Illustration · An imagined meeting room in the mid-1980s, set up before a large Al-Anon adult children’s meeting: rows of folding chairs, and at the front a table with a literature rack, a coffee urn and a stack of cups. Not drawn from a photograph.

Adult children

One group in 1974 and nearly a thousand, counting those proposed, by the end of 1985: grown children of alcoholics come to Al-Anon, and the long argument over where they belong.

“Please! Al-Anons with alcoholic parents!”

The Forum, December 1972 · as printed in Many Voices, One Journey, 2011

Worried about his mother

In February 1977 a member from Michigan went to his first Al-Anon meeting, worried about his mother’s drinking. For years he was usually the only man there, and often the only one under 40. About two-thirds of the others had a husband or wife in AA.

Some of them had grown up with alcoholism too, but they talked about a spouse’s drinking. He knew he belonged all the same, he remembered. He always related to the feelings, if not to the situations.

MoreBefore no crosstalk

Meetings ran differently then, he remembered. Members kept the focus on themselves but got more involved in one another’s lives, for better and for worse, and no one yet spoke of “no crosstalk.”

A member from Hawaii remembered the rule arriving later, with members of outside groups. Meetings suddenly seemed “controlled,” that member wrote, and sharing felt like something you could get wrong.

Al-Anon had already asked about members like him. In December 1972 its Forum put out the call that opens this page, for a booklet members wanted about grown children of alcoholics. The first Al-Anon group for adult children registered in 1974.

Late in 1976 or early in 1977, former Alateens in Manhattan started an Al-Anon meeting called Hope for Adult Children of Alcoholics. An older AA member they invited to speak became a leader of the group, and wrote literature outside Al-Anon’s process for approving it. Within about a year the group left Al-Anon.

MoreTwo kinds of group

The speaker had talked about growing up in a violent alcoholic home. In time the group joined others to form a separate organization for adult children of alcoholics.

Leaving was the group’s own choice, Al-Anon’s history says. But as more groups for adult children formed, some in Al-Anon and some not, members couldn’t always tell the difference.

Then, in May 1979, Newsweek ran “Kids of Alcoholics,” about counselors and psychologists who had begun writing on adults raised in alcoholic homes. Thousands of new members came to Al-Anon, many on a counselor’s or therapist’s advice.

They came fluent in the language of therapy, and asked for Al-Anon literature about themselves. Al-Anon’s pamphlet for adult children came out that June, almost seven years after the decision to make it: six pages and four stories, far less than many had hoped for.

MoreOr have lived with

In 1980 the Conference changed a line of the Suggested Welcome, read at the start of meetings, to “We who live, or have lived with …” and so made room for members who no longer had a drinker at home, among them many adult children.

On August 22, 1984, a woman of 28 went to a newcomers’ meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after her sister told her about the new books on adult children. She wrote the date in her journal. When she asked whether others had felt crazy, heads nodded all around.

Illustration · A journal open at the date one member wrote down after her first Al-Anon meeting, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Imagined; not drawn from a photograph.

Meetings there often drew 60 to 100 people, many of them men, and she felt surrounded by kindred spirits in their twenties and thirties. What kept her coming, she wrote, was the hope the older wives of alcoholics shared. The groups called them the “God ladies.”

Not everyone made room. One member remembered longtime members treating the newcomers as a threat (“They want to change our program!”), and newcomers using treatment words and demanding changes in the literature.

A delegate from Minnesota remembered members screaming at her when someone suggested they send in sharings for new literature. At one workshop a member threw a hardcover book at her: it didn’t say it was for adult children. Yet many members, she wrote, hadn’t welcomed them as warmly as other newcomers.

By 1986, Hank G. told that year’s Conference, the pain and confusion had only grown. Members answered from the floor: adult children brought new strength to the program, and dwelling on the past was like trying to figure out why the alcoholic drinks.

“Let’s look at the past; let’s not stare at it.”

A Conference member, 1986 · Many Voices, One Journey

One Conference member who wasn’t an adult child had answered yes to 16 of the 20 questions in Al-Anon’s 1984 leaflet for adult children, Did You Grow Up with a Problem Drinker? In at least one Area, members were being reminded that “it’s our children we’re talking about.”

Illustration · Al-Anon’s 1984 leaflet of twenty questions, answered yes sixteen times, as that Conference member answered it. The questions themselves are left out; not drawn from a photograph.

That year the Conference passed a Resolution of Unity. The experiences that bring members to Al-Anon may differ, it said, but “the principles of Al-Anon are universal.”

In 1990, 93 Al-Anon adult children groups disbanded, and ten more asked to come off Al-Anon’s list because they belonged to another organization. Al-Anon’s first book for adult children, From Survival to Recovery, came out in 1994.

By 2001, Al-Anon’s history says, the adult children were for the most part fully a part of the program. A daily reader of their sharings, Hope for Today, came out the next year.

Listen Adult children About 1 minute

Count by count

From one group to a thousand

Each bar is the number of Al-Anon groups for adult children at a point where Al-Anon’s history counts them, all on one scale; beside it, what was happening then.

Counts from Many Voices, One Journey (2011), which gives the 1985 figure as groups proposed and registered and the 1997 figure as one Conference member’s count; for 1974, the first group to register. Quotations are short excerpts.

1974
The first group

One registers

The first Al-Anon adult children group registers. In 1979 the pamphlet members asked for in 1972 comes out: six pages, four stories.
1982
14 groups

Asked to stay

Registered at the start of the year. The history gives the same number for the groups the office wrote to in 1981, asking whether they belonged to an outside organization; most said they didn’t, and wanted to stay on Al-Anon’s list.
1983
81, then 194

A pamphlet sells

81 at the start of the year, 194 by the end. Al-Anon Is for Adult Children of Alcoholics, begun as a reprint of Forum stories, sells 44,300 copies.
1984
255 groups

A statement

The Conference adopts a statement on adult children’s groups and a Declaration of Unity. The 1979 pamphlet grows by 14 pages and ten stories, and a leaflet of twenty questions asks, Did You Grow Up with a Problem Drinker?
1985
Nearly 1,000

A hundred in a room

Proposed and registered, by the end of the year, with groups reporting as many as 20, 40, 80, even 100 regular members.
1990
93 disband

Some go

93 adult children groups disband, and ten ask to come off Al-Anon’s list because they belong to another organization.
1997
About 1,200

A book for everyone

The Conference agrees to a daily reader for adult children. “It’s a book for everyone,” said the member who gave the count; Hope for Today came out in 2002.

Inside the circle

In about twelve years the adult children’s groups went from one to nearly a thousand, counting those proposed. Al-Anon answered within its Traditions and its literature, with no welcome or service committee of their own, and in time published the books they had asked for. Some groups stayed, and some left.

For a closer look

Go deeper

A welcome Al-Anon turned down, the members who taught one Area its Traditions, and what came after 1986.

A laundry list

At the 1981 Conference, delegates from several Areas worried about a “growing number of groups” that invited only adult children of alcoholics, with preambles and literature of their own. The Literature Committee looked at a special welcome that many adult children’s meetings, in Al-Anon and outside it, knew as the “Laundry List” or “The Problem/Solution,” and turned it down: it was “negative in tone, tended to stereotype, took other people’s inventories, and offered no hope.” Since its purpose was to attract new members, the Committee later suggested, the Public Information Committee might handle such material.

The office wrote to the 14 Al-Anon groups that called themselves adult children’s groups. Most said they belonged to no outside organization, wanted to stay on Al-Anon’s list, and asked for literature about their own concerns; the three that didn’t answer came off the list at the end of 1981. Later the Literature Committee turned down a request to print a passage from From Survival to Recovery as twelve numbered “gifts” or “promises,” as it had turned down requests since 1977 to adopt AA’s promises or write Al-Anon’s own. In October 1995 the Policy Committee agreed: Al-Anon does not have “promises.”

A secret weapon

In 1984, one member remembered, the Area had a single Al-Anon adult children meeting, and not every Al-Anon member liked the idea. It used no Conference Approved Literature, papers from outside were filtering in, and none of the longtime members there had grown up with alcoholism. But the group had “a secret weapon”: dual members, who belonged to AA as well as Al-Anon.

They knew AA’s Traditions and Concepts of Service, and used them to answer the negative remarks and to keep the meeting from turning into something that wasn’t Al-Anon. Watching them, the member wrote, was probably a first step in learning to trust.

The mail to Al-Anon’s office ran both ways. As the groups multiplied, the Policy Committee reported letters from members asking the office not to encourage adult children’s groups, and one from an adult daughter who complained that her group often seemed like a therapy session.

Not ready yet

Hank G.’s report to the 1986 Conference went further. Newcomers going to both kinds of meeting, he said, were bringing in outside words, outside literature, “and even a different set of Steps and Traditions.”

For a year after the Resolution of Unity, the Alateen Committee took on adult children’s concerns as well as teenagers’. In 1987 the Conference decided that every service already in place would reach out to adult children, instead of a new committee. A workshop at the 1990 Conference agreed that Al-Anon should support the groups and recognize their need to look at the past “before they can begin with their future.”

One member who came to Al-Anon in 1989 tried a meeting for adult children and left barely 30 minutes in. She loved her father, and hearing members talk about what their parents had done felt like betraying him. To have a future at all, she wrote years later, she had to look at the past, and she did it when she was strong enough.

Sources

Many Voices, One Journey. Al-Anon Family Group Headquarters, 2011. Chapter 6, “Consolidation and unity, 1971–1975” (the Forum’s call of December 1972, the first adult children group); chapter 7, “Protecting the principles, 1976–1980” (Hope for Adult Children of Alcoholics, the Michigan member, Newsweek, the 1979 pamphlet, the 1980 Welcome); chapter 8, “Defining the boundaries, 1981–1985” (the Laundry List, the 14 groups, the counts for 1982 and 1983, the Policy Committee’s report on the mail, the 1984 statement and Declaration of Unity, the Hawaii, Cambridge and Minnesota members, the dual members in one Area); chapter 9, “Looking within, 1986–1990” (Hank G.’s report and its counts for 1984 and 1985, the Conference members’ remarks, the Resolution of Unity, the Alateen Committee’s year, the 1987 motion, the member who came in 1989, 1990); chapter 10, “A place to call our own, 1991–1995” (From Survival to Recovery, the promises); chapter 11, “A new beginning, 1996–2000” (the 1997 daily reader and its count); chapter 12, “Taking our inventory, 2001–2005” (2001, Hope for Today).
Al-Anon Family Group Headquarters, Did You Grow Up with a Problem Drinker? (S-25), 1984 (al-anon.org).

Worried about his mother

From one group to a thousand

One registers

Asked to stay

A pamphlet sells

A statement

A hundred in a room

Some go

A book for everyone

Go deeper