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I get a lot of inquiries from people around the country about how to find 12 step support groups in their area.  Most of the inquiries are about Co-Dependents Anonymous meetings (CoDA) but some are looking for Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families (ACA or ACoA).

However, I am not sure how up to date it is possible for either of those resources to keep their information.  So, I also usually tell people that they can sometimes get the information on local meetings from Treatment Centers or Codependence Counselors in the area.  Many papers list 12 step meetings in them on certain days - and there are usually free papers that are devoted to healing or New Age or some similar theme that may have lists of meetings or phone numbers to find out about meetings.  There may be a county Drug and Alcohol office that has lists of meetings also.

And lately, I have been adding that the internet is a great resource for finding meetings, and telling people how to search in a way that will help them find meetings locally.

I know from my experience on the internet how very different results can come from searches on different search engines - and how the way one enters the search term can greatly affect the outcome of the search.  So, I set out to find out what kind of information it was possible to find on the internet.  That quest has resulted in this page which I hope will be useful to anyone out there who is seeking some local support.  Having 12 step meetings to attend has been - and still is - vital to my personal recovery, and I know what a vital and important resource it can be for anyone.

Search Engines

The first thing that is important, is to know something about how search engines work - at least in terms of how important it is to enter your search term in a way that will facilitate finding what you are looking for.  If for instance, I want to find web pages that might include information about a CoDA meeting I would search for  "Co-Dependents Anonymous" - placing the quotation marks around the word lets the search engine (some of them anyway) know that I want that exact phrase.  Without the quotation marks, it will search for both Co-Dependents and Anonymous - which will get you a lot of pages that aren't what you are looking for.

I first used this search term on one search engine that helped me find some regional CoDA sites. (Which I add to whenever I discover another resource.)

CoDA Australia new Septemer 2012

Adult Children of Alcoholics of Chicago & Milwaukee - West Great Lakes ACA Inter group for Illinois / Wisconsin / Indiana (added 10/11)

CoDA Canada - a new site with meetings for all of Canada.

San Francisco Bay Area Co-Dependents Anonymous  Lists meetings from Santa Cruz & San Jose up to Sonoma & Napa.

Los Angeles Co-Dependents Anonymous which list meetings for much of Los Angeles County.

The rest of Los Angeles County is covered by Co-Dependents Anonymous for the San Fernando, Santa Clarita, San Gabriel, and Antelope Valleys - and all of Ventura County.

Orange County CoDA

San Diego County CoDA

The Philadelphia Area Community Group of CoDA has just launched a website which list all the active meetings in the Philadelphia, PA area.

North Georgia Area CoDA - meetings in 8 Northern Georgia counties, includes Atlanta.

Coda Deutschland -  Co-Dependents Anonymous in Germany.  Web site is in German.

CoDependents Anonymous (CoDA) in New York City  Lists CoDA meetings in all 5 Buroughs of NYC.

New links as of October 2004

Greater Sacramento area CoDA - Sacramento & Northern California meetings

Greater Omaha CoDA Service Group - meetings in Omaha Nebraska.

St. Louis Area CoDA Groups

New links added in March 2009:

Northern Ohio CoDA

CoDependents Anonymous United Kingdom

CoDA Australia

Co-Dependents Anonymous - South Africa

CoDA Brazil

CoDA Netherlands

CoDA Texas

Desert CoDA Community Group

New England Co-Dependents Anonymous - covering 6 states

Codependents Anonymous of Washington State

Colorado CoDA

As part of the search that turned up these additional sites, I found one in Cozumel (not there any more 3/2015) - and one for an area of the country that a friend who was on our Caribbean Cruise says is a great part of the country to be in Recovery - Hickory North Carolina - whose site includes all 12 step meetings including CoDA.

Hickory North Carolina Area Recovery

This following written quite a few years ago - when people didn't know what Google was - but it still applies.

I also found pages of CoDA meetings that have not been updated since 1996 or 97 - which is ancient history in internet time, and is also too old to be reliable for twelve step meetings.  There were an unfortunate number of pages that were out of date - which made the search take much longer and can be discouraging.

It wasn't until I started searching on the internet's best search engine - in my opinion - that I discovered the real key to finding local meetings.   The best search engine is called Google.  It is the search engine of Stanford University and has recently been adapted as the search engine for Yahoo.

Google has over 1 billion pages in it's index - which may not be the most of any search engine, but it is the best indexing in my opinion.  Google has the capacity to index every word on a page and to call it up for a relevant search.   I had a great example of this the other day in relationship to a hit I got on my web site. Someone did a search for:  counselor San Luis Obispo County.  Now I am a counselor and live in San Luis Obispo County - but I do not mention San Luis Obispo County anywhere in my web site.  There are some pages on my site that contain articles that were originally written for a certain new age type newspaper that is based in San Luis Obispo.  On the very bottom of those pages is a notice that the article was originally published in that paper which includes the term San Luis Obispo.  Because the term counselor is prominent on my web pages and the term San Luis Obispo is mention 6 or 8 times on various pages, my web site came up in the top ten for the search.

I do not know of any other search engine that would have returned that result.  What this means in terms of searching for CoDA meetings, is that Google is a great resource for finding CoDA meetings.  In searching for the term "Co-Dependents Anonymous" on Google I got results that included 851 pages.  I only checked on the first 160 of those results - but was very pleasantly surprised at what I found.  Below are listed pages that contain current (within the last few months) information on CoDA or Adult Child meetings in 20 states and 5 countries.

What I discovered is that a great resource for finding current meeting information are the online versions of newspapers, church bulletins, and community service listings.  It is possible to do a search on Google for "Co-Dependents Anonymous" _______ - filling in the blank with your city, state, or region, and if the information is online Google will find it for you.  It's capacity allows it to find the name of the city and one reference to Co-Dependents Anonymous somewhere on that page.  This is a great use for the internet that I don't think any other search engine could perform in anywhere near the fashion that Google does.  It also doesn't pull up as much garbage in terms of out of date pages and pages with no real relevance as most search engines do.  Try it on your local area:

Search WWW on Google  using  "Co-Dependents Anonymous"  your city  (or "Adult Children meetings" or some such.)

Search WWW  Search Joy2MeU.com

(I will repeat this link at the bottom of the page for those who want to look over what I found - and also a link to a page that lists search engines from most every country in the world so that if you don't find what you are looking for on Google you can try some other searches.  Unfortunately most of those search engines do not have the kind of response ability that Google brings to the task.)

A site that lists 12 step meetings at the Alano Club in Rockford Illinois - including 7 CoDA meetings.

A site for lambdasouth (for gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders in recovery) in Fort Lauderdale Florida lists 4 CoDA meetings a week.

The Serenity Center in Columbia Maryland list 4 CoDA meetings a week

Search WWW  Search Joy2MeU.com

Search Google using  "Co-Dependents Anonymous"  your city  (or Adult Children meetings or you can search for therapists, workshops, seminars, etc.)

Joy2MeU The Web Site of Spiritual Teacher, codependence counselor, grief therapist, author, Robert Burney and Joy to You & Me Enterprises

Robert Burney is the author of a Joyously inspirational Spiritual book - Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls.  He has pioneered innovative, powerful, life-changing tools and techniques for inner child/emotional healing & Spiritual integration.  On the Joy2MeU web site he shares a wealth of information on codependency recovery/inner child healing, twelve step & new age spirituality, healthy & dysfunctional relationship dynamics, grief process, fear of intimacy, and much more. Some quotes from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls by Robert Burney: "This dance of Codependence is a dance of dysfunctional relationships - of relationships that do not work to meet our needs.  That does not mean just romantic relationships, or family relationships, or even human relationships in general.  The fact that dysfunction exists in our romantic, family, and human relationships is a symptom of the dysfunction that exists in our relationship with life - with being human.  It is a symptom of the dysfunction which exists in our relationships with ourselves as human beings." "We are not sinful, shameful human creatures who have to somehow earn Spirituality. We are Spiritual Beings having a human experience." "In order to start be-ing in the moment in a healthy, age-appropriate way it is necessary to heal our "inner child."  The inner child we need to heal is actually our "inner children" who have been running our lives because we have been unconsciously reacting to life out of the emotional wounds and attitudes, the old tapes, of our childhoods."

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