ACA is a fellowship of men and woman, whose common problem was growing up in an chemically dependent or dysfunctional family, who wish to overcome the effects, through love, understanding, and acceptance.

If you always do what you always did, you'll always get what you always got!

Many of us found that we had several characteristics in common as a result of being brought up in an alcoholic household.

We had come to feel isolated, 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 or married them or both. Failing that, we found another compulsive personality, such as a workaholic, to fulfill our unhealthy need for abandonment.

We lived life from the standpoint of victims. Having an overdeveloped sense of responsibility, we preferred to be concerned with others rather than ourselves. We somehow got guilt feelings when we stood up for ourselves rather than giving in to others. Thus, we became reactors, rather than actors, letting others take the initiative.

We were dependent personalities - terrified of abandonment - willing to almost anything to hold on to a relationship in order not to be abandoned emotionally. Yet we kept choosing insecure relationships because they matched our childhood relationship with alcoholic parents.

These symptoms of the family disease of alcoholism 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 and children and kept them buried as adults. As a result of this conditioning, we 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 relationships.

The solution is to become your own loving parent.

As ACA becomes a safe place for you, you will find the freedom to express all the hurts and fears you have kept inside and to free yourself from the shame and blame that are carryovers from the past. You will become an adult who is imprisoned no longer by childhood reactions. You will recover the child within you, learning to accept and love yourself.

The healing begins when we risk moving out of isolation. Feelings and buried memories will return. By gradually releasing the burden of unexpressed grief, we slowly move out of the past. We learn to ourselves with gentleness, humor, love and respect.

This process allows us to see our biological parents as instruments of our existence. Our actual parent is a Higher Power whom some of us choose to call God. Although we had alcoholic parents, our Higher Power gave us the Twelve Steps of Recovery.

This is the action and work that heals us: we use the Steps; we use the meetings; we use the telephone. We share our experience, strength and hope with each other. We learn to restructure our unhealthy thinking one day at a time. When we release our parents from responsibility for our actions today, we become free to make healthful decisions as actors, not reactors. We progress from hurting to healing to helping. We awaken to a sense of wholeness we never knew was possible.

By attending these meetings on a regular basis, we will come to see parental alcoholism for what it is: a disease that infected you as a child and continues to affect you as an adult. You will learn to keep the focus on yourself in the here and now. You will take responsibility for your own life and supply your own parenting.

You will not do this alone. Look around you and you will see others who know how you feel. We will love and encourage you no matter what. We ask you to accept us just as we accept you.

This is a spiritual program based on action coming form love. We are sure that as the love grows inside you, you will see beautiful changes in all your relationships, especially with God, yourself and your parents.

1. We admitted that we were powerless over our past; that our lives had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being, the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. Made direct amends to such people whenever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

1. Our common welfare should come first; personal progress fro the greatest number depends upon unity.

2. For our group purpose, there is but one ultimate authority - a loving Higher Power as may be expressed in our group conscience. Our leaders are but trusted servants, they do not govern.

3. The only requirement for ACA membership is a desire to recover from the effects of growing up in an alcoholic or otherwise dysfunctional home.

4. Each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other ACA groups or ACA as a whole. With regards to other Twelve Step Programs, we should be guided by the spirit of cooperation, but not affiliation.

5. Each ACA family group has but one purpose: to help adult children of dysfunctional families. We do this by practicing the Twelve Steps of ACA ourselves, by encouraging and understanding our dysfunctional families, and by welcoming and giving comfort to other adult children of dysfunctional families.

6. Our ACA family groups ought never to endorse, finance, or lend our name to any outside enterprise, lest problems of money, property, and prestige divert us from our primary spiritual aim. Although a separate entity, ACA should always cooperate with other anonymous Twelve Step programs.

7. Every ACA family group ought to be fully self-supporting, declining outside contributions.

8. Our ACA family groups should remain forever non-proffessional, but our service centers may employ special workers.

9. ACA as such ought never be organized; but we may create service boards or committees directly responsible to those they serve.

10. ACA has no opinion on outside issues; hence the ACA name ought never be drawn into public controversy.

11. Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, television, radio and films.

12. Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities.