Stopping drinking
Stopping Drinking - Quitting Alcohol
There are a number of ways of stopping drinking, and quitting alcohol, of which, the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous is but one. However, there is a free solution in the fellowship of AA which has worked for us. There are 4,487 AA Meetings in the UK as of 2015. Only you can decide whether you want to give AA a try — whether you think it can help you.
We in AA are men and women who have discovered, and admitted, that we cannot control alcohol. We have learned that we must live without it if we are to avoid disaster for ourselves and those close to us. With local groups in thousands of communities, we are part of an informal international fellowship with members in more than 100 countries.
We have but one primary purpose: to stay sober ourselves and to help others who may turn to us for help in achieving sobriety. Within our membership there are men and women of varying age groups and many different social, economic and cultural backgrounds. Some of us drank for many years before coming to the realisation we could not handle alcohol. Others were fortunate enough to appreciate, early in life or in their drinking careers, that alcohol had become unmanageable.
The consequences of our alcoholic drinking (and thinking) have also varied. Some of our members had literally become derelicts before turning to AA for help. They had lost family, possessions and self-respect. They had been in the gutter in many cities. They had been hospitalised and jailed. They had committed many grave offences -against society, their families, their employers and themselves. Others among us have never been jailed or hospitalised. Nor have they lost jobs through drinking. But even those men and women finally came to the point where they realised that alcohol was interfering with normal living. When they discovered that they could not seem to live without alcohol, they too sought help through AA rather than prolong their irresponsible drinking.
We are united by a common problem, alcohol. Meeting and talking and helping other alcoholics together, we are somehow able to stay sober and lose the compulsion to drink, once a dominant force in our lives. We do not think we are the only people that have the answer to stopping drinking. We know that the AA programme works for us and we have seen it work for every newcomer, almost without exception, who honestly and sincerely wanted to quit drinking. Visit this page if you want to know more about AA.
Some useful resources
> Am I an alcoholic? Take the Alcoholism Problem Quiz
> Find out more about Alcoholics Anonymous
> Am I too young to be an alcoholic?
What's next?
If you want to stop drinking and quit alcohol, or you would like more information to help someone else, here are some options:
- Find an AA meeting (this will open the live meetings schedule. If no meeting is shown, please come back tomorrow)
- Send us an email
- Call our help line on 0800 9177 650
- Get in touch using our Chat Now service (this will take you to the AA Great Britain website)
Alcoholics Anonymous treats every enquiry with strict anonymity, so please feel welcome and safe in our fellowship.