Adult Children of Alcoholics
From Drug Rehab Wiki
Contents |
Adult Children of Alcoholics
Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACA) is a recovery program for adults whose lives were affected as a result of being raised in an alcoholic or otherwise dysfunctional family. ACA is an anonymous program that is based on the success and employs the 12-steps and 12-traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous.
ACA Mission
The following paraphrases the mission statement of the Adult Children of Alcoholics: The ACA is a nonprofit public benefit corporation and is not organized for any person’s private gain. Organized under the Nonprofit Public Benefit Corporation Law for Charitable Purposes, its specific purpose is to serve the Fellowship of Adult Children of Alcoholics. The ACA is an agency created and designated by the Fellowship to maintain services for those who seek through the ACA to arrest the emotional disease of family alcoholism. Member do this by sharing their information and experiences, and applying to their own lives, in whole or in part, the 12 steps which constitute the recovery program upon which Alcoholics Anonymous is founded.
How ACA Works
Members meet with each other in a mutually respectful, safe environment in order to acknowledge their respective life experiences. Each person remains anonymous, true to the tradition of all 12-step groups. The purpose of the meetings is to discover how childhood affected each member’s past as well as influences them in the present. The ACA identifies 14 traits of adult children of alcoholics they term “The Laundry List.” The laundry list forms the basis for the “The Problem” statement.
After identifying and acknowledging the problem, members take positive action through practicing the 12 steps, focusing on “The Solution,” and accepting a loving Higher Power (according to each member’s understanding of what that Higher Power constitutes). The end goal is to find freedom from the past and a way to improve lives today.
The Problem
Many individuals who have been brought up in alcoholic or dysfunctional households find that they have several characteristics in common. They are isolated or uneasy being around people, especially authority figures. In order to protect themselves, they seek to please others, even at the expense of their own identity. They mistake any personal criticism as a threat.
Eventually, they become alcoholics themselves, marry them, or both. If not, they find other compulsive personalities, such as becoming a workaholic, to fill their need for abandonment.
They are living their lives as victims, having an overdeveloped sense of responsibility, being more concerned with others than themselves. They feel guilty trusting themselves, thus they give into others. They become experts at reacting, letting others take the initiative.
They become dependent, terrified of abandonment, and willing to do anything to cling to a relationship, even a destructive one. They keep choosing insecure relationships because they match childhood relationships with alcoholic or dysfunctional parents.
Such symptoms of the family disease of alcoholism or other dysfunction make the individuals co-victims – or those who take on the characteristics of the disease without ever necessarily even taking a drink. As children, these individuals learned quickly to stuff their feelings down, to avoid trouble. As adults, these feelings remain buried. Such conditioning often results in the individual who is the adult child of alcoholics confusing love with pity, and tending to love those they feel they can rescue.
But even more self-defeating, according to ACA, is the tendency to become “addicted to excitement in all our affairs, preferring constant upset to workable solutions.”
The Solution
ACA forms a safe place for members to meet and express the fears and hurts they’ve kept inside for years, and to free themselves from the shame and blame they’ve accumulated. In the process, members become the adult who is no longer imprisoned by childhood fears and reactions. They learn to love and accept themselves.
According to the ACA, healing begins when members risk moving out of isolation. Buried memories and feelings will return. In the process of gradually releasing the burden of all this unexpressed grief, it’s possible to slowly move out of the past. In essence, members seek to re-parent themselves with humor, respect, love, and gentleness.
Members learn to see that while they had biological parents, their true parent is their Higher Power. Through the Higher Power, ACA asserts, the 12 steps of recovery came.
Using the 12 steps, meetings, telephone, members share experiences, strength and hope with each other. They learn to restructure their daily lives, releasing their parents from the responsibility for the member’s actions today, and become free to make healthy decisions of their own. They progress from hurting to healing to helping. In the process, they awaken to a sense of wholeness they never knew possible.
Attendance at ACA meetings helps members to realize that parental alcoholism or family dysfunction affected them as a child and continues to affect them as adults. They learn the all-important lesson of keeping the focus on themselves and the here and now today – not what happened in the past. They learn to take responsibility for their own lives.
Members do not do this alone. They support and encourage each other in the healing and growing process. There is no judgment involved. ACA members accept everyone for who they are just as they expect to be accepted in the same manner. In ACA words, “This is a spiritual program based on action coming from love.”
ACA Meetings
The Adult Children of Alcoholics World Service Organization website http://www.adultchildren.org/ helps individuals find ACA meetings in their area. The searchable database, which is updated monthly, based on information provided by the groups, is available by country or by entering a zip code, state/province, or city/state. There are listings for physical meeting locations, as well as the option for online meetings by selecting the country “Internet,” and telephone meetings by selecting the country “Telephone.”
Other Services
The ACA World Services Organization provides online forums, the opportunity to connect with, find, or start an intergroup, ACA literature available on the Web, ACA Fellowship text (Steps and Traditions book) and ACA 12-step workbook, monthly ACA ComLine newsletter (downloadable), and a link to a project currently underway for a meditation book where ACA members are encouraged to submit meditation writings.
--Suzannekane 20:50, 31 July 2010 (UTC)
