Alcoholics Anonymous Meetings in Sacramento

What is Alcoholics Anonymous?

Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is an international fellowship of men and women who have had a drinking problem. It is nonprofessional, self-supporting, multiracial, apolitical, and available almost everywhere. AA groups meet regularly to help members stay sober through a 12-step program.

Sacramento Central Office

• Monday-Friday: 9am-5pm
• Saturday & Sunday: 10 a.m.–2 p.m.
• Phone: 916-454-1100

This office has literature, chips, and other materials available for purchase.

The Alano Club of Sacramento

• Daily meetings, times vary
• 12-step discussion meetings
• Speaker meetings

Camelia Group

• Monday-Sunday: 7am, noon, 6pm, and 8pm
• Big Book Study meetings

The 12 Steps of AA

Alcoholics Anonymous outlines a 12-step program to help members achieve and maintain sobriety. The steps are:

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being is the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. We humblely asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. We made a list of all the people we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when doing so would injure them or others.
10. We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, we promptly admitted it.
11. We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

The 12 steps aim to motivate members to make positive changes in their lives and achieve sobriety through reliance on a higher power, self-reflection, making amends, striving for continued self-improvement, and helping others with alcohol addictions. The program has helped many achieve and maintain sobriety across Sacramento.

Getting Started with AA in Sacramento

Use the meeting search on udetc.org to find local AA meetings in the Sacramento area. There are both in-person and online/virtual meetings available.

Attending Your First Local AA Meeting

There are open and closed AA meetings in Sacramento. Open meetings welcome anyone interested in Alcoholics Anonymous, while closed meetings are for those who have a desire to stop drinking. Here is a table distinguishing the two:

When attending your first meeting, arrive 10–15 minutes early and introduce yourself to the chairperson as a new local member. Share your experiences if you feel comfortable, but just listening is also perfectly fine. Many meetings provide welcome keychain tags at a member’s first meeting to mark periods of sobriety milestones, such as:

• 30 days
• 60 days
• 90 days
• 6 months
• 9 months
• 1 year

The tags provide encouragement and a physical reminder of a member’s commitment to recovery. Attending meetings regularly and connecting with other members provides community support during early sobriety.