daily readers (One Day at a Time in Al-Anon, Courage to Change, Hope for Today) and read from it each day. Al-Anon has many publications (“Conference Approved Literature”) that are very helpful to recovery. Some of these are free on their website. How Al-Anon Works is in particular excellent for newcomers, and can be read a little at a time.
- Working the Steps is the way that we can really grow. One meeting a week at our site is dedicated to the Steps. Another Al-Anon book, Paths to Recovery, is a study guide to help do this. This can be started on your own, but many find it even more helpful to have a Sponsor to help. The member directory designates who is willing to be a Sponsor, and there is a hyperlink on our site about Sponsorship.
- Learning the Al-Anon slogans and practicing applying them to our lives has been found to be a powerful way to change our thinking, speaking, and actions. There is a hyperlink on our site with Al-Anon Slogans.
- Keep coming back. No matter how bad things seem, you are not alone and always welcome. And you are worth it.
- Al-Anon World Service Office has created a special welcome email for those new to Al-Anon who have joined an electronic Al-Anon Family Group. By clicking on this link, you can provide an email address where this welcome email can be sent. The email has newcomer information with many links to Al-Anon resources.
Is this site secure on the internet?
You may have gotten a warning that A Safe Place for Recovery isn’t secure, and that you need to tell the administrators to implement SSL. We have gotten this request several times over the past few months. Here is more information.
What is SSL? SSL, or Secure Sockets Layer, is an outdated security protocol that has been replaced with TLS, or Transport Layer Security. Both are “cryptographic protocols designed to provide communications security over a computer network.” (Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security)
What does SSL/TSL do? SSL and TSL provide encrypted channels between computers in order to transmit data. If SSL/TSL is not in place, the data is moved as plain text, or human-readable text.
Why doesn’t A Safe Place use SSL? We do not store sensitive data on our site, and we do not ask or send sensitive data through the internet. The only data transmitted is username, password and any shares you may send to the site. If you use a home computer and store your user name and password, you will not even transmit that back and forth.
Wouldn’t it be safer to use SSL? All communication on the internet can be hacked. There are no guarantees that any communication will not be intercepted. SSL/TSL just makes it more difficult to get to the underlying information. Most hacking into sites is done because of leaked user names and easy-to-break or reused passwords, and SSL cannot stop that. Given the cost of SSL/TSL, its inability to be secure (see the Security section of the Wikipedia article, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security), the fact that most hacking is done through other channels, and the unimportance of our site, we have decided not to implement SSL.
Realize that we do not verity anyone’s identity when they apply for member credentials and anyone could simply lie about their identity and being affected by alcoholism and be granted credentials. That is much easier than trying to do any hacking.
What can I do to make sure my information is safe? There are a few things you can do:
+Do not use the email address you use for banking, bills, etc. as your login. You may want to create a special email account that is only used for this site with an email name that cannot be easily traced to you.
+You can choose a user name that also cannot be easily identified as yours.
+Choose a secure password, which is 16-24 random characters, lower and upper case, mixed with numbers and symbols.
+Don’t re-use your password for other sites.
+Don’t ever transmit personal information in a share.
Note that our daily meetings and your shares in them are not permanent and expire from the site in 30 days.