ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a brief narrative account of how First Step Group works in the alcoholic in treatment. The recovering alcoholic will encounter two distinctly different structures of group experience while in treatment. Intensive treatment replicates the age- and sex-stratified society the alcoholic has stepped out of. The importance of sexuality and age for the alcoholic’s treatment experience is twofold. Same- and cross-sex relationships and friendships thus form in treatment. Every alcoholic in treatment experiences, then, a shattering of previous emotional understandings concerning what a relationship with another human being is like. Group members create an idea of themselves as being in group together. A triadic process that draws each alcoholic out of her seriality into a common group point of view operates within the treatment group. Treatment requires that the alcoholic make treatment his first priority. Treatment places the alcoholic under the power and the control of the treatment centre.
