Survivors of Incest Anonymous

SIA has flyers that show a tree with all these things like addiction and depression in its branches and then sexual abuse at the root, and it says, "When you want to 'root out' the problem...." It's a good place to learn about the myriad and pervasive effects of any kind of abuse, and about how to rebuild your life and replace everything that your parents managed to leave out of the equation so you can have a really healthy and joyous adult life. More specifically, it's a good place to learn about sexual abuse of any kind (they define "incest" as broadly as you can imagine) and how to recover from it, in a peer-led (no creepy power dynamics) and free forum. Local meeting schedules and online meetings can be found at this http://sia.fabglitter.org . more

This group is awesome. It's a twelve-step group for dealing with sexual abuse of any kind, basically - their definition of incest is very broad, because the focus is on helping people rather than on boxing people in. It's a peer-led group - there's no therapist telling people what to talk about or how things should work, and no crosstalk so nobody gets to tell you what they think you're doing wrong. It uses the twelve-step model pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous, which works surprisingly well for abuse issues. I guess it's not that surprising: the steps themselves don't have anything specific to do with alcohol, abuse, or anything else - they're just good things to do to deal with life. There are two local meetings at the time of this writing, and a couple of meetings online. The Wednesday night meeting is "Nothing Too Heavy to Share," which means pretty much what it says - people can talk about anything from ritual abuse to running a marathon, depending on what is up for them. The Thursday night meeting is longer (an hour and a half versus an hour) and has a focus, in name at least, on "Healing the Child Within," although in my experience it's mostly the same as any other meeting - people come, they read stuff out loud, they share about whatever they want, and they hang out afterward to get support and maybe a snack. I like two main things about SIA: 1. The recovery - just going and hearing about all of the really awesome things people are doing in their lives that maybe I never thought of before; and 2. The openness - being in a place where people are being totally honest and truthful about what they're feeling or what happened to them or anything else. It does something to the room; it's like the air become clearer and brighter with each share. Meetings are free, although they pass the basket for donations of any kind. Anyone can go to the Thursday meeting, because it's an open meeting; anyone who is a survivor or might be or knows someone who is can go to the Wednesday meeting, because it's closed (which is what that means). Schedules of local meetings can be found at http://sia.fabglitter.org. more