Advising Is Not Al-Anon

My instinct when someone shares a problem is to offer advice. Have you tried...? You should... If I were you... I want to fix it, to solve it, to give them the answer I think they need. But that's not Al-Anon. Advising is specifically not what we do here, and there's wisdom in that restraint.

When I give advice, I'm assuming I know what's best for someone else. I'm putting myself above them, positioning myself as the expert on their life. I'm also robbing them of the opportunity to find their own answers, to trust their own wisdom. And most importantly, I'm often giving advice that worked for me without acknowledging that their situation, their resources, their context is different from mine.

What Al-Anon asks instead is that I share my experience. Not 'you should do this' but 'here's what I did and how it worked for me.' Not 'the answer is...' but 'what helped me was...' This keeps me humble, acknowledges that different things work for different people, and empowers the other person to take what's useful and leave the rest.

Learning to share experience instead of giving advice has been hard. The advice-giving impulse is strong. But it's made me a better member and a better friend. I trust others to figure out their own path. I offer my experience as one possibility, not the answer. And I stay in my lane, focused on my own recovery rather than managing everyone else's.

If someone shares a problem today, I can catch my impulse to give advice. Instead, I can share my own experience—what I did, how it worked, what I learned—without prescribing what they should do. This respects their ability to find their own answers.