What Is Good Behavior In Alcoholics Anonymous?

One of my friends in Alcoholics Anonymous is a young woman - young-ish woman - who grew up with two alcoholic parents, the father taking a powder and leaving his kids to fend for themselves with no guidance or support after subjecting them to years of disdain and disbelief.  This kid got herself involved with a piece of shit A.A. member - yes, we have them, too - with a ton of sobriety and a big presence in one of our local villages.  Fair enough and not unheard of.  SuperK and I got things going when we were both pretty new in sobriety.  So it happens.  And it happens because we're in an environment where everyone is sharing or should be sharing, anyway, very intimate feelings of sadness and loneliness.  If you're a piece of shit predatory type then you're in a pretty fertile hunting ground.  I should say this: I do not know the guy.  Maybe he's just a minor piece of shit and not a huge piece of shit but I'm gonna stand by my classification until proven otherwise.  This mixing of all kinds of personalities and histories is, of course, one of A.A.'s greatest strengths while being the source of the occasional great pitfall.  A man with a lot of sobriety should have not behaved this way; or should have behaved this way only with great caution.  He is still a presence at two meetings that my friend visited regularly but is now too abashed to attend.  He's fine, apparently, blithely unconcerned about how this relationship affected someone new enough that drinking again could be a plausible outcome for his victim.

Here's the point of my judgemental screed:  I'm not a close, day-to-day friend with this woman but we talk at the Keep It Complicated meeting regularly so I was floored when I found out she had suffered this abuse at the hands of this guy.  I was floored that I didn't know one solitary thing about the relationship that she was invested in so heavily that it really caused some emotional damage when it ended.  She mentioned it not once to me.   Did anyone know about it?  Did her sponsor know about it?  I know her sponsor very well and find it hard to believe she would have watched this behavior without weighing in with some pointed, unequivocal advice.  We try not to give direct advice but if you tell me that you're going to feed your whole arm into a wood chipper I'm going to say something.

Okay, here's the real point, finally: Talk to people!  Tell people what you're doing!  Get some fucking feedback, for chrissake!  If someone talks to me about something going on I really, really try not to be dismissive or critical but what I can do is to ask a lot of good questions that allow the other person to hear themselves talk out loud about what they're doing.  How many times have I listened to myself talk to another member and after a bit thought: "Well, I sound like an idiot."  The other person did not have to tell me I'm an idiot.  I sounded like an idiot to myself.