Survivors of Incest Anonymous

This meeting is so my home group.
It’s normally pretty small, up to eleven or twelve people on a busy night. It differs from other SIA meetings in its «Nothing too heavy to share» theme: it welcomes shares about ritual abuse, forced prostitution, and other hard topics. Somehow this has translated into a strong core membership and great longevity for this meeting — it’s the longest-​running SIA meeting in the Bay Area, and has been at Mandana every Wednesday night since at least 1989!
The format of the meeting varies. Currently some weeks include a reading chosen by group conscience from the meeting’s literature — usually from a SIA pamphlet about anything from sponsorship to multiple personalities. Some include more time for sharing, and some nights the meeting asks for someone to volunteer to be the speaker and share their story for up to about twenty minutes. And once a month, we all read the explanation of the step of the month from SIA’s «Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions.»
The meeting is only an hour long, but somehow everyone seems to get to share. In my experience, people at this meeting are very respectful of each other’s boundaries and share really interesting things about what they are doing in recovery. For a while, everything I knew about self-​care came from this meeting, and I was learning a lot!
The meeting also makes me happy because it has good history. When I first started attending it, in 2003, there were (as there still are) people coming who had been around for about ten years. I heard stories from them about how big the meeting used to be, and I wondered why none of those people came anymore. Eventually, I realized that there were a lot of people showing up who had been coming to that meeting for decades and had a lot of recovery to share and a lot of memories of the meeting’s and the program’s history — they just were often the people who showed up every few months instead of every week. I really like being able to hear what things were like «back in the day» as well as how recovery has changed someone’s life over ten or twenty years; I think that that’s incredibly valuable and given how small SIA is I’m lucky to have such a rich meeting to attend!
It also has incredibly quick (usually anyway) and polite business meetings, which is a good test of a meeting’s health. It tends to mean that the folks at the meeting are following the traditions and putting principles before personalities, instead of letting egos take over the meeting or getting super-​invested in a particular issue or dragging each other down into fights. I’ve rarely seen that in any fellowship, but it’s not fun when it does come up!
By and large, this meeting is just a bunch of friendly folks checking in about their lives, the really hard stuff as well as the great gains. It may not be a super-​flashy meeting that can put on a lot of events or get a ton of butts in the chairs, but it’s home!