WSO INC. - The Loving Parent Guidebook

The Loving Parent Guidebook

This ACA WSO Publication is under fellowship review, with a goal of eventual conference approval.

Fellowship comments are invited. To submit feedback, please visit:

http://litreview.adultchildren.org

Copyright 2021 by

Adult Children of Alcoholics/Dysfunctional Families World Service Organization

PO Box 811

Lakewood, California 90714

www.adultchildren.org

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the permission of the copyright holder.

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The Loving Parent Guidebook

ISBN 978-1-944840-14-3 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-944840-15-0 (eBook)

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Printed in The United States of America

Table of Contents

ACA Serenity Prayer

__________, [god, higher power, life, universe, etc.] grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change, the courage to change the one I can, and the wisdom to know that one is me.

The Solution

The solution is to become your own loving parent.

As ACA becomes a safe place for you, you will find freedom to express all the hurts and fears you have kept inside and to free yourself from the shame and blame that are carryovers from the past. You will become an adult who is imprisoned no longer by childhood reactions. You will recover the child within you, learning to accept and love yourself.

The healing begins when we risk moving out of isolation. Feelings and buried memories will return. By gradually releasing the burden of unexpressed grief, we slowly move out of the past. We learn to re-parent ourselves with gentleness, humor, love and respect.

This process allows us to see our biological parents as the instruments of our existence. Our actual parent is a higher power whom some of us choose to call God. Although we had alcoholic or dysfunctional parents, our higher power gave us the Twelve Steps of Recovery.

This is the action and work that heals us: we use the Steps; we use the meetings; we use the telephone. We share our experience, strength, and hope with each other. We learn to restructure our sick thinking one day at a time. When we release our parents from responsibility for our actions today, we become free to make healthful decisions as actors, not reactors. We progress from hurting, to healing, to helping. We awaken to a sense of wholeness we never knew was possible.

By attending these meetings on a regular basis, you will come to see parental alcoholism or family dysfunction for what it is: a disease that infected you as a child and continues to affect you as an adult. You will learn to keep the focus on yourself in the here and now. You will take responsibility for your own life and supply your own parenting.

You will not do this alone. Look around you and you will see others who know how you feel. We will love and encourage you no matter what. We ask you to accept us just as we accept you.

This is a spiritual program based on action coming from love. We are sure that as the love grows inside you, you will see beautiful changes in all your relationships, especially with God, yourself, and your parents.

The ACA Twelve Steps

1. We admitted we were powerless over the effects of alcoholism or other family dysfunction, that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand God.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and, when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understand God, praying only for knowledge of Gods will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others who still suffer, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

The ACA Promises

1. We will discover our real identities by loving and accepting ourselves.
2. Our self-esteem will increase as we give ourselves approval on a daily basis.
3. Fear of authority figures and the need to people-please will leave us.
4. Our ability to share intimacy will grow inside us.
5. As we face our abandonment issues, we will be attracted by strengths and become more tolerant of weaknesses.
6. We will enjoy feeling stable, peaceful, and financially secure.
7. We will learn how to play and have fun in our lives.
8. We will choose to love people who can love and be responsible for themselves.
9. Healthy boundaries and limits will become easier for us to set.
10. Fears of failure and success will leave us, as we intuitively make healthier choices.
11. With help from our ACA support group, we will slowly release our dysfunctional behaviors.
12. Gradually, with our higher powers help, we will learn to expect the best and get it.

A Special Note

This book began as a group ballot proposal for a reparenting workbook of practical tools to support The ACA Solution of becoming ones own loving parent. The proposal passed the 2017 ABC (Annual Business Conference) and ACAs WSO (World Service Organization) formed The Loving Parent Guidebook subcommittee, which began meeting in January 2018.

The subcommittee wrote several drafts and incorporated feedback from the fellowship and the Literature Committee using a group conscience. WSO approved The Loving Parent Guidebook in early 2021. This book is now in Fellowship Review Mode for up to three years to provide the fellowship an opportunity to use the material and share their feedback. The subcommittee will then incorporate suggestions and submit the guidebook to an ABC for final Conference approval, and then it will be published in its final version. We invite you to submit comments after using the guidebook at http://litreview.adultchildren.org.

Stylistic Choices

The Loving Parent Guidebook has adopted several style decisions regarding terms. We encourage you to use the terms that work for you if these dont resonate with you:

• We use they as a singular pronoun, rather than he or she, to make the text gender neutral, except in fellow traveler shares.
• We use the words para-alcoholism and codependency interchangeably.