I knew I had to stop but I just couldn't - until...

Throughout Alcohol Awareness Week, which runs from November 18 to 25 this year, members of the Plymouth group of Alcoholics Anonymous have been sharing their experience of how AA has helped them to re-establish relationships with themselves and others

My name is Mike, and I am an alcoholic. Until about a year ago, I certainly wouldn't have admitted it to myself let alone to anyone else. I just didn't, as I thought, fit the profile. I never drank in the morning, rarely drank spirits and didn't overdo it in the pub. My background was broadly lower middle class - my father a social worker and Mother a church army officer, neither drank much or often, I grew up in homecounties suburbia, and went to the local grammar school.

However, I never really felt like I fitted in, I had friends but I was never very popular. What I did notice in my early teens was that a glass of wine with a meal or at a family gathering made that sense of dislocation disappear, replaced by one of social ease and comfort. One was never enough. By my late teens I was getting regularly drunk with friends. At university I began to drink on a daily basis.