Come Alongside
I’ve told this story so many times, perplexed, always with no emotion until The Loving Parent Guidebook and the questions on page 26 and 27: What would you tell a child … ? I was in first grade sitting at the kitchen table after dinner struggling with single...
Mother Wounds
This is a poem I wrote to my mother. I have had no contact with her for 3 years. As I have been grieving the loss of my childhood and coming to the realization that I never really had a “mother”, poetry has been one way for me to express my grief. Before coming to...
2022 ABC Delegate Summary Information
Here is some important information that has been reviewed and approved by both the ABC Committee and the Service Network Committee. We hope this is helpful in understanding: the purpose and function of ACA’s Annual Business Conference (ABC);the role of Delegates to...
Waiting In Darkness: Discovering the True Self
She is impatient. She is alone. She has been counting the minutes, the hours, the decades for him to return. He never comes. No one ever comes. Yes, people have passed by and dropped in for a spell. They have idle chatter and intertwine their lives. There is...
This is for all who have been through a lot in life and survived
Debra L
Enough
One day I woke up and said, “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH”. I admitted I was powerless and my life had become unmanageable. I found safe enough people to share my story with, and by letting my truths hit the air, my true healing began. There is power in feeling heard and...
Poems
CryingThere’s a reason I can’t cryPart of me just hears the lieI think It’s weak and I’d be a babyI gotta pretend I’m not hurt or crazyWhen someone cries I envy themThey got a gift that I can’t haveIt feels like I’m a machine insideNot able to feel a single thing...
Many Faces
This is a piece I painted a couple years ago (called "Many Faces") maybe when I first started my journey into trauma recovery and right before I came into ACA. I was trying to express dissociation and to me how it felt to be so fractured inside at the time and also...
The Healing Adult And The Child Within
The maimed child within:terrified,paralyzed with fear.Forced to trust daddy-Monsterwho’s unstable and dangerous –unpredictably explosive.Forced to trust bitter battered mom,who gave him birth,who’s drunk,slurring her speech,unable/unwilling to protect herselfor her...
The Selfish Empty Nest
Seventeen years spent on the family farm. Home from school to the shock of my room packed on the porch. My baby book, framed pictures of perfectly posed horses, trophies and ribbons, horse magazines with my name inside, plaid button up shirts on hangers, my well...