Adult Children of Alcoholics / Dysfunctional Families

This is official Adult Children of Alcoholics World Service Organization (ACA WSO) Conference Approved Literature.

The ACA Fellowship Text (commonly referred to as the Big Red Book or BRB) is a meeting book, Steps book, Traditions book, workbook, and group guide. The ACA Fellowship Text was anonymously written by ACA members and provides guidance on working the 12 Step ACA program leading to recovery from the effects of growing up in an alcoholic or otherwise dysfunctional family. ACA WSO has adapted AA's Steps (with permission from AA) to address the effects of childhood trauma and neglect, and offer hope to ACAs worldwide.

Never before in the history of Twelve Step programs has a fellowship brought together such a diverse group of recovering people that includes adult children of alcoholics, codependents,
and addicts of various sorts. The program is Adult Children of Alcoholics. The term "adult child" is used to describe adults who grew up in alcoholic or dysfunctional homes and who exhibit
identifiable traits that reveal past abuse or neglect. The group includes adults raised in homes without the presence of alcohol or drugs. These ACA members have the trademark presence of
abuse, shame, and abandonment found in alcoholic homes.

ACA experience shows that survival traits developed by an abused or neglected child continue to affect the adult in problematic ways that our fellowship understands and addresses.
We offer hope and a sense of home for many adult children who live each day in quiet desperation without words to describe such despair.

Clinical and medical researchers have measured the causes and effects of growing up in a dysfunctional home and how such trauma continues to affect the affected adults throughout their lives. Our book also offers a medical opinion on this fact in its introductory pages.

No matter whether there was alcohol, drugs, gambling, sex abuse, physical abuse, neglect, or actions by immature parents, we develop similar traits or characteristics that interfere with our ability to form happy and healthy relationships with partners, at work, and anywhere else that fear and self-doubt can enter into our lives.

By finding a twelve steps meeting of adult children of alcoholics and working through this book and reparenting yourself, you will come to know a new way to live that will relieve the pain, shame, and years of stored anger you have endured since childhood.

Our fellowship includes members who have been diagnosed with addictions, depression, panic disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, and various dissociative states. Adult children
understand dissociation, codependence, obsession, and compulsion like few others.