`ADULT KIDS' OF ALCOHOLICS BACK DOWN FROM 12 STEPS

They're dying off, and they can't figure out why.

``It's not that there aren't any dysfunctional families around any
more,'' Fred says.

True, but there are fewer and fewer meetings of Adult Children of
Alcoholics (ACA) now in Greater Toronto.

The remaining members have been fighting the trend. They long ago
expanded the group's mandate: Meetings are not just open to those with
an alcoholic parent, but to those of any dysfunctional parent or
family. Now those of a controlling, overeating, tobacco, Valium, cross
or sex-addicted, verbally or physically abusive parent can come to
meetings.

It's just that not many do.

Of the 19 regular ACA meetings listed on the yellow card given out by
the group, only 12 are still up and running. Two are in Huntsville and
Barrie and few attract full houses.

Fred, who attends a Sunday meeting in Newmarket, winces.

``Even the Mississauga group folded,'' he notes.

The Canadian Association of Adult Children of Alcoholics has folded
its tents, the conferences ended years ago, and it's been several
years since media have paid this movement any attention.

So what does this say about the 12-step fellowship?

``When the adult children movement was making front page news in the
late '80s, we were running all sorts of treatment groups, we couldn't
provide enough groups for all the people,'' says Penny Lawson, family
co-ordinator at Bellwood, a private addiction treatment centre. ``But
I don't think I've received a call in six months asking specifically
for ACA treatment.''

About 85 per cent of Bob Metcalfe's counselling practice is with
adults from alcoholic families. He always recommends they go to a
support group as well.

But many patients tell him they have trouble finding an ACA support
group, especially in the 905 area.

Others are ``frightened half to death'' of going to an ACA meeting
because they don't understand that no one comments, challenges or
discusses anything anyone says there.

``To be heard and nothing more is really essential for the healing of
many people,'' he says.

The guaranteed anonymity helps as well.

Therapist Linda Charbonneau says many of her patients found ACA
meetings ``helpful, supportive, sometimes intimidating, always
educational, for about six months.''

They weren't making the Alcoholics Anonymous kind of long-term
commitments to ACA.

She began to realize they needed something more.

``At some point, the knowledge and self-awareness you get (from ACA)
is not enough. You need change,'' says Charbonneau, who has a private
practice counselling for trauma and loss, relationships and addictions.

Because many from alcoholic families have difficulties in
relationships - they repeatedly pick the wrong kind of partner because
they only know dysfunctional relationships, they stay in troubled
relationships because of their heightened fear of abandonment - they
wanted to explore, then repair themselves in their current
relationships, not in their former families.

``This is the evolution of the ACA movement.''

Charbonneau was one of the first Canadian professionals to receive
training in what was then an ``exciting, dynamic movement''
recognizing the impact alcohol has on the family unit and individuals
within the family for the first time.

It was the ACA movement that generated the flood of books on the
subject, paved the way for healing guru John Bradshaw's television and
road-to-recovery workshop phenomenon and gave tens of thousands the
understanding that their current problems might stem from growing up

in the chaos of an alcoholic home.

In the heyday of the 12-step groups, all offshoots of the tried and
true AA model, there were plenty of groups for sex addicts, cocaine
addicts, food addicts, 12-step group addicts. But the biggest, the
fastest growing, was Adult Children of Alcoholics.

Pick a night, any night.

In church basements they'd be gathered listening to tales of pain and
horror, brutality and cruelty. Some were unbelievable as well as
unspeakable.

It began in New York in 1977, part of an Al-Anon group, an Alcoholics
Anonymous sister organization for families of alcoholics.

In 1983, ACA, as many were coming to know it, split from Al-Anon,
creating its own codes, 12 steps and 12 traditions.

The first Toronto group began that next summer, struggled for eight
months then folded. In 1985, it began again, this time with the
involvement of a professional, Yvonne Johns, now retired, then of the
Donwood Institute.

A March, 1986, feature article on the front page of The Star's Life
section was reproduced in newspapers across the country and
kickstarted that meeting into a bona fide movement.

Suddenly people were treating alcoholism as a disease of the entire
family and recognizing that adults who grew up in an alcoholic
environment had a lot of personality traits in common, most of them
not involving alcohol abuse.

There's an ACA ``laundry list'' of 14 points, all typical
characteristics of the ``adult child'' of an alcoholic.

Peter cites this as an example: ``We have an overdeveloped sense of
responsibility and it is easier for us to be concerned with others
rather than ourselves. This enables us not to look too closely at our
own faults.''

And: ``We are dependent personalities who are terrified of abandonment and
will do anything to hold on to a relationship in order not to experience
painful abandonment feelings which we received from living with sick people
who were never there emotionally for us.''

Along with the list, ``adult child'' became a buzzword.

By the summer of 1990, there were 30 ACA groups in the province and an
exploding international movement.

A three-day conference in Toronto at which Indiana University
sociology professor Robert Ackermann estimated one family in six is
alcoholic (in Canada that translated to 2.5 million children of
alcoholics) was attended by 700 ACA members.

Some of them belong still.

Grace joined nine years ago. ``I'll be doing this till the day I
die,'' she says.

She is one of about a dozen people sitting around a boardroom table at
the Addiction Research Foundation on a bright, fragrant Saturday afternoon.

This is intergroup, the once-a-month meeting of representatives from
the Toronto-area ACA chapters. And they've got problems. Money problems.

Falling membership means a declining bank account, Jim reminds them,
and they must maintain their phone lines with recorded messages of
meeting times and places. Otherwise, how will people find them?

But any meeting is open to any member who needs the comfort of
colleagues and who needs to talk.

That's why Rocco dropped by. A genial man, only his salmon silk shirt
speaks of his past as a compulsive gambler who lived large, laughed
loud and made a fortune one week, then lost it the next.

Now he goes to five Gamblers Anonymous meetings and six ACA meetings -
per week.

``I'm not panicking about the situation I'm in. ACA has given me the
tools . . . I know it's all going to work out.''

``There is no cure. We have to live with it. The program helps us
accept it,'' Jan adds.

Just like AA, being an ACA member means it's a lifetime process, Fred
says. ``It's not over till you're over.''

Organizations offer assistance

For more information relating to alcohol addiction:
* Adult Children of Alcoholics: (416) 593-5147.
* Alcoholics Anonymous: (416) 487-5591.
* Al-Anon and Alateen: (416) 410-3809.
* Addiction Research Foundation: (416) 595-6111.
* The Donwood Institute: (416) 425-3930.
* Bellwood Health Services Inc.: (416) 495-0926.

Checked-by: (trikydik)