About the fellowship
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Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families, known as ACA or ACoA, is a free, anonymous fellowship for adults who grew up around alcoholism or other family difficulty and find that childhood still shapes how they feel and relate today. Members help each other heal using a twelve-step programme.
There are no fees and no referrals. The only requirement for membership is a desire to recover from the effects of growing up in an alcoholic or otherwise dysfunctional family.
ACA is for anyone who grew up with a parent or carer who drank, used drugs, or whose home was marked by other difficulty such as neglect, illness, or harshness. You do not need your family named a certain way, and you do not need anyone else to agree it was hard. If the past still echoes in how you cope now, you are welcome.
Many people come having spent years looking after others, keeping the peace, or feeling somehow different. ACA is a place to set that down for an hour, in your own time and without anyone labelling you.
Many people first meet ACA through the Laundry List, fourteen traits the fellowship's co-founder wrote down in 1978 to describe how growing up in a difficult home can shape an adult. When it was first read aloud, someone said 'that's my laundry list', and the name stuck. It is there for you to read and see how much you recognise, not for anyone to diagnose you.
ACA began in New York in 1978, growing out of Al-Anon and Alateen as younger members realised the effects of a parent's drinking lasted well into adulthood. The fellowship spread worldwide and now meets across the UK in person, online, and as hybrids.