Our Mission

This website is intended to be a recovery resource for Al-Anon Adult Children and our friends in related 12-step groups anywhere they live on planet Earth. Our primary service project is the yearly Workshop and Festival. The next Workshop and Festival will be May 2nd - May 4th, 2008, at the Green Lake Conference Center, Green Lake, Wisconsin. Please continue to watch this page (actually, you can come back to it at any time............) for more details.

Who We Are

The yearly Workshop and Festival and this website are hosted by a service committee of  Al-Anon Adult Child volunteers in northern Illinois, USA. The membership of this committee changes from year to year, but a few have served since the first Workshop and Festival in 1989. There are usually about 10 members each year.  Most of us "grew up" in Al-Anon Adult Children or other 12-step groups for adult children of alcoholics. As Al-Anon members, we follow the 12 Traditions, Steps, and Concepts of Service of Al-Anon. In keeping with Al-Anon Traditions, our functions are entirely self-supporting. After maintaining prudent reserves and paying the costs of the yearly Workshop, any remaining funds are contributed to Al-Anon and Alateen.

Recovery Issues

Since adult children of alcoholics are predisposed to learn and adopt our parents' addictive attitudes, we predictably feel frustrated and angry, victimized, lonely and confused. In addition to struggling with damaged relationships with our families of origin, we frequently continue to rely on our old coping skills, attitudes and belief systems. Even though there is no apparent connection to the past, we often see the patterns of our own childhood being replayed in our current families and relationships.  See Did You Grow Up With A Problem Drinker? 

               
Adult Children often have distorted perceptions of who we really are.

In addition, many of us have our own primary addictions such as alcoholism, drug dependencies, food and eating disorders, relational and sexual compulsions, workaholism, and similar problems. It is not the mission of Al-Anon or this website to address these primary addictions. Our goal is to address the painful, underlying issues which are common to adult children of alcoholics, and which predictably lie at the heart of these other addictions.  For those  adult children with any sort of primary addiction issues, we strongly encourage you to directly pursue recovery groups that deal with those problems.

For those not yet ready for this journey, or who wish to use an easier, ineffective version of the 12 steps,
click  here