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When I first started going to S-Anon (a 12 Step recovery group for those affected by someone else's compulsive sexual behavior), I was immediately struck by how small the group was. If we had seven or eight people in the room, it was a big meeting, and ten people was huge. Most nights there were just four or five women (always women) huddled together in folding chairs in a church meeting room. But a few doors down, ten times that many people would be at the Sexaholics Anonymous meeting on the same night.

As I struggled to find this one meeting in an area where my husband had access to a number of different well-established meetings by several different groups, I'd wonder where the other partners, family members and friends of addicts were. Was I only one who needed help? Or the only one sticking around? Or the only one whose loved one hadn't alienated everyone already?

And those questions held my suspicions as to why our meetings were harder to populate:

• It's hard to wrap your head around why you need to work on yourself when your loved one has a big, loud, glaringly obvious problem in their addiction.
• The geographic cure — cutting ties with the addict as a way of fixing what ails you — is attractive and (based on my own experience with getting out of bad relationships) really does quickly and significantly reduce the pain (at least for a time).
• Addicts, with their tendency to isolate, cut themselves off from or alienate loved ones, perform their own geographic cure by proxy.

What do you think? Why can 12 Step support be hard to find for those close to addicts?