What we’re about
Did you grow up in an alcoholic or dysfunctional home? Do you identify with the Laundry List? Why Adult Children? Because we bring self-doubt and fear learned in childhood to our adult interactions. We share our experience, strength, and hope with each other in recovery.
THIS MEETUP IS PRIVATE.
Interested members have limited access to this Meetup's content before they join. Non-members CANNOT see Meetup event descriptions and locations, member lists and group profiles, attendees, photos or other shared content. It cannot be searched. It can only be found via a direct link. You are welcome to use an alias first name in this group if you wish.
FOR PUBLIC LISTS OF MEETINGS GO HERE:
For a list of online meetings, please go here: https://battlebornaca.com/temp-meetings/
The current live meetings list is here: https://battlebornaca.com/about-meetings/aca-meeting-schedule/
or contact the World Service Organization: http://www.adultchildren.org
All of the regular meetings are listed here on Meetup on the calendar (for members of this group only):
https://www.meetup.com/LVACOA/events/calendar/
Adult Children of Alcoholics Common Problem
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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 life 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.