Tony A’s 12 Steps for Adult Children with Alcoholism is a little different from the original 12 steps. I don’t relate to steps 3-10 in the original 12 steps. I have not lied, cheated or stolen from others, I have no children whom I have harmed and harmed by being abandoned or neglected or embarrassed. I never felt comfortable and couldn’t “relax” in an original 12-step group. I wasn’t a narcissist who didn’t care about anyone but myself. But I come from a family of severe dysfunction. I say serious because I think there are many levels of dysfunction, it’s not just one type. But yes, I know that dysfunction is prevalent in many families and across many cultures, backgrounds, and ethnicities. So when I finally found ACA (Adult Children of Alcoholics or Other Dysfunctions) and started going to meetings with all this stuff, my STUFF started to come out! I knew this was the show for me. I could relate to everyone in the group, on some level they were telling my truth, they could understand what it was like to live with a mom who was suicidal, or a dad who was angry and absent a lot. And family members constantly cross boundaries with each other.

I immediately wanted to attend one meeting a day. But I realized that you can’t speed up the process, in fact that’s another trait of someone from an alcoholic or dysfunctional family, is to SPEED the process up and try to go through all the steps too quickly.

Step 1 in the original 12 steps of Tony’s A’s begins like this:

“We admitted that we were powerless over the effects of living with alcoholism (dysfunction) and that our lives had become unmanageable.”

For a long time I wanted to deny this process! I wanted to tell the world and myself that there is nothing wrong with me, it was ‘they’ who were sick! I am so glad I cut those people out of my life, and now I know that all I have to do is keep sick people (addicts, abusers, manipulators, liars, cheaters, sociopaths, etc.) out of my life and i will be set! Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way. I ended up becoming even more alienated and drowning in my work, another trait of an adult child. Now, adult child does not mean that we act like children when we are adults, it means that when we were children we needed to be the “adults” because our guardians or immediate parents were too dysfunctional to take care of us. I know it’s a sick cycle, but that’s how it works.

Now what I’m learning is that first step, taking the program one day at a time. Go to meetings, talk to people, find a sponsor and really start a deeper level of healing. This is the first step in my own childhood emotional recovery.