The alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) has been extensively investigated in the past decades for solving separable convex optimization problems, and surprisingly, it also performs efficiently for nonconvex programs. In this paper, we propose a symmetric ADMM based on acceleration techniques for a family of potentially nonsmooth and nonconvex programming problems with equality constraints, where the dual variables are updated twice with different stepsizes. Under proper assumptions instead of the socalled Kurdyka-Lojasiewicz inequality, convergence of the proposed algorithm as well as its pointwise iteration-complexity are analyzed in terms of the corresponding augmented Lagrangian function and the primal-dual residuals, respectively. Performance of our algorithm is verified by numerical examples corresponding to signal processing applications in sparse nonconvex/convex regularized minimization.