Al-Anon in New York: Help for Families When Someone Else Drinks

Last reviewed: September 2026

Almost everything else on this site is written for someone worried about their own drinking. This page is not. It is for the person who has been counting bottles in the recycling, or checking a phone at midnight, or rehearsing a conversation in the car before going inside.

If that is you, you have probably already discovered the central problem: there is a great deal of help available for the person who drinks and almost none of it is addressed to you. Al-Anon exists for exactly that gap, and so does a much less well known approach called CRAFT. They are built on different assumptions and it is worth understanding both before you pick.

What Al-Anon actually is

Al-Anon Family Groups is a separate fellowship from Alcoholics Anonymous. Not a branch of it, not a department, and not run by it. It was started in 1951 by Anne B. and by Lois W., who was married to one of A.A.'s co-founders and who had spent years living the problem from the other side of it.

The format will feel familiar if you have ever seen an A.A. meeting. People sit in a room for an hour and take turns talking about their own experience without being interrupted or advised. It is free, there are no dues, and you give only your first name. Al-Anon adapted the same Twelve Steps, rewritten so they describe the family member's situation rather than the drinker's.

Alateen is the part of the same fellowship for teenagers living with someone else's drinking. It started in 1957 and runs with an adult member present. If you have kids in the house who are old enough to have noticed what is going on, and they almost always have noticed, it is worth knowing this exists.

What Al-Anon is not

This is where people arrive with the wrong expectation and leave disappointed, so it is better said plainly. Al-Anon is not a technique for getting someone to stop drinking. It will not give you a script, a strategy or a lever. If that is what you are looking for, the first meeting will feel like a room full of people talking about themselves while your actual problem goes unaddressed.

The premise is that you cannot control another adult's drinking, that trying to has probably already cost you a great deal, and that you are entitled to your own life regardless of what they do next. Members describe getting calmer, sleeping again and stopping the constant management of somebody else's crisis. Whether the drinker stops is treated as genuinely outside your hands.

For a lot of people that reframing is a relief, and for some it lands as giving up. Both reactions are common and neither is wrong.

The Three C's

The phrase you will hear early on is that you did not cause it, you cannot control it, and you cannot cure it. It is meant to dismantle the private theory almost every family member carries around that if they had been better, quieter, more supportive or more forceful, this would not be happening.

There is a fourth line that gets less attention and does more work: you do not have to contribute to it. That covers paying the overdrafts, making the excuses to relatives, calling in sick on their behalf, and generally standing between the drinking and its consequences. Doing those things is what love looks like from the inside and it is also, reliably, what removes any pressure to change.

Detachment is the other word you will hear, usually as detachment with love, and it is routinely misread as abandonment. What it describes in practice is declining to be pulled into every crisis while continuing to care about the person. It is less cold than it sounds and much harder than it sounds.

CRAFT, and why almost nobody mentions it

If your goal is specifically to get someone into treatment, there is an approach with better evidence for that particular outcome, and it is strange how rarely families are told about it.

Community Reinforcement and Family Training, usually shortened to CRAFT, works with you rather than with the drinker. It teaches concrete behavioral skills: how to respond when they are drinking and when they are not, how to stop unintentionally cushioning the consequences, how to raise treatment at a moment when it might land, and how to look after yourself while doing it.

The research on it is unusually consistent. Trials have put treatment entry somewhere in the range of 64 to 74 percent of drinkers whose family member went through CRAFT. One randomized trial comparing it directly against twelve-step facilitation for family members found 64 percent of drinkers entering treatment on the CRAFT side against 17 percent on the other. A meta-analysis covering eleven studies concluded CRAFT was roughly twice as effective at getting the person into treatment as the comparison conditions.

Two honest caveats. Those numbers measure treatment entry, which is not what Al-Anon is trying to achieve, so this is not a fair contest between them on Al-Anon's own terms. Al-Anon is aiming at your wellbeing whether or not the drinking ever stops, and it does not claim to be a treatment-engagement program.

The second caveat is availability, which is the real catch. Al-Anon meets in church basements across New York for nothing. CRAFT is a clinical method that generally needs a trained therapist, which means finding one and paying for it, and outside the larger cities that can be difficult. There are self-help books and online programs built on it if a therapist is out of reach, and the research suggests the self-directed versions retain some of the benefit.

The two are not alternatives in any case. Plenty of people do both, one for their own footing and one for the practical question.

The intervention you have seen on television

The confrontational family intervention, where everyone gathers in a room to surprise the drinker with prepared statements, is by far the best known approach and has weaker support than its fame suggests. It can work. It also has a high rate of families never going through with it, and it risks a rupture that leaves the person more isolated than before.

If you are considering something like this, the version worth looking at is one facilitated by a professional trained in a specific method rather than assembled from what you remember of a documentary.

Can you just go to an A.A. meeting?

Yes, to some of them, and it is worth knowing which.

Schedules mark meetings with an O or a C. An open meeting is open to anyone with an interest in A.A., family members included, and you are welcome to sit and listen. A closed meeting is for people who have a desire to stop drinking themselves, so that is not the one.

Going to an open meeting is genuinely useful for one narrow purpose: hearing people describe the inside of the thing you have been watching from outside. Many family members say it was the first time the behavior made any sense to them. What it will not do is address your situation, because the room is not about you. That is precisely the gap Al-Anon fills.

If you want to know what walking into one is like, the guide to what actually happens at a first A.A. meeting applies to open meetings too.

Finding a meeting in New York

Al-Anon has its own geography, separate from A.A.'s areas, and the state is split between two service areas with several local information services underneath them.

The reliable starting point is the official finder at al-anon.org, which covers in-person and online meetings and lets you search by location. For New York specifically, Al-Anon New York South covers the five boroughs along with Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Rockland, Putnam, Dutchess, Orange, Sullivan and Ulster counties, at al-anonny.org. New York North covers the rest of the state at nynafg.com. The Capital District keeps its own site at al-anon-8ny.org, and New York City has a dedicated listing at nycalanon.org.

If reading websites is more than you have in you today, the World Service Office answers a phone line at 1-888-4AL-ANON, which is 1-888-425-2666, and will tell you what is near you.

Online meetings are worth knowing about for a reason specific to this situation. Al-Anon meetings are smaller and thinner on the ground than A.A. meetings, particularly upstate, and there is a decent chance the nearest in-person one is at an awkward hour or a long drive. There is also the ordinary problem that in a small town you may not want to be seen walking in.

One thing worth hearing

Family members tend to arrive at all of this believing the problem will be solved when the drinking stops, and organize their entire life around producing that outcome. It is an understandable way to think and it hands every one of your good days to somebody else's decisions.

Whatever you choose from the above, the part that seems to help most is the same in all of them: your own life becoming something you attend to again rather than something on hold. That is not a consolation prize for failing to fix them. In the CRAFT research it is the thing that changes the odds.