The Discipline of One Thing
Each Al-Anon Family Group has but one purpose: to help families of alcoholics.
Al-Anon groups succeed because they do one thing well: help families of alcoholics. We don't expand into addiction counseling, mental health services, or financial planning. We stay focused on our primary purpose, and that singular focus is our strength. Distraction destroys effectiveness.
My life becomes unmanageable the moment I lose my primary purpose—my own recovery—and get distracted by the alcoholic's crisis. When I shift my focus from healing myself to fixing them, I become useless to everyone. I'm no longer working my program; I'm working their chaos.
The discipline of focus is harder than it sounds. Their crisis feels urgent. Their pain feels more important than my quiet healing work. But when I abandon my primary purpose to manage their emergency, I lose the only thing that actually makes me helpful: my own serenity, my own clarity, my own connection to God.
Al-Anon is teaching me that I'm most useful when I'm focused on my purpose, not theirs. When I attend to my own recovery—meetings, prayer, inventory, boundaries—I have something real to offer. When I abandon my purpose to chase their problem, I'm just another person drowning in their wake. The group stays strong by doing one thing well. So do I.
When I'm tempted to abandon my recovery work to manage someone else's crisis, I can pause and ask: What is my primary purpose right now? Am I focused on my own healing or distracted by their chaos? Can I return to my one thing—working my program—and trust that my serenity is more helpful than my intervention?
