ACA Meetings

My spiritual father, who is a deacon in the Melkite Catholic Church, suggested to me several months ago that going to ACA (Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families) might prove to be of help to me with certain problems with which I struggle.

From the ACA Website:

Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACA)/Dysfunctional Families is a Twelve Step, Twelve Tradition program of men and women who grew up in dysfunctional homes.

We meet to share our experience of growing up in an environment where abuse, neglect and trauma infected us. This affects us today and influences how we deal with all aspects of our lives.

ACA provides a safe, nonjudgmental environment that allows us to grieve our childhoods and conduct an honest inventory of ourselves and our family—so we may (i) identify and heal core trauma, (ii) experience freedom from shame and abandonment, and (iii) become our own loving parents.

The 14 Traits of an Adult Child, also known as The Laundry List, are shown below.  If you identify with any of these Traits, you may find a home in our Program. We welcome you.

1. We became isolated and afraid of people and authority figures.
2. We became approval seekers and lost our identity in the process.
3. We are frightened by angry people and any personal criticism.
4. We either become alcoholics, marry them or both, or find another compulsive personality such as a workaholic to fulfill our sick abandonment needs.
5. We live life from the viewpoint of victims and we are attracted by that weakness in our love and friendship relationships.
6. 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, etc.
7. We get guilt feelings when we stand up for ourselves instead of giving in to others.
8. We became addicted to excitement.
9. We confuse love and pity and tend to “love” people we can “pity” and “rescue.”
10. 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).
11. We judge ourselves harshly and have a very low sense of self-esteem.
12. 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.
13. Alcoholism* is a family disease; and we became para-alcoholics** and took on the characteristics of that disease even though we did not pick up the drink.
14. Para-alcoholics** are reactors rather than actors.

Tonight, after attending for almost a half a year, I have volunteered to lead the meeting. In the meeting, we share our feelings and struggles without commentary from anyone else. Often, in listening to the struggles others are having, or the relief they have found from certain actions, we can find wisdom and help.

This is what I will be sharing tonight:

Please forgive me if this goes a bit long, or if you feel I wrote a sermon rather than a sharing. Our program is a spiritual program, and Step Three speaks of “the God of our understanding.” Right now, this is where I am stuck and having problems that relate to my dysfunctional anger issues, so this is what I need to share.

It seems to me that for every individual, there are two kinds of knowledge in life. There is factual knowledge, that is, you know some set of facts to be true, and then there is experiential knowledge, which means that you have a deeper and more personal understanding that these facts actually are impacting your life. In AA, for instance, I heard a saying, which you have perhaps heard from me before and which is a saying I really like because it is so true: you cannot help an addict until they realize that they are lying on the bottom of the pool and they are watching their last bubble of air rise to the surface.

What this means is that while an addict may realize he “has a problem,” to say that he or she is watching their last bubble up air float upwards means that they now know the problem is real, it is going to kill them, and they need to do something about it now, rather than just saying, “Yeah, I have a problem with my drinking.” (Or drug abuse, or pornography abuse, or working 80 hours a week – or in my case anger and perfectionism. Whatever it is that they are using to medicate away the pain of their existence)

I see myself coming to this point and I want to tell you that it is a little frightening to me. I’m watching that last bubble of air called “religious perfectionism,” head to the surface and I am being shaken out of my comfortable lying on the bottom of the lake like some turtle in hibernation.

This week: on Page 96 of the Red Book I read:

“Beginning with Step One, the adult child begins to realize, perhaps for the first time, the destructive malady of growing up in an alcoholic or other dysfunctional home. In addition to shame, our families included perfectionism, rage, mental illness, sexual abuse, religious abuse, or illicit drug abuse.”

This is the paragraph that arrested my attention this week when it talks about perfectionism, rage, and religious abuse. You see, I have blended these together for so long that I have created a false image of God – an idol by definition – which has been comfortable for me because it was familiar. And unfortunately, there are a lot of theologies and a lot of churches that are just as perfectionistic and dysfunctional as my family was. This was very comfortable for me because I understood the parameters. Now instead of an earthly Father who was impossible to please and would never tell me he loved me, I have substituted a heavenly Father who was described to me in the same fashion. Not that He is this way, but was described to me in this manner. In these abusive churches, God is always looking down from heaven to examine every little thing you do, and ready to condemn you. But since I was sick, I and didn’t know it, because I wasn’t doing drugs or getting blitzed on alcohol every weekend, I just went along with the program. I let people tell me what love is – according to their definition. That is, God is love, but only if you do this, believe that, or deny yourself this. And I jumped into that sick definition with both feet because that was exactly the way my earthly father was. My earthly father may not have said “I love you,” but by golly, I was going to do everything these religious people said to do to get a sense of God’s love for me, which was something I was lacking. And sadly, for a long time, while all this frantic religious activity gave me purpose, it made my family miserable.

In the churches I was in, I was told to make God happy (in other words, to get His love) you should attend church every time the doors opened. You had to tithe, and if you didn’t, God would punish you by extracting the money in some other manner, like having your car break down and the repairs come to exactly the amount your tithe would have been. I heard that story once in a “Revival Meeting” and it did it’s job. I was scared to death not to tithe from then on, even though we were very poor as a young couple and behind in our bills.

That isn’t the God who is love. Let’s call this what it is – “Theological Terrorism.” Unfortunately, because I am sick, I bought into this and it still affects me today. Which is one reason I think I am having these issues with anger. I’ve tried my best to get a sense of God’s love and rest in it by doing all kinds of things that I think will make Him pleased with me, but the theological terrorists have done well their job. I think the anger has come from my frustration and sense of failure, and my sense that God is still displeased with me. No child can live under such a sense of despair without it affecting them.

Faith is a wonderful thing, but a malappropriated faith is a terrible taskmaster. One of the interesting things about children is that they have faith in their family, and especially their parents. Mommy and Daddy couldn’t possibly be wrong, because, well, because they are wonderful Mommy and Daddy. So a false idea gradually forms within the child that the problem must be – ME! Therefore, I will do whatever I can to get them to give me the love and attention that I am craving.

It’s odd how easily this is transferred to our heavenly Father. It is odd how we transfer this faith in authority to those who claim to be speaking for God, sometimes at the expense of rather clear biblical language, such as “God is love.”

Step Three says that we turn to God as we understand Him. I need to stop at this Step and work on my understanding of Him, because right now it is exactly like my earthly father. The Sacred Scriptures of the Christian faith say that “God is love.” That is something I don’t understand yet, and it has been causing me a lot of problems because I became something of a religious nut trying to please God and get Him to love me rather than having faith in His love and enjoying it. In a sense, this was not my fault, since I really never knew what love was in the first place. But now I am watching that last bubble of air rise to the surface and I can either head up after it to change, to break into the fresh air of truly knowing God as love – or I can drown in a continuing sorrow, misery, and the anger which sent me here in the first place.

My spiritual father is a very wise man. After a few months of discussions, he directed me away from prayers in my prayer book that are all about confessing sin and instead gave me to pray every morning a prayer called, “The Athakist of Thanksgiving.” The word “athakist” simply means a prayer said while standing. It is a beautiful prayer and I would like to share with you just a small sampling from it, which I hope will bless you with the goodness of love of God:

You have brought me into life as if into an enchanted garden. I see the sky, a vessel of deepest blue, and the birds that sing in its azure heights. I listen to the soothing rustle of the tress and the sweet-sounding music of the waters. I taste fruit of fine flavor and fragrant, sweet honey. How wonderful it is in Your world, how joyous it is to be Your guest.

Glory to You for the feast of life.
Glory to You for the fragrant lilies of the valley and the roses
Glory to You for the delightful variety of berries and fruits
Glory to You for the glistening silver of morning dew.
Glory to You for the joyous smile of dawn’s awakening.
Glory to You for the New life each day brings
Glory to You, O God, forever.

Thank you for letting me share.