I on the other hand, suffer a brokenness which began before conscience thoughts or alcohol entering my body. I am a person that is grateful for AA and that I have been re-united with God.

Recovery and life happiness is dependent on more than being clean and sober. But if that is the goal of your program, then Good Work.

Wendy,

That brokenness is only in your rear-view mirror, which is the focus of 12-step recoveryism. Because you are still reserving the option to have “relapses,” your future is as seen through the eyes of addiction, so the future must remain unthinkable. “Sober” people cannot look ahead, but rather wait for life to happen to them according to the mercies of a self-made, love-only, God-as-you-understand-him. The past remains your seedbed of misery, and must remain so to protect you from the moral burden of your self-intoxication. Your drunkalogs are a catechism of innocent suffering resulting from bad genes, dysfunctional families, and cruel fate.

If you will simply quit your addiction (self-intoxication!) unconditionally, for life, as a matter of personal commitment to moral principle, you will likely discover that you are truly safe from yourself and from any imagined addictive disease. Then, you will no longer be an alcoholic, but a normal, independent, adult.

I realize that you cannot possibly imagine such a scenario is this, and I understand you’re uneasy feelings about the idea of independence and the prospect of being a normal human being. I call those feelings of apprehension recovery group disorder, or “Recoveryism,” for short. All people who are in recovery have the same conflicted feelings between their native beliefs and values and of the recovery doctrines that hold them in place.

If you are interested in exploring  personal independence, you might review these links:

RecoveryismMy Recovery 

Declaration of Personal Independence

Crash Course on AVRT®

Wishing you and your family the best,

Jack Trimpey

I don’t have a disease. I am not an alcoholic. I am a person who used to drink way too much and who now doesn’t drink at all, and who will never drink again. I am personally responsible for myself.

Thank you for sparing me any more AA meetings. Their self-congratulatory stories were wearing thin.

I believe you are confusing the rants and raves of a few, maybe a lot, of AA members who feel their way of life, whether you agree with it or not, is being attacked as the position of AA itself. This is categorically untrue. AA/NA/CA all have no opinion on “outside issues.” Your method, treatment centers, therapists, medication, and the courts are all “outside issues.”

As a clean member of NA, I have been clean for 12 years, I can tell you that I am not really concerned with your method, nor do I worry about your attacks of 12 step programs. Still, I don’t agree with your bashing of those who do not agree with your ways but if it works for you and for others, I am not going to knock it. To each his own.

I think you want it both ways — to be righteously offended at my AA-bashing, and to remain true to Tradition 10: AA has no opinion on outside issues, and the AA name should never be drawn into controversy.” The man in you is made a coward in the 12-step fellowship of addiction. You’re pissed, with good reason, but wear the pretty mask of 12-step piety/humility.

In the simplified realm of 12-step recoveryism, there are no internal contradictions, although they are abundant and conspicuous to outsiders. Each sentence you wrote contradicts the others; every word you wrote is inverted truth. To say that addiction treatment is an outside issue is absurd and ludicrous. Addiction treatment is nothing more nor less than a very expensive introduction to 12-step recovery by members of AA doing the steps for money, i.e., moola. To say the courts are outside issues is disgusting, as if AA is a victim of those naughty courts that keep sentencing their drunk drivers to meetings. American traffic courts are kangaroo courts, operated by 12-stepping policy makers and AAs in public employment as counselors, assessors, monitors, etc. To say medication is an outside issue denies AA‘s direct responsibility for the suffering and deaths resulting from the routine advice to members to discontinue psychiatric medications. To say therapists are an outside issue is simply stupid, because everybody knows that substance abuse counseling is the bastard child of the mental health movement, established as marginal practices under ethics and values foreign to the learned professions.

I am obviously attacking the 12-step way of life. I believe that the outcome of one-day-at-a-time sobriety in the context of anti-family, social cultism is tragic. If you say every concept of the Big Book backwards, you’ll end up with something very close to AVRT®. The 12-step program and AVRT® are irreconcilable — AVRT® is the foil.

AVRT® is a self-aiming weapon that exposes the Addictive Voice regardless of its source. Every word of AA fits the definition of the Addictive Voice — any thinking that supports or suggests the possible future use of alcohol or other drugs. 12-step recoveryism is predicated upon the inevitability of using unless one accepts the highly implausible, counter-intuitive, anti-family doctrines set forth by Bill W. I cannot help it that the very best way to defeat serious substance addiction is to contradict all concepts of 12-step recovery.

As for your 12 years of “sobriety,” it’s a good thing you aren’t in my family because you would be most unwelcome without a personal guarantee you’ll never drink again. Who do you think you are, reserving the possibility of “relapses,” after all the harm you caused yourself and others in your pursuit of addictive pleasures? An “alcoholic?” Where did you learn such arrogance? Alcoholics Anonymous?

Jack Trimpey

Stop bringing the AA name into public domain. My thinking never got me into the solution…It only has kept me sick. Please stop using AA to promote your system. Your system may be wonderful for the problem drinker - Just like AA is wonderful for the Alcoholic. Thanks.

An Grateful AA member.

Readers:

I am always glad to receive objections and even hate mail from 12-steppers or anyone else. One of our most important contributions to society is the introduction of controversy in a field held hostage by social cultism.

However, AA forbids its members to speak for AA, prohibits members to engage in any controversy about addiction recovery, protects secret memberships and dual relationships of substance abuse counselors in public employment, and requires its chain of thousands of addiction treatment centers to deny their deep involvements and affiliations with AA.

Nevertheless, its millions of members act as sentinels against public criticism of AA, who reflexively defend AA against any public criticism, and present AA to the public according the party line of its Twelve Traditions. Believing their survival to be dependent upon AA, members cannot tolerate public discussion or criticism of 12-step recovery. They are unconcerned about the millions who are forced against their will into 12-step recovery each year, with the secure, abstinent outcome of about zero.

Above is the charming face of tyranny, speaking in home-spun clichés while he attempts to deny your access to the escape hatch from the booby hatch to which he has consigned himself.

For the record, Rational Recovery® is a kind of counseling and guidance on addiction recovery that directs people away from fellowships of addiction and toward independent recovery through a moral commitment to lifetime abstinence. The means to that goal is AVRT®, which identifies the Addictive Voice regardless of its source. Every word of AA doctrine and literature, and every word spoken at 12-step meetings fits the definition of the Addictive Voice, “Any thinking that supports or suggests the possible future use of alcohol or other drugs.” A good pre-requisite to AVRT-based recovery is the Declaration of Personal Independence.

Jack Trimpey

The 12-step program is my worst enemy. I feel that if you can’t abstain on your own, then who should care? If you can’t handle drugs, don’t do them. It’s mind over matter, as always.

Justin,

Just as addiction is anti-family, AA/NA is anti-family at the core, and so is their auxiliary group, Al-Anon. Addiction and its fellowship of addiction, the recovery group movement, is essentially a home invasion, extending the reach of the Addictive Voice into all social systems, starting with the immediate family, and then into the social service system, the courts which invaded your family, and the mainstream media.

The inverted message is the disease excuse, followed by the arrogance of one-day-at-a-time sobriety. Recoveryism requires families to accommodate endless uncertainty rather than expect the addict to accommodate his family with a guarantee of endless abstinence.

Your pregnant fiancé faced a decision not unlike Sophie’s Choice, in which she had to choose between two intolerable alternatives. To keep her child, she chose life in recovery, and now must agree to its endless quasi-moral authority. The authority demanding this ghastly choice was not the Nazis, but the 12-step syndicate, another government-bred attack on the citizenry. Your fiancé made her choice and lost her freedom and her human spirit as well.

The 12-step syndicate is everyone’s enemy; they do no good at all, and harm everyone with its inverted, malignant corruption.

Jack Trimpey

Cynthia,

I have no doubt you’ll soon defeat your addiction through a personal commitment to lifetime abstinence. AVRT® is a seed idea that incubates for a period and then grows into the moral conscience that was lost to addiction. Addiction cannot endure your moral authority.

Your comments about the great discouragement of recoveryism are the basis of why I call the recovery group movement the American addiction tragedy. Being “in recovery” is a lifestyle that, from a subjective viewpoint, is frankly inferior to addiction itself, although not studded with the painful downfalls that cause one to seek help. Instead, new members face a future of addict-identity, associating with people they would not likely invite into their homes, struggling vainly to believe implausible ideas such as “spiritual-not-religious,” addictive disease, one-day-at-a-time sobriety, God-as-you-understand-him, codependency, and learn a new language of non-thought, steptalk, which consists of cliches, slogans, and mottoes.

Addicted people are staying way from AA/NA, believing AA’s proclamation that the choice is between AA and addiction, and follow AA’s warning to not take the most constructive action of all, quitting the use of alcohol and other drugs for life. AA dropouts prefer the grip of addictive pleasures to the stuffy phoniness of recoveryism, and very often they destroy themselves, family members, and strangers in their meteoric downfalls. There is no doubt in my mind that AA destroys more lives than addiction itself, because they systematically discourage all addicted people from undertaking planned, permanent abstinence.

Thanks for your comments, which I hope will encourage others to walk away from addiction and its pervasive fellowship of addiction, the recovery group movement.

Jack Trimpey  

“You will suffer from recovery group disorder for many years, as the slogans and mottoes of AA haunt your thoughts with self-doubt and character attacks.”

applies to me. Fascinating.

I do have a problem with the undermining of self control that is found in the Big Book, i.e. (to paraphrase) there will be a time and place were the alcoholic is defenseless against the first drink without the help of a higher power.

I suppose if this were true, the success rate would be higher than 5%, eh?