I have never been an alcoholic myself, but I used to go to 12-step meetings a long time ago because there was alcoholism in my family. I went for about five or six years, off and on. While I found some of what they taught constructive and helpful, I didn’t get along with most of the people because they seemed whiney, cliquish, and self-righteous to me. Looking back on it now, I think they might have sensed I wasn’t on the same wavelength as them. I felt a lot of the meetings were nothing but self-indulgent group therapy sessions. Whenever I expressed my doubts to any of these people, they would always urge me to “keep coming back” to these meetings and tell me that I “couldn’t do it myself.” Yeah, like I really needed any of them. However, I continued to go for a while because I thought I just didn’t “get it” and if I continued to go, I would eventually “see the light” and consider the meetings worthwhile. This never happened. Finally, I got to the point where I just wasn’t getting anything out of the meetings any more, and I stopped attending them completely.
Occasionally, I would pass some of the people that also went to those meetings in the street, and they would look away from me, like they were totally shunning me. This amused me more than it offended me. Twelve-step programs really are like cults.
For a while I thought I was the only one who wasn’t enamored of 12-step programs, and I am so grateful to see this is not the case.
]]>]]>To the Readers:
This letter continued for hundreds more of rambling sentences, showing the clearest evidence of all that AA is not just ineffective, but evil. When she desperately grasped out for help 30 years ago, all she wanted was to know how to quit drinking/using and stay quit. They didn’t encourage her to quit drinking/using, nor did they explain how to quit an addiction, because none of them had done that, either. They sucked out her human spirit, turned her against her own flesh and blood, and stole her life by injecting her with its high-proof Addictive Voice, the disease concept of addiction and the evil of one-day-at-a-time sobriety fortified by the 12-step program of lifetime recoveryism. Now her mind has turned to Jello, a sweet, molded form that cannot bear the burden of independent living, but only trickles sacharrine nonsense under stress.
Some may think it cruel or insensitive to expose the handiwork of the Beast this way, but that is always the way of social movements which exploit the masses for the benefit of a few. I did allow her some modesty by snipping her comment short, showing just the tip of an iceberg made of Jello. Her recovery certainly does come first, one-day-at-a-time, whether her family likes it or not.
If you can recover on your own, you will prove you never had the (pretend) disease concept of addiction in the first place, and you will avoid subjecting yourself to greater harm than addiction itself—recoveryism.
Jack Trimpey
]]>Sam,
Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of addicted people, not recovered people, so all AA has to offer is adaptation to life in addiction. They call this “in recovery,” which is a typical example of inverted 12-step thinking. AA provides no exit, and the bridge back to society you imagine is truly the Bridge to Nowhere. AA literally curses its members with grim predictions of endless suffering and death if they even seriously consider leaving the group. The issues you identify are all results and not causes of addiction, and they promptly fade and disappear when one permanently abandons his addiction. To make mattes worse, members are threatened with dry-drunkism, which I call the Curse of AA, in which taking responsibility for abstinence is the direct cause of emotional instability and mental breakdown.
AA isn’t a means to addiction recovery, but only an alternative to quitting the use of alcohol and other drugs. When people are considering total abstinence, with good reason, they make the tragic error of seeking the guidance of AA rather than trusting their own native beliefs and original family values. The resulting sellout results in life in recovery instead of the wonderful emancipation from addiction that results from planned, permanent abstinence.
Jack Trimpey
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:
Declaration of Personal Independence
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