At the last Sunday Irvine Meeting I announced that I would not be available to facilitate the meetings on May 17th and 24th. I’m pleased to announce that I’ve found people to substitute for both of those meetings. Meetings will be continuous indefinitely. I’m grateful for the help. I think it’s great that meeting regulars will get exposed to other facilitator styles. Both the subs are SMART trained facilitators.
I have a strong commitment to have the meetings as scheduled and when things come up and I can’t do them I bend over backwards to try to get a substitute. I’ve shown up for meetings that were cancelled or no one else showed up. I do think there are times when people may be just on the edge of a relapse and they really need a meeting. Showing up for a cancelled meeting could be quite detrimental in this situation.
If a meeting is cancelled I will announce it on this blog and also the Irvine Sunday Afternoon facebook page. If you want to join the secret facebook group and have a fb account send me an email. I’ll paste the facebook instructions below. When meetings are cancelled I’ll also announce them here in this blog. If you follow this blog you’ll get an email notification automatically. You can follow this blog with any username you want. Just need a valid email address. I’ll also let the SMART central office whenever a meeting is cancelled. They are very good about posting any cancellations on there meetings list. The link for the California meeting page is here:
http://www.smartrecovery.org/meetings_db/view/showalpha_state.php?search=C
Scroll down to Orange County area for the meeting. Good idea to bookmark this page.
Irvine Sunday Afternoon Facebook Group
This meeting has a secret facebook page called Irvine Sunday Afternoon. I am the administrator and use the page to communicate information about this meeting, SMART principles and recovery stuff in general.
I share the SMART Recovery facebook group posts to this secret page. This will allow you to see all the SMART posts without having to like the SMART group to your public page. I also put up notifications if the meeting is cancelled.
If you are interested in joining the group send an email to steve.smart@cox.net. I’ll send you a link to join. I then have to approve your request.
All attempts were made to make this as private and anonymous as possible with the facebook rules. The facebook rules for a private group are as follows. Secret groups do not show up in search. Your facebook friends are not aware you are a member of this group. Any posts, likes or replies to posts you make will not show up in your facebook friends news feed. The share function is disabled. The default setting for groups is that new posts show up in your news feed. However that setting can be changed so that they won’t show up. Click on GROUPS on the left column of your Home page. A page will pop up showing a list of groups you belong to. On the right of Irvine Sunday Afternoon click on the little gear. Then click on Edit Notification Settings. On the drop down list click on Off. The group will still show up on your home page group list. A little number will appear if there are new posts. Click on the group to see what the new post(s) are when there are no prying eyes around.
There are some issues to consider before requesting a sign up. Note that members of the group can see who the other members of the group are. It is possible for members to “out” other members with copying and pasting and screen captures etc. Anyone violating these privacy rules would be banned from the group. I also reserve the right to ban group members for inappropriate posting, stalking, etc.