Todd,

Welcome back to your original home. AA wanted to be your “new family,” but in your heart you remained true to your original identity, which was instilled in you as a young child.

Addiction is a survival drive, but so is family attachment. Families are the cradle of life, where life begins and is protected, nurtured, and prepared for independent, adult living. You acquired a moral conscience in your family, and that was washed away by your addiction.

Your addiction was like a magnet for other addicted people, and you longed for a new family who would accept you and protect you. Although AA tried to pull you away from your native beliefs and values, your family loyalty has won out.

You don’t belong in the social ghetto of recovery groups, and everything in you has rebelled against your “new family.” However, you have acquired some bad thinking patterns and the slogans and mottoes of AA will haunt your thoughts for many years.

Your last name is no longer, “Imanalcoholic,” so shine up your family coat of arms and be proud of your last name and your ancestral heritage. Your original family values have great survival value, and your existence is proof of that. You haven’t inherited any addiction problem at all, but you did inherit the solution.

Jack Trimpey

Heather, when I look upon your many words, I wonder what you’ve said. At the least, you’ve made me more self-conscious about my inclination toward verbosity.

My main comment, other than to congratulate you for finally seizing control of your personal conduct, is that you seem unaware that you actually did seize control, and that your uplifted feelings since that accomplishment are the natural reward for accepting adult responsibilities. You still see through the eyes of addiction; if you take The Crash Course, your vision might improve.
You conveyed that your inability to revive the astonishing buzz proves you smoked for the sheer pleasure of it. Nothing personal, but this is the oldest story in the book, i.e., “I don’t know why I use. I don’t know what I was thinking,” etc. When you dragged yourself through shit to get to the dealer, you knew exactly what you were hoping for, and you certainly weren’t paying for something you hoped would make you feel bad. From the start, crack made your sexual awakening seem like tiny candle before the roaring fires of crack’s addictive pleasures. That is why you became a slave to the Beast, and lived in the proverbial barnyard, forsaking all else. Sadly, you now explain your immorality as nutritional deficiency, or some other vague predeliction, and regurgitate vapid recovery doctrines rather than frame your experience in common language.

Everyone starts in a childhood family where the daily drama forms original family values. We can learn much from the shortcomings of our parents, and even learn kindness from being treated with cruelty. Having addicted parents doesn’t destroy children; it may just as well educate them to the evils of habitual vice. Your view of troubled families is dark; there’s more good there than you think.

Jack Trimpey

Rob,

12-steppers are in a self-made prison that occasionally serves “relapses,”  just to keep things a little interesting. When shown the way out, they rage against the leader. As though on parole, they expect their families to accommodate the rules of addiction, living under the cloud of one-day-at-a-time uncertainty.
Jack Trimpey

[snip]
I just realized - I used my last name in our dialogue, and in order to maintain my anonymity and respect the traditions of 12-step recovery, could you please edit my last name to “L.” on my posts, or delete the last post entirely? I have noth my personal and professional anonymity to consider.

I understand you take exception with the 12 Traditions, but they are important to me, and hope you will extend me the consideration.

Mr. Lovelace,

I see. You come here trying to suppress information on AVRT-based recovery, but conveniently forget to disclose that you are a 12-stepper, loyal to the program that AVRT® exposes as crippling indoctrination. In your AA mode, you must not appear to speak for AA, nor may you engage in any controversy about AA because AA has no opinions about anything.

Then, I called you out, and you were torn between honesty and loyalty to AA. You came clean and disclosed your affiliation, as well as your implicit political agenda. You are a “two-hatter.” In other words, you took off your normal-man hat and put on your crazy AA hat. However, in choosing honesty, you are now disloyal to your personal savior, AA. You are discovered speaking for AA, engaged in hot controversy with a well-known detractor of AA. So, you want the freedom to speak out against independent recovery, but without disclosing your hidden political agenda. You want to sound like a scientist while representing AA, which is serving two masters, a bizarre conflict of interest.

Your duplicity here is precisely how our social service system is being destroyed by 12-step social cultism. No agency has ever chosen to force AA on its clients justified by any supportive research. It is always a political decision, based upon unfounded, exaggerated claims of “two-hatters” who remain anonymous, very much like KKK members in government once anonymously set social policies favoring its own political agenda.

Today, our social service system has been transformed into a gigantic funnel into AA/NA, which is the feeder system for the addiction treatment industry. Almost all of the substance abuse counselors and addiction treatment specialists are themselves members of AA/NA, ensnaring their clients in the same quicksand that sucked them down years ago, and no one, not even you, ever recovers for fear of becoming a hopeless dry-drunk. Because of “two-hatters” like you, millions of men and women languish in one-day-at-a-time sobriety, depressed that their lives have been permanently altered to accommodate the pretend disease of addiction, hopeless for the freedom and dignity of independent living.

Now that your mask has been removed, you want me to participate in your deception, so that visitors to the RR website won’t know who you are. The real deception is that you are somehow at risk for breaking anonymity, that your fragile “sobriety” is at risk, that you might now explode into drunkenness, and that I will somehow be responsible for damages resulting from your tantrum. This is exactly the kind emotional blackmail that 12-step recovery pulls on families, who are expected to be supportive of their sacred alcoholic, and tolerate all of the weirdness and arrogance of one-day-at-a-time sobriety, and “Sorry, honey, but my recovery comes first.”

I want every reader to understand clearly that it is entirely unnecessary to bow to the sacred alcoholic for fear that forthright honesty might cause one to go stark, raving mad. I want readers to become more challenging, inquisitive, and demanding of good explanations about 12-step recovery. Most of all, I want everyone to reject the terribly misguided idea that members of AA are entited to anonymity when they take part in public discourse, and especially when they participate in any activity affecting social policy.

Like the masked man in the picture above, so-called “alcoholics” are nothing more nor less than self-excusing asses who stubbornly refuse to totally abandon their addictions, and aggressively stand in the way of others doing so, exactly as you have attempted to do, here, Mr. Lovelace.

Your plea for anonymity, Mr. Lovelace, is denied.

Jack Trimpey

AVRT® is perfectly perfect. However, you are looking at addicted people as specimens, not as human beings endowed with free will. You believe that self-intoxication has hidden causes that may be identified and treated, with the outcome that one no longer is driven to drink/use. You think that AVRT® is a treatment for addiction. As I already said, you have not read with comprehension. In AVRT-based recovery, one is free to choose between addiction and recovery, in the moral dimension where self-intoxication is immoral conduct. — JT

Mr. Trimpey, from reading about AVRT, you seem to be very interested in the interaction between human physiology and the psychology of addiction (beast brain/new brain, etc.). Yet you term the physiological study of the disease “bullshit” and go so far as to selectively edit posts so you can frame a discussion in only terms you are comfortable with. Reader, take note of that as well; scientific/medical research that does not fit into Mr. Trimpey’s hierarchy of belief is “bullshit”. How very rational of him.

I offer the Structural Model of Addiction, which is a gradeschool-level presentation of a healthy, human brain, free of disease, generating robust desires for physical pleasure that sustain physical survival. Because no addictive disease has ever been identified, I take the license of identify addiction research itself as bullshit. I use the criteria of “bullshit” set forth by Harry G. Frankfurt, in his definitive book, On Bullshit, which remains in the top 1000 amazon.com best-sellers almost all the time. By those criteria, I am certain that you are bullshitting. Your comments are those of someone who has not defeated an addiction, or one who has not been addicted.

(If you insist, I will restore the original paragraph which I mercifully edited in the interest of readability.)

Until there is a comprehensive union between psychological (”addictive voice”, “spiritual disease”, “powerlessness”) and medical understanding of addiction, no single approach will do anything but make a dent in the number of people who gain long term meaningful recovery, be it AVRT, 12 Steps, etc.

This is a perfect example of Frankfurtian bullshit. You are speaking without knowledge of what you speak. There is no need for any involvement of medical or other counseling professionals, because there is no disease or inherent defect to be treated. In fact, those individuals are responsible for a public health catastrophe, mass, runaway addiction to alcohol and other drugs. The disease concept of addiction and its attendant rituals of recoveryism destroy more lives than addiction itself, mainly by forcefully contradicting original family values that are sufficient for anyone to abruptly and permanently recover. Simply allowing the natural consequences of addiction to pile up, including the moral indignation of everyone affected, will result in more recovery than all of our addiction treatment centers combined.

However, it’s time for you to come clean, Jason. Tell us about your day job and any personal involvement you have with addiction or recovery. Because you appear so dense with respect to AVRT-based recovery, I am beginning to suspect you are either in recovery or a treatment specialist yourself.

Jack Trimpey

You use the word “relapse” in terms that suggest you view it with the same scepticism a non-believer might view an exorcism, an “event” that exists only in the mind of delusional people.

…Medical research has demonstrated conculsively that alcohol and drug abuse result in craving following detoxification. In many cases, people may succumb to these cravings through a process where physiological processes affect mental ones. Do you dispute these aspects of addiction physiology?

Are you asserting that all instances where a person has undergone detoxification from immediate physiological affects of drugs, and then reingests the substance of choice is an example of moral or intellectual failure alone?

Jason, “relapse” is a fictional event that exists in the minds of addicted people. Relapses are simply personal parties, for the purpose of pleasure without regard for the suffering of others. In other words, relapses are immoral conduct. Addicted people have yummy relapses for any reason at all, including great tragedies over which they would otherwise grieve and weep.

Addiction research is like professional wrestling: muscular showbiz. Not a single addicted person has been helped by the outcome of scientific research into the nature of addiction or recovery.

“Craving” is Addictive Voice biobabble for “want” or “desire.” You have read with no comprehension at all. I doubt you have read anything about AVRT®, except trying to find loopholes. There aren’t any, because AVRT® is already perfect. Yes, perfect!

Readers, I have edited Jason’s post, above, which was originally written in the idiom of scientific bullshit. The Addictive Voice element, however, has been preserved, however.

Jack Trimpey