Sharing Experiences: Doing Therapy With the Help of Mutual References in the Meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous

Abstract

Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is a world-wide fellowship for mutual help for persons suffering from addictions and alcohol problems. This article addresses a pragmatic aspect of the therapeutic process taking place in the weekly AA meetings. At meetings, AA members ‘share’ their personal experiences, but they also recurrently refer to previous turns of talk in order to make their own experiences recognizable, understandable and ‘shareable’. This study is about these ‘co-contributor references’, and about the work AA members do to create mutual, ‘therapeutic’ relevance for their ‘monological’ turns with these references. This article is a conversation analytical study of tape-recordings of actual AA meetings in Finland. Mutual references are a technique through which members can both manage topic shifts and accomplish solidarity between members in mutual help group, and constitute greatly variable relations between speakers as individuals. As a whole, the article explicates members' methods for sharing and co-constructing experiences whereby mutual help is achieved as a practical accomplishment.