Meetings The Promise Not Kept

Once upon a time there were thousands of ACA, ACOA and Alanon-Acoa meetings. In the Seattle area alone there were once over a hundred ACA meetings on the inter-group schedule. Now there are two and the nearest one to me is 40 miles.

We laughed and cried and learned and played together and once upon a time we promised each other that we would never again be alone. That meetings would be there and we could always find someone who understands. What happened? AA, Ala-non, NA and dozens of other 12-Step Programs survive and thrive but ACOA is pretty near dead.

Lots of things happened in no particular order. In the end we just broke a promise, not just to ourselves, those of us who benefited from the fellowship and recovery that our groups provided, but also to an entire generations yet to come. The ACOA "fad" may be over but a whole new crop of Adult Children of Alcoholic parents is created every day. Alcoholism isn't a fad and it didn't go away. The documented and well studied effects of alcoholism on the family system didn't go away just the support and recovery for those who grow up and whose lives are profoundly effected. The meetings, fellowship and recovery are all that went away.

It reminds me of one of the few jokes I can remember.

This guy dies and it turns out he didn't go to heaven so he's met at the front door of hell by the devil.

"Hello Mr. Smith," he says, "Welcome to hell let me show you around. Since your going to be here for all eternity we thought it was just fair if you get to choose what your eternal punishment will be but once you decide, that's it forever. "

So old Satan starts touring him around to various rooms. In some, people are being roasted on a barbecue pit slowly turned over and open flame and the guy doesn't think that's very good so they move on. In other rooms people are being flayed alive with whips and chains or dunked in molten lava and our lost soul, Mr. Smith, is really beginning to sweat. This he decides, is serious stuff.

Finally they come to a huge room where a group of people are standing around in a cesspool of stuff that you would normally find in a cesspool up to their waists drinking hot coffee and chatting. Not great but the best he's seen so far so he tells the devil that he'll choose this as his punishment and climbs into the tank. A thoughtful demon comes by with a scalding cup of coffee and while he's holding it and hoping it will cool off a little a whistle blows and the demons come by and begin taking everyones cups away.

"Okay everybody," the devil shouts. Coffee breaks over back on your heads."

Seems he forgot to tell the guy that coffee break happens once a millennium but that's the devil of it isn't it.

Coffee break is over for all the adult children in the making.

In retrospect ACOA grew out of and became conflated with what became a self help fad. Fads almost by definition don't last. The movement had it's roots in both the 12 Steps and in commercial for-profit counseling and therapy. That was both it's strength and in the end one weakness. Gurus arose. Hundreds became self proclaimed experts and everybody with a typewriter or computer it seemed wrote a how to recovery book and began holding workshops and retreats. Some it turned out were little more than Flem flam artists.

AA on the other is very singularly focused on the 12 Steps. Yes there are paid AA speakers but nobody makes a living at it. AA World Group publishes a few authorized books that are the only material used at meetings and the income from which helps fund the groups activities. The only AA gurus were Bill W and Dr. Bob and they are long since dead. Nobody gets rich off of AA. They don't endorse recovery programs or counselors or any other commercial venture.

On the other hand the singular focus on the 12 Steps is a weakness for ACOAs whose path to recovery is more complicated than the standard AA don't drink and work the steps approach. AA doesn't focuses on the past. On how a person became an alcoholic and they don't overly focus on the consequences. You make a personal inventory of your life and you make amends to those you harmed. Then you get on with life. The motto is: "One day at a time." You are free to go to a therapist and muck around all you want but in general they don't consider it necessary. "Don't drink, go to meetings, work the steps, learn recovery." That's the formula and it works.

ACOAs however need to learn what the hell happened to them first of all. Then they need to understand how it effected them personally.

We all have similar characteristics but they manifest themselves in diffrent ways. What was our role in the family system for instance? Are we heroes, scapegoats, lost children or family clowns. Did we become enabling co-dependent spouses who grow up to marry alcoholics? Did we become alcoholics ourselves or both? Just to name a couple of examples.

Since the symptoms vary from individual to individual so does the definition of recovery. Some even found that the very first step in ACOA recovery was to stop drinking themselves so their recovery began where it should have, in AA.

One of my worst symptoms was rescuing. Virtually every relationship I had ever had was based on a rescue mission. I grew up and married my own alcoholic and enabled her almost to death for 13 long years. She finally found sobriety and recovery after our divorce. In the end I decide that if you can't lick'em join them. I went back to school, became a chemical dependency counselor, and learned how to help people properly, and at a distance. Counselors can't have relationships with their clients. And even though I've been out of that field for several years at least so far that much of recovery is working to an extent. I have never gone on a mission to rescue another alcoholic in the past 21 years. That in part is a the equvilant of don't drink but it took a lot of soul searching and learning about myself to know that.

Toward the end of the great meeting era the only one left in my area was an Ala-non ACOA group which I attended for a couple of years but it really didn't work for me. If you live with a practicing alcoholic Ala-non is the way to go. You need 12 Step recovery as much as your family member does. They even have Ala-teen and in some areas Ala-tot for pre-teens. However they are like AA. Ala-non is very strictly focused on the 12 Steps.

When I began going to meetings I quickly learned that the word Co-dependency was a no no. The term comes from the private self help movement and they didn't like you using it in meetings. There were lots of other subtle differences. And there wasn't the depth of personal sharing that is so important in working through the grief process of ACOA recovery just wasn't there. the focus isn't on leaning about how you got there it's do the steps and live life forward, "One day at a time." They were Ala-non meetings with ACOA tacked on the end.

There is nothing at all wrong with Ala-non and this isn't meant as a criticism. After all, Ala-non is alive and well. They were right not to get caught up in all the hype. Ala-non has not broke faith with those in recovery. I made some good friends in Ala-non and at least one friend for life. It wasn't a bad experience but if I hadn't already gotten a lot of ACA style recovery I would probably have dropped out.

Enough for today. If you have read my previous comments I apologize for not posting sooner. One of my symptoms is depression. Depression is common both in alcoholics and their co-dependents. I sort of hit a bump in the depression meter and didn't get back for awhile. When you are experiencing a bought of hopelessness there doesn't seem much point in blogging. But I'm back. I'll write more later. Like meetings, this is after all a therapeutic experience for me.

Post your thoughts. Tell your story. It's your blog too. Keep coming back it works. (If you work it.)

Hi-My name is Ray and I'm a recovering Adult Child of an Alcoholic.

Needed to share tonight so this will all be in rose color. I've discovered that there is very little action on other ACOA sites which is discouraging. The characteristics of Adult Children didn't go away just because the fad of the late 80's and 90's died down.

I was thinking about a couple of things today that have been interfering with my life lately. One is being a night owl and the other is not answering the phone and tending to hide from people even though I have no reason to.

One of the fundamentals of mental health is that a person needs to feel that they have a fair degree of control over their lives. Makes sense. One of the first principles of torturing someone is to take complete control of their lives. A child growing up in a chaotic environment internalizes that, since anything can happen at any time and you never know when something catastrophic will happen, they have very little control over their own lives. As a result they develop what is called free floating anxiety.

They often grow up to be very controlling people in one way or another. Many attempt to control other people in a variety of ways and can become very abusive. Another more subtle way is to just maintain tight control over their own environment. In any case, even though the controlling may be directed outward the internal need is to maintain control for ones self.

In part, for me it means avoiding other people whenever possible. I'm not a recluse in the normal sense. I just don't make close relationships with others very well. And yes it becomes very lonely which is the price I pay. I became a night owl many years ago which was a two pronged coping strategy. One, it was quite and safe late at night when I was growing up. I had much more control. I could read or listen to music quietly and didn't have to worry about getting yelled at or otherwise getting in some random trouble. It was easy to get in trouble in my home. Often you didn't even know why. "Because I said so," were the watch words and may still be the most hated phrase I know.

The second part of the night owl stratagy is that it limits the contact you have to put up with in dealing with the rest of the world. That is both a plus and a big minus. It's hard to exist in a world that is mostly geared toward daytime interaction including work.

The other problem is that I'm usually pretty much out to touch. I keep my phone turned off and screen calls. I prefer to call you back on my time table rather than yours. That way I can decide on how I want to respond to your message and not have any surprises sprung on me. Life while growing up featured a random set of surprises, many of them quite unpleasent.

The other dread factor was that the phone ringing often meant trouble. My father could be in jail or have gotten a DUI or in a car wreck or any number of things. We lived in a constant state of fear when he was out drinking. One, we feared something bad would happen to him and at the same time we feared he would come home and start a fight. Having the phone ring still creates a sudden spike of irrational dread. So my solution, as I said, is to not hear it ring. This of course is more and more of a problem in our communication age where the rest of the world is glued to a cell phone seemingly 24 hours a day.

Maybe I'm typing into the great Internet Void but if you are out there thanks for listening. Sometimes sharing just means talking about the problem. Sharing helps.

If you stop by please post a comment just to let me know you were here if nothing else. Thanks and as always, "Keep coming back it works."

Ray

I thought it would be good to talk a little about alcoholism and addiction which in most professional opinions today are the same thing. Addicts of all flavors have always tended to feel special. Alcoholics often think they are above drug addiction and vise versa. The honest to god truth is that alcohol is a drug. Period. Alcoholism is the addiction to the drug alcohol. There is still some medical debate as to how one becomes addicted and who is more likely to become an addict but addiction it is none the less. Without question addiction is a medical problem and in many professional opinions, including yours truly it isn't a legal problem. Nor is it a moral failing. One of the contributing factors in the phynominom of denial is the feeling for failure. One doesn't normally feel like a failure if they get cancer or even a cold for that matter. Neither do you have to feel like a failure to admit you have a substance abuse problem.

If you read my previous post you will remember that I said that alcoholism and other addiction is most often multi generational. There are at least three generations of alcoholics in my family and maybe more. That is a far back as we know. So alcoholism has a genetic component. They have in fact identified the gene that is passed at least from father to son that seems to effect a predisposition to an addiction to alcohol. The key word however is predisposition. That doesn't mean that there is a certainty. It just means that the odds are much greater that if you drink you will become addicted. A person with a history of alcoholism and drug addiction in the family is well advised to not drink. Yes I know it's easier said than done because there is cultural and peer pressure to drink and have fun. They seem to go together or at least that's what the popular idea is.

Two things are certain. One, if you don't drink, you will never become and alcoholic. Two, if you do drink you will never know before hand exactly when you are crossing the line after which it is difficult to stop.

Addiction happens on a continuum that begins with recreational use with no problems, to abuse, then to addiction. Most people who drink never progress past recreational use. Only about 10% of the population of the US is alcoholic. The figure goes up to about 13% if you include all drug addictions. Yet 90% or more of the population drinks or has drank at some time. A few people later realize that they were hooked on alcohol on the first drink. The experience is often described as that they felt normal or whole for the first time in their life. That percentage is small. There is also a popular myth that people get hooked on street drugs the first time. In fact most don't and there are even people who are able to use heroin recreationally for years.

A second indicator, in addition to family history, is the young person who begins drinking and finds that they can drink everyone else under the table from the beginning. Peers often think it's funny and encourage them to drink even more. People with early high tolerances tend to progress quickly to abusers and then alcoholics. Finally, for this session, the earlier a person begins to drink and I don't mean a sip of beer or a glass of wine with dinner, I mean recreationally, the more likely they are to become addicted.

Addiction to a drug happens through a change in brain structure and chemistry. Through modern brain scanning equipment we can now see differences in the brains of addicts from non addicts. Hopefully one day there will be a resulting medical cure. The physical brains of young adults have not completely matured and are for some reason more susceptible to alteration by addictive substances. The worst problem with teen drinking isn't necessarly the resulting instant behavior but the long range consequences. For the teen who may be predisposed to addiction for other reasons he (she) couldn't begin drinking at a worse time age wise.

That's it for today Dudes and Dudets. Keep coming back, it works.

What does the term Adult Child of an Alcoholic mean? The short answer is that children growing up in alcoholic or other addictive households develop certain similar characteristics which manifest themselves in dysfunctional behavior in adulthood. Perhaps the most concise description of a very complicated subject is “The Problem” which is read at every ACA meeting. I will publish it now and when I figure out how I’ll post it as a link on the side so you that it will always be available.

***********

The Problem

Many of us found that we had several characteristics in common as a result of being brought up in an alcoholic or other dysfunctional households.
We had come to feel isolated, and uneasy with other people, especially authority figures. To protect ourselves, we became people pleasers, even though we lost our own identities in the process. All the same we would mistake any personal criticism as a threat.

We either became alcoholics ourselves, married them, or both. Failing that, we found other compulsive personalities, such as a workaholic, to fulfill our sick need for abandonment.

We lived live from the standpoint of victims. Having an over developed sense of responsibility, we preferred to be concerned with others rather than ourselves. We got guilt feelings when we trusted ourselves, giving in to others. We became reactors rather than actors, letting others take the initiative.

We were dependent personalities, terrified of abandonment, willing to do almost anything to hold on to a relationship in order not to be abandoned emotionally. We keep choosing insecure relationships because they matched our childhood relationship with alcoholic or dysfunctional parents.

These symptoms of the family disease of alcoholism or other dysfunction made us 'co-victims', those who take on the characteristics of the disease without necessarily ever taking a drink. We learned to keep our feelings down as children and keep them buried as adults. As a result of this conditioning, we often confused love with pity, tending to love those we could rescue.

Even more self-defeating, we became addicted to excitement in all our affairs, preferring constant upset to workable solutions.

This is a description, not an indictment.

*************

If you relate to the problem, don’t despair, there is also a Solution. I’ll post it tomorrow. If your parent(s) were alcoholic or otherwise addicted and you don’t relate, give it some time. Denial is a strong mechanism. We read the Problem, Solution and the 12 Steps at each and every meeting for a reason. They need to be constantly absorbed and re-absorbed to have meaning. We also say “Keep coming back. It works.” I invite you to keep coming back there is much yet left to learn.

Every 12 Step meeting, all of which are derivative of AA (Alcoholic’s Anonymous), has three phases. The read stuff, they share personal experiences, and there is some sort of group close. The reading section is introduction and teaching which is what I’ve been doing and will continue to do. As a member though it’s important for me to share. Sharing is where healing takes place. To separate the two I’ve decided to share in a different color type. From now on, when we are in black it’s about addiction and recovery in general. When we are in Rose it’s about me and my experience as and ACOA.

I taught addiction recovery in treatment programs for 13 years and honestly it is easier and tempting to just lecture you all about how to do it. As if I have “the” answer. I do not. I have a lot of knowledge that may point the way toward “your” answer. So I’ll try to take the risk and share some with each post. Since we are still in the introduction phase, the teaching may be more than the sharing for awhile. If a recovering community develops then hopefully the reverse will happen.

**********
Hello-my name is Ray and I’m a recovering ACOA. (If you’ve been to meetings you know that everyone responds, Hi-Ray. If you’ve been to lots of meetings you said it in your head didn’t you. Hahaha)

I’m 58 years old. My father was an alcoholic before I was born, although I didn’t know that until I was grown because even to the last day of her life my mother never acknowledged the obvious facts. We never spoke the truth. My grandfather was an alcoholic who became depressed and committed suicide. My sister is and alcoholic and I grew up and married one. Alcoholism often a multi-generational disease. It’s probably part genetics and part behavioral training. I drank when I was younger but either wasn’t predisposed toward alcoholism or I never drank enough to activate the addiction. I’ll never know. I stopped drinking in 1987. I’ve been sober 30 years thanks to the program.

Rather than drink, I sided with my mother’s piece of the equation and became an enabling rescuer. I married an actively alcoholic woman and set out to “fix” her because that was what I thought you were supposed to do. In the meantime “fixing” her actually meant propping her up for 13 years so that rather than hitting a bottom and getting real help her addiction only got worse.

In 1985 my wife’s mother passed away and she went completely off the deep end which turned out to be the best thing that could have happened. I left for a year during which I learned about ACOA and began putting the pieces together about how I had ended up in such a messed up life despite my best intentions to the contrary. In 1986 we tried a brief reconciliation then divorced and I’ve never looked back.

Has it always been absolutely wonderful. No. Is it better than it was. Yes. That’s enough for now. I’ll share more later. Thanks. (And you say….”Thanks Ray.” See it’s this little formula that involves, opening and closing and respect.)

Welcome to my ACOA (Adult Children’s of Alcoholics) Blog

To answer the first question: Why and ACOA Blog in the first place? The simple reason is that meetings are no longer held where I live and I would like to attract some like minded people with whom to share recovery.

I'll get to just what he heck and adult-child is for those of you who aren't familiar with the term but first some housekeeping.

By way of disclaimer: This blog is not affiliated with Adult Children Anonymous (ACA) which is a registered trademark. Although I was a very active member until meetings disappeared and thoroughly endorse the group, their efforts and the 12 Step method upon which they were founded. I do hope to secure links to their home page and other ACOA related sites as we go along. In the meantime if you want to learn more about ACA just Google them.

Before I get into who I am and about me I would like to establish a couple of principles for using the blogs discussion feature. It would be good if we can style our discourse in the way of an actual meeting. The most basic principle is respect. As an adult child, our self image has already been profoundly effected by negative interaction with others, beginning with an alcoholic parent or parents. We come to meeting in all shades and flavors of function and dysfunction. In meetings we learn to listen and learn from each other’s strengths, yes we all have strengths, our hope and our recovery. We do not give advice. “You should,” cross talk and is an unwelcome phrase.

Some adult children are angry adults who grew up in less than tolerant situations. While loving you, I will not tolerate, racism, sexism, gay bashing, or other hate speech. That isn’t to say that those topics are taboo. They aren’t. Virtually anything can be discussed in a reasonable fashion.
In the words of a John Prine song, “Little pictures have big ears.” Children or young adults my find their way to this site. Some may even find it useful. Alanon even has a group for children called Ala-Tots. Out of respect for anyone who may find us. Lets keep a civil tongue; no cursing or vulgarity please. No I’m not a prude and yes I’ve been to AA meetings where the talk was pretty rough at times. Everyone there was at least an adult though.

This gets us started then. The 12 Steps were adapted from AA and Alanon. If you have attended either of those programs you will find that the core of recovery is exactly the same. Everyone who has been effected by drugs and alcohol, which is just another drug, is welcome at the table. Our focus is slightly different but you will understand the language.
I don’t have any pretty art, particularly Teddy Bears which were the unofficial ACOA mascot, to begin with but every journey has to have a beginning. We can decorate the room as we go.

Next time I’ll talk about what adult-child means. Then go into the history of the ACOA movement and lead into recovery and some of my own history to boot. With luck this will cross the path of a few fellow travelers and we’ll begin to form a community.