For women in Al Anon there is often a need to set boundaries and to learn how to maintain them. For MEN in Al-Anon there is more often a need to lower walls.

Walls are safe places for a man who has been around alcoholics or has been married to an alcoholic wife. The reason why silence is so preferable to opening up and exchanging words is because words are how alcoholics most often inflict pain.

The wall that builds in time around the inner parts of a man make him more and more stagnant.

The word stagnant means "not moving, or stale." Water is a lot like spirit. Spirit that is not moving, like still water, becomes stagnant. Stagnant water and stagnant spirit stinks...maybe that is why we call it stinking thinkin'!

Lowering the walls that held in the stinking thoughts ...thoughts like resentment for hurtful words uttered by a drunk, or thoughts like self pity that we love to resort to because, well with self pity it feels like there is SOME sort of payoff...those walls, when they are lowered, allow us to drain the inner swamp.

Maybe we lower a wall on one side of our inner swamp with our first sponsor, and he allows the stinking dark thoughts to just dissipate away into the universe. Then we start going to meetings and we listen... a lot. That listening starts to bring in fresh water...fresh thoughts. We read our literature, and that brings in cool fresh water...new cleaner clearer thoughts.

Finally, we lower two more walls...the two most important walls of all. The first is the inner ring of walls that block us off from our own feelings. There is this little tiny compressed densely packed residue of true feelings. These are all that is left after we have stuffed them year after year. The wall has become like a tough seed coat around a pinto bean. Beans have to be soaked...sometimes for a long time, before they can take in water. Our beans have to be soaked in the spirit of the program. The softening of that hard seed coat is the toughest job a man will ever do, and I'll be honest with you. I have sponsored over 30 men over the years, an many men are simply are not able to do that softening!

But if they do, inside every seed coat is an embryo. The embryo is new life that, once freed can now begin stretching its roots into the moist nutrient-rich soil of this program.  Our new roots start pulling up rich stuff like wisdom, and laughter that we forgot we ever had, and just plain old love.

Please, if you are a man hidden deep inside a hard seed coat that is safely buried behind a thick wall of denial, get yourself to a local Al-Anon meeting, start to trust another man, and begin to sprout. You have so much to offer the universe...why not let it out?

Call 1-888-4AL ANON or go to www.al-anonalateen.org