[0:00]Why 12 new steps for ACOAs followed by a group discussion led by Tony Allen, recorded live at the U.S. Journal training and Changes Magazine sponsored 7th Annual National Convention on Children of Alcoholics, held February 24th to 27th, 1991 in Orlando, Florida. Good morning everybody. Thanks for getting up. I got walking in here with a young lady. I uh mentioned the fact that uh at this particular hour, uh my my life, I feel at this hour is just about as important to me and to ACOA as that the uh the hour that I first read the laundry list. Uh, I look out in the room, it's about the same amount of people that were in the room when I first read the laundry list. Yesterday I went into my personal story and uh my AA and Al-Anon and ACA experience. And uh today what I'm like to discuss is uh 12 new steps for adult children of alcoholics. Uh why they were written, who they were written for and uh why I feel that the AA steps should be replaced. Uh needless to say, this this subject is not uh uh without some controversy. And uh I have already uh uh been faced with that controversy. And uh if I had missed the controversy at the beginning, ACOA never would have started. Because uh if you look at the uh the super structure or the structure of the 12 step movement, Alcoholics Anonymous is truly their parent. And uh Al-Anon is in many essences or many uh uh areas the mother. And so long comes a movement, which is the children. And if you look at it, the alcoholic comes into Alcoholics Anonymous, they get sober, we get sober, I got sober. And I was told that all I had to do is to stay sober and uh I had a successful day. And the Al-Anon person comes in and told her to attend meetings, take the focus off their husband or wife, put the focus on themselves, learn how to detach, and they'd be okay. And this is terrific, and then all of a sudden the ACOA movement starts and these two parents have to look at what they did to the children. And needless to say, it makes them very nervous. Uh as an AA member, I uh I was living in before I became an alcoholic. Uh recovering alcoholic, I lived in bars. I was never home. So my three children were brought up and uh I was never with them. So all of a sudden I joined Alcoholics Anonymous, I got sober. I went out to help others. I went to a meeting every night, and uh as my daughter said, I was running around helping strangers. And meanwhile, I had abandoned my family just as much with uh through through through AA as I had uh uh in bars. As far as my children concerned, the only difference was I was now mouthing some slogans that they didn't understand, was talking about a higher power that they I had never heard from me before, uh whenever I happened to stop by at home. So, as an ACOA, what I I did was, I again abandoned my children uh on an almost deeper level. Uh When I came into Alcoholics Anonymous, I was presented with 12 steps. And these 12 steps uh taught me that I had to clean up my act, uh make amends, uh admit to God myself another human being the exact nature of my wrongs and uh uh prosetize, go out and uh and uh present the Alcoholics Anonymous program to others in order to help them. And I believe all of that basically is a is a wonderful uh wonderful tool for recovering alcoholic. Uh I think that basically the uh the AA steps, not only are not appropriate for adult children of alcoholics, I believe that the AA steps drive ACOA's crazy. And now I would like to launch into this discussion. I'm very good at incidentally telling my own story, I'm not so hot at this. Uh I feel like uh I'm sort of giving a lecture. And I'm beginning to sound like an authority figure. An authority figure, as I say, scare the hell out of me. So I'm beginning to scare myself. So if I sound too authoritarian, raise your hand and I'll try and stop. So I'd like to, first of all, I'd like to go through uh these ACOA steps. Uh First of all, in AA, I start off with the AA step. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol and their lives have become unmanageable. Well, as a two-year-old or a three-year-old, I really wasn't powerless over alcohol. I mean, I wasn't drinking it. It had no particular effect on me physically, except for the fact that my mother had drank it for the nine months that I was in the room, which means I was almost factually, I guess, I didn't work out to be a total alcohol fatal baby, syndrome baby. Anyway, the step I've offered is, we admitted that we were powerless over the effects of living with alcoholism and that our lives had become unmanageable. Now what are the effects of living with alcoholism? I believe that's the laundry list I wrote in 78, which I will now read. These are the effects of living, having lived with alcoholism or in dysfunctional family. We became isolated and afraid of people and authority figures. We became approval seekers and lost our identity in the process. We are frightened by angry people and any personal criticism. We either become alcoholics, marry them or both, or find another compulsive personality such as a workaholic to fulfill our sick abandonment needs. We live life from the viewpoint of victims and are attracted by that weakness in our loving friendship relationships. We have an over-developed 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, etcetera. We get guilt feelings when we stand up for ourselves instead of giving in to others. We became addicted to excitement. We confuse love and pity and tend to love people we can pity and rescue. We have stuffed our feelings from our traumatic childhoods and have lost the ability to feel or express our feelings because it hurts so much. Denial. We judge ourselves harshly and have a very low sense of self-esteem. We are dependent personalities who are terrified of abandonment and would do anything to hold on to a relationship in order not to experience painful abandoned feelings, which we receive from living with sick people who are never there emotionally for us. Alcoholism is a family disease and we became power alcoholics that took on the characteristics of that disease even though we did not pick up the drink. Power alcoholics are reactors rather than actors. Now, those are the effects. That's my personality profile. That's what that's what happened to me as a victim being brought up in an angry, abusive, uh atmosphere.
[8:10]Uh sexually abused, uh overtly, uh emotionally abused, uh verbally abused, physically abused. And that is what happened to people, children brought up in that kind of an atmosphere. Uh Many of us became uh uh post-traumatic stress disorder victims, frozen feelings. Frozen feelings are are are uh some of the effects of having been brought up in this kind of a home. And uh uh also anger, of course, which is mentioned in here, guilt, shame. But the basic uh effect of having been brought up in that kind of an atmosphere is fear. I feel that I'm a fear-based person. Just about everything I've ever done has been based on fear. Uh So anyway, uh I believe I've covered the first step. The second step of Alcoholics Anonymous stated, we came to believe that power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. When Bill Wilson was asked uh what he meant by restored to sanity, he said, if I don't pick up the first drink, I'm restored to sanity. I agree with that. I think that's uh that's certainly valid for for for members of Alcoholics Anonymous. But me as a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, when I looked at the step, I skipped it. Uh First of all, when I was an AA member, I looked at it and I said, gee, if they take my insanity, there's no Tony. My whole life, I mean, it was was was uh I was an insane uh uh person and I kind of liked it. You know, as a euphoric up and down, did crazy things and uh and seem to function at a pretty high level financially. I made a lot of money. Anyway, when I'd uh uh uh, how would I put it, when I helped get the ACOA movement started, uh, one of the uh members came to me and said that they the group had uh had a discussion and they asked me to write new steps for ACOA. Which I did in 1979, try to 78 or 79, I wrote 12 steps for adult children of alcoholics and uh uh some of these are included in these new steps which I'm offering now. The uh steps at that time I wrote them and uh a new member came into the ACOA movement who is a psychiatrist. And what I asked him to do was to edit the steps for me so I could make it a wee steps rather than just me. He did and uh the steps were in rather psychiatric jargon and uh did not get too popular. They still use them some someplace in Brooklyn. I hear some some some places in in California. But anyway, uh if you look at the second step for an ACOA, we came to believe that power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. That's the AA step. Uh restoration means to be given back something that I once had. You can look that up in the dictionary, that's what it says. And as an ACOA as a child being brought up in a in a crazy, alcoholic, abusive family, there was no sanity. So there was nothing for me to be restored to. When I looked at the step from an ACOA basis, what I what they were what they were saying was that basically, uh I would have to uh uh go back to the insanity of my family. That was all I had to be restored to. So the step I'm offering for ACOA is we came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could bring us clarity. Clarity means clear, clearness of vision, being able to see clearly. And there was one dictionary I looked up and it said that uh it can also mean freedom from guilt and freedom from shame. So it struck me that clarity uh is is is a is a far better uh uh condition for me to be restored to than uh a sanity that I I never experienced. As a child. Around 1980, around 1979 and 1980, uh I read a uh a book on the Kahunas.
