Rational Recovery Center - The Internet Center for Self-Recovery

Rational Recovery Feedback

Rational Recovery has heard from hundreds of thousands of people by mail, phone, and email, plus this website currently gets over a thousand hits per week. Millions know of our existence, but are poorly informed about the nature of our approach to recovery. Below, are a few typical responses from people who have recovered using Addictive Voice Recognition Technique (AVRT). We applaud them for accepting personal responsibility while the professional community judged them diseased and powerless. We also thank each of them for contributing their experiences, so that you can follow their example if you choose. Clearly, they set a higher goal than is permitted in the recovery group movement, and as might be expected, demonstrated the true nature of the human spirit.

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The names of contributors are included when provided and withheld by request.
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For the past 20 years, I've been mired in dependence to pot and alcohol. There are far worse cases out there than myself, but the fact remains, I've leaned heavily on those two substances for comfort and social acceptance for over half my life. In college in the 1980's, I worked at a psych hospital which embraced Steppist doctrine, and it was there that I decided I was more or less doomed; there was no way in hell I was going to immerse myself in AA and NA's whining, quasi-religious dogma, but for all I knew (and was told), the 12-Steppers were my only salvation if I wished to get sober and stay that way. Better to muddle my way through life as a doper than submit to their fascist-in-a-velvet-glove doctrine.

Finally, I realized that the booze and dope just had to go if I were to be able to pursue a happier, more productive life. Problem was, the very doctrines which I had rejected had burrowed their way into my subconsious, making the prospect of self-directed abstinence terrifying beyond belief. I can't tell you how many times I quit, only to start back up again in moments of weakness - weakness created by the echoes of disease-concept addictionology!

I noticed signs advertising Rational Recovery some time ago, but took them about as seriously as I take anything else I see tacked up to a telephone pole. Well, last night, about a week into what I had chosen to think of as "recovery" (edited, of course, to remove the deity references which offend my atheist-humanist sensibilities), I found your website, and took the crash course. Talk about a release! Most of what I found there were similar to conclusions I'd reached intuitively many years ago, but until then, I'd had no validation or support for them, whatsoever. Up until then, it was just me and my ideas against the juggernaut of addiction-as-disease dogma.

Applying AVRT to my cravings instantly put things in their proper perspective. Even now, I'd love to roll up a big, fat one, but labelling such midbrain impulses as "the Beast," and treating them accordingly, allows me to defeat those impulses, with far greater ease than I was able to just 24 hours ago. Being liberated from the grinding, "one day at a time" approach makes this challenge of abstinence far less daunting.

Thanks so much for helping me achieve the kind of intelligent sobriety I've craved for so long!

Your first paragraph, in which you tell how, at one time, you consciously decided to surrender to your addiction rather than turn your life over to the 12-step recovery group movement, very well summarizes the American addiction tragedy. There are millions of men and women who have surrendered to florid addiction simply because our public information system has created the illusion that in order to quit using alcohol and other drugs, one must congregate with others in the same boat and delve into irrelevant psychological and philosophical riddles.

Your account of how 12-step doctrine burrowed into your conscience, making life without drugs to appear intolerable, is a vitally important testimonial about the recovery group movement. The 12-step program was written and endorsed by men who were animated by the drive to get drunk, and who were unaware of how their efforts were being designed and shaped by their own Addictive Voices. They and their following believed that the 12-step program was revealed by God Almighty, indicating that the ultimate organizing entity of the 12-step program was not a human personality playing by universal rules of moral intuition and human judgment, but some other entity that spoke in godlike fashion about the nature of addiction and recovery. Their perception that the 12-step program sprang from divine origins, however, was sadly mistaken, for exactly the opposite is so.

The 12-step program is the code of the Beast - the human voice of the animal drive for intoxicated pleasure around which the doctrine and the rules of the recovery group movement revolve. Each of the twelve steps is a key that progressively unlocks one's grasp on mature, adult functioning, particularly one's capacity for self-restraint of the desire to drink or use drugs. The recovery group experience is intentionally humiliating and unproductive, bonded with the fear of inexplicable self-destruction. Alcoholics Anonymous offers a permanent lifestyle that only the most impoverished would prefer over the scarce but predictable rewards of substance addiction, a lifestyle that the most desperate, such as you and I were, will often refuse even in the face of death.

Your brush with the AA cult almost cost you your life, and actually destroyed your happiness for many years. AA has broadcast its message of hopelessness and despair so effectively, for so long, and to so many people, that we now live in a culture that cripples problem drinkers' natural ability to grow up and quit drinking or using drugs.

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Hello again:

This is just a follow-up to my previous e-mail earlier today. Several hours into the RR website has been mind blowing! Reading the articles on your site map, "Recovery Group Disorders" and "Of Course, AA is a Cult!," has been a revelatory experience. This initial exposure to the RR rationale has been the most liberating exercise in sanity I have ever had in all my years of shame-based, guilt-ridden, so-called "recovery." In the past few hours I've plowed my way through your website with glee. "I Object!," the letters from AA naysayers, and your sane, salubrious responses, have opened up my mind with a clear, fresh breeze of sheer enlightenment and unbridled joy!

At long last! A humane and humanistic approach to a human dilemma! And a method of recovery that neither opposes God nor demeans individual responsibility! For a long hard time I've been waiting for someone, anyone, in AA to practice the HOW Principle as rigorously (religiously?) as it is preached, without all the contradictory head-in-a-box claptrap. RR presents Honesty, Open-Mindedness and Willingness in superabundance, and in so doing exposes the destructive lies and hypocrisy that makes AA so unpalatable to the thinking person.

My thinking has been so permeated by the cultish AA doctrine that I am almost ashamed to admit it. Such a fool I've been! All these years, struggling with my conscience to mentally reinterpret and transliterate the AA doctrine in such manner as might seem palatable (to whom?): all those agonizing meetings, tripping over personal pronouns in an attempt to make my God fit into the cult; all that wasted energy being tolerant and forgiving of people who judge me condescendingly as a danger to their groupthink; all that self-deprecating "gratitude"; all the agonizing moments I've sat biting my tongue in fear of ostracism and being cast into Outer Darkness should I fail to toe the party line (or at least give lip service to it); ... All of it has been total and utter crap!

AA is riddled with sick people reinforcing their own sickness and self-loathing in some vague, vain attempt to justify their individual shortcomings in a collective mindfuck. I've just about had it up to my hypothalamus with the lunatics, freaks and loser geeks posing as models of AA "miracles," making the alcohol-ridden world safe and sane for newcomers, promising "The Promises" as a carrot-on-a-stick enticement to sucker neophytes into their cigarette-smoking lair. Fourth Step my Ass! Does anyone honestly think that sharing your innermost secret hell with a mentally unstable "sponsor" is going to make anyone "happy, joyous and free"!? Get a clue, people!

Here's a story from my own real experience. I attended an AA meeting once upon a time. The topic for discussion (no cross-talk!) was God. I said, "I am agnostic. I neither wholly accept nor completely endorse nor adamantly oppose your concept of God, I don't really understand God. I wish I did. I envy those of you who have enduring faith. I have no argument with any of you. I wish I could simply "let go and let God," but I have no real knowledge of God. I want to know and love God, but I am still imperfect in my understanding. I mean no disrespect to anyone. I just want to be honest. This is a "spiritual program" of recovery. I accept that. I hope you will try to understand and accept me as well."

In response, the woman sitting next to me said, in effect: "Poor you, who doesn't get God. To people who hate God, I say, 'Fake it 'till ya make it.....'" And so on.

For the record, I do not hate God, I simply do not understand God. But I do understand that an open mind and a willingness to know God on my own terms is essential to my general sanity and sobriety. The AA Apparatchik sitting next to me heard nothing, zilch, zippo, nada, not a damn thing I said. She was reacting to a perceived threat to Her sobriety posed by my common theological dilemma. And most importantly, she was reacting from a lifetime of AA brainwashing.

I did not attend AA with the intent of resolving my personal theological dilemma; I went to AA to find a practical means to a logical end: to wit, how to be a sober, sane and healthy member of society. The issue, sadly in AA, is still open for debate (but don't debate it out loud, please).

AA has no real answers to any cosmic questions. AA has no answers to any common sense inquiry into its own sordid, pretzel-logic dilemma of surrender and give up and let go and Become One With Us. Silly me, I read Huxley's "Brave New World" and Orwell's "1994" as a junior-high babe in the woods, and I return to those texts for inspiration, for human music underscoring a Tocsin of daily strife and the necessity for change. These days, I find Huxley's essays on God and his "Seven Meditations on the Lord's Prayer" to be of more practical use than the "Big Book" and it's "authentic Native American" story, pp. 474, "Join The Tribe!"

Admittedly, I am a heretic and a blasphemer, insofar as AA is concerned. I try very hard to be just like Them, but it's insincere. Like anyone afraid and alone and scared silly of being branded a drunk and an outcast, I tend to recoil from Final Solutions and authoritarian cure-alls. I'm a libertarian, a Jeffersonian democrat, a free-thinker, just a regular person trying to get through life without being a fool or hurting myself or anyone else in the process of my personal evolution. To me, accepting and indoctrinating anyone into the Cult of Hopelessness that is AA ranks among the All Time Top 10 Capital Crimes Against Humanity.

I'll have none of it. I'm tired of sitting demurely at meetings as if I were somehow fatally miscast in "Nuremberg II: The 12-Step Solution".

Of the RR doctrine I've digested thus far, I sense much that is reactionary. The common theme, rather than Rational Recovery, appears to be, "AA: A Case For Spiritual Cleansing". What I would really like to see here, unlike, say, in Yugoslavia, is a meeting of minds on equal ground, sans all the finger pointing, blame, and attendant intellectual carnage.

Just once in my life I'd like to witness a fair debate between AA and RR, either on a neutral website or in realtime at the podium of some cheap convention hotel.

Then, God willing, we might all get over ourselves and proceed with the real business of "recovery," whatever that is ...

AVRT has the beneficial effect of quickly deprogramming individuals who have become mired in the 12-step quagmire. If you will notice, it is not only I who is attacking the character and credibility of AA, but thousands of men and women who are telling their stories of misguidance and abuse. Rational Recovery is the voice of an important, oppressed majority. I do not know exactly why you want me to silence their voice of dissent. If debate between AA and RR was possible, it would have happened years ago. Sadly, AA is a secret society that forbids its members from representing AA in public, and forbids them from engaging in public debates or anything controversial. I have debated many 12-steppers on TV and radio, and I always win. They always resort to using the high idioms of science or ad hominem attacks when I raise such mundane matters as the morality of self-intoxication. Although you have wasted much time and possibly suffered painful "relapses" under the spell of AA, you are now unwilling to admit you have been suckered out of a whole lot of the most precious commodity any of us have, which is time of our lives. You won't turn on AA, and accuse them of screwing you. Like most other walking-wounded dropouts, you suffer a recovery group disorder that silences your complaints, allowing AA to escape accountability.

Jack Trimpey
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In case you're in short supply of testimonials, I'm writing to apprise you of how I've experienced AVRT. On the other hand, if you're deluged with positive feedback, you need only read this: through my discovery of Rational Recovery I am no longer a hostage to my Beast who, by the way, was a close relative of that cigarette monster.

I now realize I've been stuck with a daily drinking pattern which was in part perpetuated by AA's disease model. Having to choose between being an "alcoholic in need of chronic treatment" or a responsible, competent drinker, I naturally chose the latter. Though I often envied those who can take it or leave it, alcohol was my constant companion, my best friend, just as cigarettes were. (I quit smoking around 14 years ago). Further, every time I gave up drinking for a few months I became obsessed and repulsed by my husband's six-drink-a-night and more on weekends pattern. My abstinence was, in fact, disruptive to the family equilibrium.

I won't go into details, but it became clear (even through the lens of the bottom of a beer bottle) that there WAS no equilibrium, just a tenuous and fragile illusion. After I stopped drinking for a week or so, instead of retreating to the comfort of beer or wine, I found your site. AVRT is the only support I've ever had that neither carried with it the labels, "alcoholic," "recovering" nor doomed me to a lifetime of hanging out with self-congratulating 12-steppers. Phew! I'm free, just like so many other's who have responsibly and privately defeated the Beast with courage and integrity. I am a person of integrity, not a recovering alcoholic.

After I quit smoking for a year, my husband, not to be outdone, did the same. He's never gone back. He now has a choice to make: the Beast or me. He confuses me with the Beast and blames me for blunting his dreams. For years I thought I WAS his Beast or worse, a pathetic "codependent." Ha! I'm free of that responsibility and my own Beast! There's nothing codependent about me. Can't describe the relief of THAT!

Now my marriage may disintegrate, but its fabric has been shredded thread by thread by the Beast for twenty-four years. My husband has yet to explore AVRT, but I know he shares my disdain for the AA cult. I will be gifting your book to him next week and he will make his own choices. I'll let you know if another testimonial is in order!

Finally, I was consoled by the fact that you, Jack, are a practicing social worker. I've often felt like a hypocrite when my colleagues discuss AA and alcoholism in treatment rounds. (I'm a psychiatric clinical nurse specialist). They say we're the hardest to treat. No wonder! We're just too rational.

Your political activism is important and I'm relieved that someone is challenging the myth of AA. Unfortunately, at this time I'm focused on political activism for curing my daughter of a chronic disease. However, if you have any guidelines or tips as to how I might best integrate AVRT into my practice, do let me know. I work at a mental health institution devoted the AA thing with an alternative called "Smart Recovery," about which I know very little.

Please honor my confidentiality. After all, part of my wisdom in keeping clear of AA and "treatment" was to protect my anonymity. (What does the second A in AA stand for?)

Anonymity does not mean confidential. This is one of the reasons we steer people clear of AA, which has little regard for the well-being of its members. Remember, AA has no commitment to individuals, only to its own well-being. AA uses the fear of disclosure to keep people coming back, as in their dispicable relationship with courts. The slip-signing is a thinly disguised emotional blackmail to force people to turn out at meetings. In reading through the literature of the Oxford Group, from which AA mutated, it can be seen that their interest in confession to elicit feelings of wretched guilt was to form a bond of trust between members who share extremely sensitive information about each other. In truth, 12-step meetings are public meetings, even their closed meetings are like swimming in an aquarium for all to see.

SMART Recovery is little different from AA, offering secular humanism as a substitute for the spiritual agenda of the 12-step program. They are group-centered, expecting years of participation to cleanse oneself of "irrational beliefs," such as the idea that one should feel guilty for reprehensible behavior. Although claiming to be an abstinence program for political reasons, SMART is a guild of professionals who offer services privately for a fee leading to the fondest wish of all problem drinkers, moderate or "controlled" drinking.

I frequently make the glaring point that the 12-step program is anti-family at its root, and that the substance-addicted groups and the Al-Anon groups create a pincer effect to gain members. There is a natural mistrust between an addicted person and his/her family, due to the conflict surrounding the use of alcohol and other drugs. Problem drinkers come to see their spouses as enemies who are attacking the foundation for a satisfactory life, while the spouses struggle frantically to ward off family disaster resulting from preposterous drunken behavior. It is into this cauldron of conflict that AA/Al-Anon thrusts itself. The general stratey in both groups, AA and Al-Anon, is to generate suspicion and mistrust, each demanding that the group members pressure spouses or loved ones to join the other group, under the threat of inevitable family disaster, and strongly stating that the 12-step experience is the only source of hope. They meet separately, of course, to prevent and block direct communication between family members on sensitive matters, presuming that the family is incapable of resolving addiction problems without deepening 12-step involvements. They are taught in each of the groups that communication the addicted and the non-addicted is impossible, and that the 12-step program is the only language that can bridge the chasm of misunderstanding.

So, the set-up is that both the addict's craziness and Al-Anon member's frantic coping efforts are regarded as flip sides of a mysterious disease process, a family-born disease that only 12-step doctrine can relieve. The addict suffers from alcoholism or drug addiction, and the family suffers from the parallel disease, codependency. Both diseases are without objective evidence, solely in the eye of the beholder, and quite inverse to reality. Codependency is the sum of the family's coping efforts, inspired by familial love, but viewed by the 12-step groups as a disease process. Indeed, this disease of authentic love and caring for someone who is destroying himself is a staple of professional counseling, the literature of which sprang from the sociopathic mindset of the addiction treatment industry. In the eye of the addict, the family's coping efforts are perceived as hostile, demanding, offensive, controlling, but these expressions ironically agree perfectly with the addict's own better judgment.

Remember, addiction is a state of ambivalence toward the use of alcohol and other drugs, when one drinks or uses against one's own better judgment. Thus, codependents are merely reflecting the addict's own better judgment, that it is wrong to drink/use, and that one had better completely abstain. To call the family's love commitments and better judgment symptoms of a disease process is more than absurd; it is a moral outrage. It is the perception of the Beast of addiction that the family is behaving pathologically, even immorally, by trying to intervene in its path of destruction. As with AA, Al-Anon is the embodiment of the Beast, tainting the family with ideas of disease and powerlessness before the addict's desire to get high. Al-Anon tells newcomers, "If you haven't been able to stop your loved one from drinking/using by now, that proves you are incapable of doing so, and must therefore submit your family's life to the inerrant guidance and oversight of the recovery group movement.

As a professional, you know first-hand how the addictions field boils in nonsense and contradiction. I hope you make use of your professional self to bring back common sense to your work environment.

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I am a 36 year old college professor who was addicted to alcohol for 10 years. I completely bought into the AA/recovery group philosophy. I made several attempts to get sober in AA but found the whole scene absurd. I never needed a drink more than immediately after a meeting. I felt really deficient because I couldn't get into this fellowship thing. I am exactly the type of person that gets labeled "in denial" or "dry drunk" in AA.

I went to my first meeting hopeful that it would be just like in the movies and on the Lifetime network where I would be embraced with love and caring by a group of people just like myself - drunks, that is. Was I ever surprised!!! I was viewed with suspicion and repeatedly asked if I was an alcoholic ( I guess this was some kind of denial screening). My appointed sponsor was completely incapable of uttering anything but slogans ("stinkin' thinkin' et al). What really shocked me was how undemocratic these meetings were. There would be a panel of people (usually with a really superior attitude) running the show and tacetly implying that they had all the answers. One woman kept talking about her relapses, one as recently as a couple of months prior to that day. I couldn't understand how someone who can't control her own drinking could help me with mine. Needless to say, I didn't last long.

A few months later I decided to try an alcoholic counseling service. The program entailed going to six weeks of nightly meetings and therapy. During the screening for this program, the counselor repeatedly tried to change my profile to fit the stereotypical alcoholic profile. She insisted that my mother probably secretly used alcohol or prescription drugs (she drinks a glass of champagne at New Years???!!!) When she asked me how I felt about all the people that I had hurt because of my drinking I replied that I had mainly hurt myself. She referred to this as "denial" and said that as soon as I did my moral inventory I would come up with "lots of incidents." Because I taught a class at night, I told her that I would have to miss some of the meetings. This was also labeled as "denial," because I was not willing to "do anything that it takes" to quit drinking. I certainly was not willing to get fired from my position, and since I am not full-time faculty, this is exactly that would have happened. Needless to say, I did not enroll in the program. At this point, I decided that I was morally defective and incapable of being honest with myself, and decided that I was probably going to drink myself to death.

About a year and a half ago I was surfing medical web sites researching all the ways that I was probably going to die from alcohol. I somehow came upon your Rational Recovery site and immediately began to abstain from alcohol. I had a three-month relapse due to negative conditioning from my 12-step ordeal. (I had a really hard time saying to myself that I would never take another drink.) Fortunately I continued to to practice AVRT and have been sober and reasonably happy for many months now. I want to thank you guys for being there. I called a therapist that I once saw and told her all about Rational Recovery and she was very interested and excited. She admitted that she had also been very skeptical about the 12-Step program. I hope that more professionals will be receptive to your concept. I am 100% convinced!

(I am withholding my name because I work at a very conservative University that really embraces AA. Hope this doesn't seem paranoid. Please feel free to use this E-mail if needed.)

Judging from the stories on the Horror of Alcoholics Anonymous page, it is not in the least paraniod to withhold your name. Many people feel comfortable speaking out against AA in their own names, and of course this adds considerable weight to their statements. But the 12-step syndicate uses intimidation and fear of dirty tricks in order to put down dissenters. It is common for treatment centers to notify courts, employers, and even family members that their client is in "deep denial" or is refusing to submit to AA doctrine.

Your addiction treatment experience was very typical, with AA members doing the 12-steps at work for money, using their authority and influence to force people into AA activities. At the meetings you met many people running the show who were pathetic examples themselves, and who had no wisdom of value to anyone.

One of the most common comments we hear from callers and emailers is, "I never wanted a drink so much as after meetings." This is part of the reason I warn everyone to stay away from recovery groups like the plague, for that is what they are. AA is the embodiment of the desire to get drunk, which we call the Beast. That animating force shaped the 12-steps and AA into what they are, a dangerous cult that extends its influence into society. From its birth, AA has been obsessed with the need to grow, to capture the entire world and make it safe for substance abusers. They use forms of discourse from science, medicine, and religion to excuse their misconduct, and create mawkish rituals, such as moral inventories and drunkalogs, to lend dignity to their passive morality.

Drunkalogs tell only half of the story, and even that part incompletely. Evening storytellers "share" tales of past misdeeds and degeneracy, focusing on how they were blithely unaware of what they were doing, and how dangerous their behavior had become. Always, they tell how meaningless life was during the bad old days, and how the glory of God-as-you-understand-Him shone in on them when they "turned it over." They tell of being beaten, robbed, raped, fractured, sued, divorced, fired, ostracized, bankrupted, frozen, jailed, and always of how terribly sick they were and how hopeless they felt about life. One would think, from hearing a drunkalog, that there were no rewards during the addicted years, or that people drink or use drugs for the purpose of feeling miserable. Conspicuously missing from every drunkalog is the fact that it feels wonderful to drink/use, and that the addicted years are a mixture of mostly fine days, and some really bad times. Drunkalogs paint a fictional account of what it is like to be addicted, one that must be entertaining, told with sincerity and a dash of humor. Each member develops his/her story, telling it countless times over the years, always tuning it and refining it to reflect AA doctrines. The same is true with the fearless moral inventory (FMI) ritual, which, as your counselor admitted, changes with time, under group pressure, to reflect the 12-step vision of addiction. In your case, you were expected to admit to harming others even though you hadn't, and it was expected that you would manufacture examples for later FMI's. As one's membership in AA deepens, it is also expected that one's pre-cult life be tortured, hollow, degenerate, and meaningless, in order to create a dramatic contrast with one's life in recovery. Likewise, with one's original family, in which the parents were always dysfunctional, and where the seeds for adult miseries were planted. Your counselor could not imagine that you could fit any other profile than the typical alcoholic profile, since that is the only dimension AA can recognize, and all living things must fit that profile.

I'm glad you were fortunate to find the Rational Recovery website and take care of the problem. Although you left AA, you took with you some seductive ideas, such as the inevitability of "relapses," and the lifelong nature of addiction, and even the nagging suspicion that AA might be right about most things after all. These residuals of 12-step participation are called recovery group disorder, and may persist for years in your Addictive Voice. Because of this, I recommend that you execute a Declaration of Personal Independence, to deprive your Beast of any hope that you will congregate with irresolute drunks and junkies.

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Dear Rational Recovery,

I would like some more info. Your site is the best. You are the first I have ever heard of that remotely thinks of AA & NA & recovery in general like I do. I wish you the best.

AA has a way of making everyone feel like a minority of one, what Bill W called the "herd mentality." Actually, most people who know what the 12-step program contains agree with us, that it is a crock.

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Just a quick note to let you know how happy I am to have found your system. I've been going to AA meetings and group meetings for around eight months. In a nutshell, AA gave me no HOPE and your system does. I've remained sober for eight months and my exsponsor said I was a know it all that I only did 80 meetings in 90 days that I need to do a meeting a day to change the person that came in the door,or I was bound to relapse and I was thinking I wasn't such a bad person to begin with; all I need to change is quit drinking. After digesting your site I cancelled all AA meetings and threw out the "Big Book" and step book and As Bill Sees It and all the other nonsense literture. If I can be of help to you let me know.

Congratulations on your Big Plan and welcome to the real world of Rational Recovery! Now that you've withdrawn from AA, notice how your Beast keeps pumping the 12-step program on you. When you hear it harping about how you can't be sure you are recovered, and how relapse may be inevitable, and how maybe AA is right after all, just recognize it as your AV, and realize how lucky you are to have escaped from the cult.

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Dear Rational Recovery,

After 5 yrs. of banging my head against the wall and silently nodding at concepts I truly didn't believe in, I stumbled on to your web site. The simplicity of it all astounded me. Why the hell didn't anyone bother to sum up all bullshit and lay it on table for each individual to decide for himself! I did everything they told me do and yet time and time again I failed. Each time I became more and more puzzled at what I must have missed. Finally I get it. I missed the truth!! I'm the only one with the power to say "Fuck You, No More. Ever! Skip all that one day at a time crap, and all the other happy horse-shit.

I can't believe I've spent $10,000 and such an enormous amount of time chasing my own tail, only to finally see the simple truth. I am responsible for me. To be honest I never did believe in that disease nonsense. I figured it was just something they told us so we wouldn't feel so bad about all the awful things we had done. I didn't believe a lot of it, but everyone else swore it was true, so I sat in silence, waiting for "the miracle."

Finally last year, I quit going to meetings. I guess I was just finally tired of listening to clueless people tell me how to do something they couldn't seem to do for themselves. I grew disgusted with all the "posers" patting themselves on the back for all the years of sobriety they didn't have. In AA your status seems to depend on your "clean time" rather than your honesty. I was sickened by it all, and yet after this last year of isolation and my drinking becoming heavier and heavier, I felt I had no other place to turn. Until now.

Your words have filled me with a sense of hope I haven't felt for years! I never will drink again! Never! For the first time in my life I believe it. After all, you're right, that Beast can't do a dam thing about it, but try to trick me into believing he can. Well I'm not buying it anymore. Without my arms to reach for that bottle he's SOL.

I want to thank you for having the courage to speak the truth. I've heard nothing but scorn and ridicule about this place, but the one thing I've learned in the program is to keep an open mind. I look forward to learning more about your movement and am overjoyed I'll never have to spend another hour and a half on a hard chair, wondering why I seem to be the only one who doesn't get it.

Congratulations on your Big Plan and welcome to the real world of Rational Recovery! You ask why, in all of your AA years, no one summed up planned abstinence and made it available to you. The reason is simple --AA is not about addiction recovery; AA is about AA. You must remember that neither Bill W nor Dr. Bob never quit drinking, a moral action that was as commonplace then as it is today. They saw themselves as special, different from other common drunks who carried the moral burden for their conduct, and they evaded responsibility for quitting the use of alcohol completely. They continued to binge despite serious problems it caused, and when they met, the stage was set for the rise of AA's pious irresponsibility in American society. They set a standard to which all addicted people must live down to, that of tentative abstinence, always leaving the door open to future drunkenness, should a good invitation arise. Bill and Bob were fleeing the moral outrage of society toward preposterous drunkenness, and they formed a pact of mutual forgiveness that became the foundation of Alcoholics Anonymous. AA is very attractive to dependent types who prefer the umbrella of authority to personal independence and freedom.

The worst feature of AA is that they instill fear of one's bodily desire for pleasure, and define recovery as the absence of desire. They think the desire to get drunk is a disease, one that God must remove if they are to abstain from alcohol and other drugs. The idea of self-restraint is alien to their magical view of recovery, and when members express their intent to restrain or overcome their desire to drink or use, they are told that those ideas are sick, diseased, part of inevitable relapse, as if they will be punished by mysterious forces for challenging the desire to drink. They are instructed to flee responsibility, by calling an equally powerless sponsor, or get immediately to a 12-step meeting, where they may find safety from themselves.

As for the honesty AA congratulates itself for having in great abundance, it has none. AA is based on a single Big Lie, that it is not morally wrong, once a pattern of harm to others is established, to continue drinking/using. From that grotesque, self-serving lie, springs an inverted world in which perpetrators become victims, addiction is a disability, science supports the unproved, family members are the sick ones, human beings are incapable of resisting the desire to get drunk, adults need supervision ("support"), behavior is disease, abstinence is God's burden, abstinence is not sobriety, quitting on your own is sick, doctors preach religion, prisons are asylums, hospitals are temples, spiritual is not religious, abstinence is not recovery, people don't drink/use for the pleasurable effect, medical treatment consists of religious teachings, and so on. Once AA is understood as the embodiment of the Beast, and all that it says or does is the Addictive Voice, it becomes easy to defeat AA in your own thinking and promptly recover from addiction to any substance. In the grip of AA's AV, recovery is impossible, and the members will even tell you so.

You were very lucky to stumble on the only source of information on planned abstinence available, as we enter the new millennium. The addiction treatment industry is addicted to money, and destroys the financial futures of countless families who, like you, have been swindled by medical duplicity and the 12-step racket. I hope you will do what you can to expose the insanity of AA and the addiction treatment industry, which are eating the soul of America, one day at a time. Maybe you can get your money back; new cases are showing up in which plaintiffs win good sums of money for fraud and damages.

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For the first time I really believe and have hope. As you flat out said on your web page, the uneducated go to AA thinking they will receive help in abstaining.
I just finished your book and feel such tremendous hope. I am cured, but my beast is still around. Thank you tremendously for what you have done. Sincerely yours,

Welcome to the real world of Rational Recovery, and congratulations on your Big Plan! It's tragic that when people get desperate they go to AA thinking they will be shown how to quit their addictions. We are doing the best we can to get information on planned abstinence out to every American. This website got 52,000 hits during 1999, so maybe we're making a dent in the problem.

Your Beast is just there, along with other perfectly normal drives for physical pleasure. Although you don't do all that your sex drive may suggest, you wouldn't want to get rid of your sex drive. You can live comfortably in the presence of any desire, knowing you are perfectly safe from any magical force that will misdirect your arms and legs. You will probably be interested in The Journal of Rational Recovery which delves into social, legal, and political implications of the recovery group movement.

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Hi there, this is so excellent. I can hardly believe how much knowledge comes from reading your website. And although it`s so simple, it's great! It feels like I just woke up from a nightmare, and I can see all the things the Beast was doing to me, making me feel and act the way I did for sooooo long. Now I see it! Thank you, very much. I mean it! Yours Sincerely,

Thanks for the very nice feedback. Others will be encouraged to know that you are recovered just by visiting this website.

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I have just started on my new journey with Rational Recovery, I am ecstatic with the philosophy. I started with AA after attending a AA 12 Step Residential Rehabilitation Program last December, I would never join AA previously because of their strong religious bias. I am an agnostic/atheist and have been struggling with this program because I was not aware of anything else. I go to a women's Recovery Group where I live, which is not affiliated with AA but still very dependant upon a strong belief that God will solve everything for you. One of the women in this group recommended "The Small Book' as she was aware of my feelings on religion & AA. I am hoping, since I live in a very university oriented city, that there maybe a group here or not too far away. I intend to correspond on the web site more fully in the future, but would appreciate being able to make a contact somewhere in Ontario, Canada, Most sincerely, a grateful new follower,

First, let me apologize once again for The Small Book. It was all I knew at the time, The Small Book is my literary albatross, written under the influence of professional education, before AVRT grew to its present stature. It is full of errors and AV, particularly the AV of Albert Ellis's REBT, and it fails, as in your case, to bring closure to addiction. It recommends recovery groups, which we have discovered are inappropriate to the task of recovery, and identifies addiction treatment as a professional competency, which it is not.

Your recovery is not a journey; it is an act of personal integrity, and moral responsibility. As soon as you can, read Rational Recovery: The New Cure for Substance Addiction (Pocket Books, 1996), and in the meantime, stay away from recovery groups of all kinds, as if they are the plague. Get on with life as a normal person who for personal reasons simply never drinks/uses. We don't want to get to know you, and we certainly don't know how you can achieve happiness, for we are all struggling with that like everyone else. Rational Recovery has no followers, no groupers, and no sponsors, but each self-recovered person, like you and I, stands as an example for others to emulate in their struggle against addictions. I sincerely hope you enjoy your life as an abstinent person, and that you will now move forward and find better interests than addiction recovery.

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In 1968 I went to the Pioneer House in Medicine Lake. Minnesota. This facility was an AA-sponsored treatment center, under the auspices of Hazleton in Center City MN. I spent 28 days there. I have since been to three other treatment centers all in Mn. In addiction I took the two year course for chemical dependency counselor at the U. of Minn. I finished there with an incomplete, 8 credits short, because I could not afford to do the 1000 hrs. of internship required for certification.

Thorough all these years (since 1968) I have held the belief that alcoholism was not a disease but willful and wanton act. Of course I was told I was in denial, crazy stupid, unfit to be a counselor, and needed more then anything else to go back to treatment and get in touch with my true inner feelings. Than, I found you, and you will not guess where. In an AA chat room, just someone mentioning RR in passing. I asked where I could find out more and was given your address on the web.

You have put in writing, in such a persuasive way exactly what I have long believed to be true but unable to articulate. I am more the grateful to you for you work. I will never drink again, and I will never forget. I shall let the Beast keep time. All the while I will feel the freedom I have always looked for, and now have thanks to you. In closing if there is anyway I can do to help get this message out without being stoned to death by the treatment industry, please let me know.

I would like to help. By the way I'm 70 years old, and have fought this Beast for over 50 years. Everything that can happen to someone who keeps getting drunk for so long a period has happened to me. It will not take a get deal of imagination on your part to figure out what that entails. I live not far from Tampa FL. Thanks again and keep up with great your work.

Your letter touched me, because you spent so much of your life entangled in the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous. In 1968, you were inducted into a cult posing as a remedy for problem drinking, and it appears you remained in the pincer of addiction for the next 30 years. It seems to me you were waylayed by thugs who stole the best years of your life for their religious cult, Alcoholics Anonymous. They may have been dressed in doctor suits and had degrees on the wall, but they were ignorant thugs who used their authority to raise the 12-step program to the status of health care, when it is just so much septic garbage. They used intimidation and fear to place the AA yoke on you, and in your addicted state you found no way to break free from their mind control. One day you accidentally stumbled on information on planned abstinence, AVRT, and the trance of addiction was instantly broken.

Jim, this is an outrage in a nation that is capable of instantly communicating AVRT to every citizen. You are only one dramatic example of a human tragedy that is affecting every family in America. I hear daily from people who say, "If I had known about RR X years ago, my life would have been much different." The American addiction tragedy is the illusion of addictive disease that originates within and is projected by the addicted mind, then sanctified by the addicted ones within the professions, and and then believed by a trusting, and I would say gullible, public. The addiction treatment industry is not ignorant, nor are they unable to understand the efficacy and broad implications of AVRT. I visited the director of the National Institute on Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse (NIAAA), Enoch Gordis, in his Washington DC office, and after I explained the essentials of AVRT, he said, "Well, then, Mr. Trimpey, if what you say is so, then we can all go home." His staff, who were present, laughed politely, but they knew he was speaking the truth. Still, I have heard no inquiry from any government agency to find about how to make AVRT publicly available.

You are welcome to get involved in the fray. Alas, I do not know of a way to fight 12-step hegemony without them stoning you. AA, for all its posing as a humble fellowship of altruists, is still a gang of thugs when they are 12-stepping in our public institutions. I stay at the old stand, answering calls and editing the Journal of Rational Recovery each day, taking some time to run a class through AVRT: The Course each month. If you have some time and energy to raise hell about the American addiction treatment tragedy, let me know. We lend our banner to warriors who want to resist the 12-step syndicate, if they will step forward.

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That's the last thing my Beast wants to hear! I guess it'll just have to suffer. I am writing because this is the most revolutionary thing I've come across in a long time. I, too, have struggled for about 10 years with all of the poisonous doctrine of AA (Arrogant Assholes) swirling in my head, while deep down the authenic me was screaming to get out and get on with life. It's fantastic to finally realize that I'm not crazy, that I'm not sick or diseased, and that AVRT is real and not a delusion or the product of my "denial!" Great Stuff! Keep up the good work. Michael Guess TX

Great note! Readers should take note of your attitude, which is strong and resilient. This is part of the Abstinence Comittment Effect, when people rebound into their authentic selves when they crack the moral whip of planned abstinence. Your biggest problem for a while to come will be the persistent effect of long-term exposure to the pernicious 12-step program. Instead of trying to get you to drink, your AV will start pumping the 12-step program, with all of its slogans an mottos, as if your Beast's life depended upon it. But you will see that its life does depend on AA, and that AA is an enclave of the enemy. Be sure to make a Declaration of Personal Independence, to cut your Beast out of the pack, so you will have only it, and not the rest of the pack, to contend with. Congratulations on your Big Plan and welcome to the real world of Rational Recovery!

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I am a Rational Recovery PHD (phormer drunk) who discovered your web site and book just over a year ago, and made a Big Plan. After reading some of your hate mail online this morning, I decided it was time for me to write, carry on a little, and thank you. My recovery log goes something like this:

Over ten years ago, a three-week treatment center "recovery" lasted about three months (and boy, was my beast counting!). My first gripe, within days of entering treatment, was the emphasis on our very small chance of success. It was sort of like boot camp, and the "few good men" mentality. I wondered, even then, "If it isn't going to work, then why the hell am I here?" But I had already been programmed to believe that I couldn't do it alone. And I didn't. I didn't work the steps, get a sponsor, or go to meetings each and every day. No wonder it didn't work!

More years of drinking and desperation led to another treatment center, though I was pretty certain it wouldn't work either. I detoxed, was handed a "step workbook ," and then checked out, "AMA", to drink again soon. Another self-detox, then to AA meetings the way I "should" have done it to begin with, this time complete with sponsor, steps, service, the works. That didn't last too long either. My sponsor was a bossy control freak, but at the time, although I knew that to be true, I was convinced that it was something wrong with me. After all, I was very sick and had stopped maturing when I started drinking at age 15. What does a 40 year old, 15 year old know, anyway? I couldn't (or wouldn't) do AA their way, so I was convinced that I was doomed to drink. I was one of those poor unfortunates, you know. I hated it; my beast loved it.

Then I read Rational Recovery, and quit drinking. At the beginning, I had enough AA indoctrination to agree with some of your detractors; that is, RR is great but what's with all this beating AA to death? To each his own, and so on. For me, AA didn't work, RR does, so just shut up about it. Let AA alone; if it helps some people, so be it.

After reading Ken Ragge's, The Real AA, I have changed my mind. I was in a religious cult in my early twenties. After about six months, I looked around and said "I don't think so. Something here is way too weird." Of course, that was the devil in me, dooming me to eternal hell fire. I left the cult, and left behind life-long friends, my entire social circle at the time, and possibly my chances at eternal life and glory. It was a difficult, but critical choice, and I figured I'd worry about the damnation later.

I can now see I reacted exactly the same way to AA, except this time it was the sick, unfortunate in me, dooming me to life as a drunk. Leaving my only hope to sanity behind was extremely dangerous, and much more immediate. AA presents themselves as the only way; the media and our entire social system reinforces that. We are easily led to believe, and even for thinking people, whether or not they are drinking, that can be fatal. It nearly was for me.

So, thank you for your book and web page. And thank you for the other resources that you offer. And I now applaud your attack of "AA, THE ONLY WAY." Go after AA with a vengeance, Jack, because it is a matter of life and death for many, many people.

I thank you for taking the time to look back for a moment, now that you're recovered and have many new interests. Your comments are far more important than the pronouncements of any medical doctor or government scientist, because you are a foremost expert on the subject of addiction recovery from first hand experience. Our social system has been swept away by 12-step fanaticism because most people who accept moral responsibility don't go around talking about how they quit by themselves, and the media simply refuse to listen to stories as mundane as yours and mine.

If people really wanted to solve the problem of mass, runaway addiction to alcohol and other drugs, they would seek out and find out how people actually recover in real life, rather than listen to the fairy tales of 12-steppers. For now, Rational Recovery is an underground movement of people who are entrenched outside the mainstream of public awareness, found only by a desperate few who are fortunate enough to have a computer or stumble upon Rational Recovery: The New Cure for Substance Addiction in a bookstore or library. But as more and more people like us stand up and raise our voices against the insanity of 12-step recovery and addiction treatment in general, the balance will tilt toward an AVRT-based social system.

Ken Ragge's book, The Real AA, is an excellent exposé of the cult aspects of the recovery group movement, and under a different title, it influenced the development of Rational Recovery. We recommend this book for persons suffering from recovery group disorder, as you apparently were following your AA stint. It appears more and more, that in order to move on with self-recovery, one must defeat AA in their own thinking.

The concepts instilled in each AA newcomer are among the sickest and disgusting ideas I can imagine, yet they are coated with verbal sugar in such a way that otherwise thoughtful, bright people easily succumb to them in desperation. To those outside the movement, AA appears to be a society of friendly people who sincerely care about others, and simply want to help people end their addictions. It is a cruel hoax, of monumental proportions, that has taken or destroyed the lives of countless people and their families.

Anyone can quit an addiction, right now and for good, just as you and I did, but in these days of AA's primacy, no one expects that of someone who calls himself an "alcoholic," least of all the drunk himself. In better times, everyone will expect a drunk to knock it off when he can't say "when," and not make a big deal of it. More drunks will reclaim their lives from booze when that comes to be.

As the Objections page shows, I take a lot of heat for speaking out against Alcoholics Anonymous, and it is critically important that writers like you report to America what is really going on in the name of addiction recovery and addiction treatment. Your story is exactly the same as thousands of others who have contacted RR, but distinguished by your ability to put your observations into writing. I want everyone to know that AA is to addiction as gasoline is to fire, and that the only way to recover from an addiction is to make a personal decision to unconditionally refrain from any further use of the offending substance. What a radical idea!

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For the first time, I really believe and have hope. As you flat out said on your web page, the uneducated go to AA thinking they will receive help in abstaining. I just finished your book and feel such tremendous hope. I am cured, but my Beast is still around. Thank you tremendously for what you have done.

Welcome to the real world of Rational Recovery, and congratulations on your Big Plan! Your Beast is just there, along with other perfectly normal drives for physical pleasure. Although you don't do all that your sex drive may suggest, I doubt that you would want to get rid of your sex drive. Likewise with your desire to get drunk. It's healthy to desire that, and effortless to say, "Never." You can live comfortably in the presence of any desire, knowing you are perfectly safe from any magical force that will misdirect your arms and legs. You will probably be interested in The Journal of Rational Recovery which delves into social, legal, and political implications of the recovery group movement.

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Thank you very much for such a common-sense approach to problems with alcohol. I know I have a problem but I never would believe I was "sick." Your plan puts it into a much better perspective since I could never accept the AA "treatment." Thanks very much and I hope I have finally quit with your help. I feel so much better already.

It is for me to hope you have finally quit, and for you to know. I cannot know what you may or may not do in the future, but you certainly can know if you are still capable of drinking. We all stand for certain values that we cannot or will not violate. These are actions that we consider wrong, immoral, and against everything we stand for. I could name a few actions that I know I will never take, but they are too numerous and disgusting to list here. Soldiers typically decide that no matter what, they will never desert the battlefield. And they often die with knowledge they could run. Parents commonly will sacrifice their own lives for their children's, and political leaders often lay their lives on the line for principles they believe in.

To say that you or I cannot know with certainty that we will never drink again, is to say we don't know right from wrong, and cannot learn from past mistakes. We are human, and although we were wrong, there is nothing wrong with us that we drank crazily in the past. Moreover, there is nothing wrong with us to prevent us from redeeming ourselves through a personal commitment to permanent abstinence. When that is made, AVRT makes it easy to stick to that decision for all time. Your rejection of the 12-step program is evidence that you are morally fit and mentally intact.

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Thanks for having the integrity to put yourself on the firing line against a behemoth that prevents progress in the reduction of addiction and unhealthy dependency. Ten years of browbeatings, and listening to the endless AA commercials of pious 12-step automatons left me with little room for gratitude. Having recently left A.A. with ten years of sobriety, I can finally claim the life I have regained through my own hard work and commitment. Your words echo many of my own, and they fuel the gratitude I found so elusive in AA.

And I thank you for taking the time to speak to the many thousands who will read your encouraging words. I hope your comment above will inspire as many as possible to rise up and walk out of 12-step meetings everywhere. There are many hapless people who originally went to AA out of curiosity or perhaps for real help with quitting their addictions, who are now hopelessly entangled in the cult. They sit through meetings in quiet desperation, feeling lost but unable to navigate their way to a normal, independent life. Rational Recovery is a roadmap out of recovery, an experience that is often more harmful than addiction itself.

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I've just finished reading the Rational Recovery: The New Cure. I am empowered and feel free, free to recover on my own resources. I am confident that I can identify and recognize my "dragon" through AVRT. It's such a relief to know that I do not have this vague, mysterious "disease" that I am powerless over, and it's a relief to also know that I do not need to go to those god-forsaken meetings anymore! I wish I had found Rational Recovery and AVRT years ago, but I'm glad that I've found it now.

I also wish that information on planned abstinence had been available to me, about 25 years ago, when I was going strong with my alcohol addiction. I have little doubt my family and I would have been spared considerable grief had I not come to believe that I suffered a disease that exempted my drinking from moral assessment. On one hand, I knew my drinking was dead wrong, because of the predictable results of drinking. But on the other hand, once I delved into the literature of addiction treatment and Alcoholics Anonymous, I saw myself as a pathetic victim of bad genes and character defects that added up to a lifetime of alcoholic excess. My eventual recovery through planned abstinence was in spite of all the book-learning and AA meetings I attended, all of which portrayed my future in a grim light, either as a deteriorated drunk or a clammy grouper sitting in a folding chair. My discovery had been discovered my legions of men and women who went before me, but who did not have a good reason to document the phenomenon of self-recovery. I did, and added to my own experience the common thread of thousands of stories like yours, and AVRT was finally born.

AVRT exists, and will spread and grow of its own accord. It is a contagious idea, like freedom is to the enslaved, and will eventually prevail over the social cultism of the recovery group movement and its business arm, the addiction treatment industry. Good luck and watch out for Mr. Beast.

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Yesterday I took the internet crash course on AVRT. Almost immediately, I felt free from my addiction to alcohol, from AA. and from both of their mind numbing effects. It made me recognize something that I've suspected for some time, but couldn't put my finger on: it is me or "IT." We both can't survive.

My attempt to stay sober was mainly through AA meetings that quite frankly made me want to puke. I tried another recovery group and fortunately the meeting got started late and I left. Then I looked up RR and decided to give it a try. The first thing I saw was something about "voice" and said to myself "Oh God" some type of cassette self-help
program. I read on anyway. Then I came across the Beast concept, and once I realized it wasn't the one in the Bible, I knew this wasn't just another religious program. And, yes, AA is religious, and no I don't have anything against religion. To each his own. I also thought, "What is this, some lame attempt at hypnotism?" I don't think so.

This is my second time around at trying to stay sober during the past year, and I feel more confident than I ever did at AA. To bad for "IT," which dominated my life for over 30 years. I'm sure that members of my family who are in AA are freaking at my decision to stop going to AA meetings. I also plan on buying your book, as I'm sure it is cheaper than attending AA meetings forever and is better written than that boring "Big
Book." Man, that thing needs to be burned. In fact I might just do that.

Thanks for the web site and the really refreshing look at dependency and addiction. Of course, time will tell, but the thought of attending another nauseating AA meeting is just as bad as picking up another drink. I just hope I got out in time and didn't aquire any of what you call RGD's. Oh, and thanks for cancelling the meetings.

You are most welcome. I cancelled the entire recovery group movement in order to alert everyone that no one has to go to AA, even if they are mandated by a court or prison administration. The system may react harshly, but there are Constitutional protections for anyone who will stand up against the zealots.

Alas, you did acquire at least one recovery group disorder, that of counting time. Time will not tell anything about whether you will drink in the future. It is vitally important that you realize that time does not exist in a linear sense, but is a static moment called, "now." The only time anything can transpire is in the present moment, thus the only time you can drink is in the fleeting "now." What could be easier than simply not drinking now? For the rest of your life you will occupy the "now" moment, and all you are really saying in your Big Plan is "I will never drink in the present moment, for the rest of my life." This is a far cry from the crippling one-day-at-a-time (ODAAT) approch of AA, which gives the Beast eternal hope, and you eternal despair. ODAAT creates a purgatory of indecision, in which you may only hope that one day you will not inexplicably decide to get loaded. With AVRT, that day does not, and cannot, come to be.

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I have been using AVART for the last couple of years. Before this I read The Small Book. Your program is the only thing that saved me from endless addiction and deasese. For years and years I went to AA/NA for nothing only to watch everyone relaspe. Your program offers real hope. I would like to help and be part of something REAL! If you need help please contact me.

Thanks for the nice comments, and for your willingness to help Rational Recovery. One thing would be for you to write up some of your experiences in the recovery group movement and/or the addiction treatment industry. Voices added to mine make a much stronger impression on the public and to addicted people.

We receive about 20 requests per month from people wanting to start up "Rational Recovery groups." We explain that while we need sincere activists for social change, the last thing we need is another brand of recovery group. In the past, Rational Recovery sponsored thousands of so-called "self-help groups," failing to fully understand that expression's contradiction in terms. Most of the volunteers were AA discontents who didn't like the 12-step program and were looking for another "recovery home." They created groups where people kept coming back and back, never really confronting the Beast with a Big Plan, and delved into the psychological riddles of cognitive psychology. The result was a new cadre of amateur shrinks waiting in empty rooms for someone to show up. It should be clear that AA is the sole proprietor of recovery groups, and that its clones and spinoffs invariably carry the seeds of chronic addiction.

If you want to got to city hall, talk to judges and administrators, or communicate with legislators and public officials, give us a call. They need to be brought in on the action as soon as possible.

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What a revolutionary concept! People responsible for their own actions! What will all those people who lust for control of other people if such a radical idea "gets out" and becomes widely known? Maybe they will have to conduct group sessions on self-direction, Oh, well. Seriously, I appreciate the web site and will promote it.

Thanks for your good humor. When I see the tragedy of groupism and addiction treatment every day, it gets hard to laugh, but "groups on self-direction" cracked me up! The recovery group movement is a pathetic crowd engaged in bizarre practices, and is certainly ripe for lampoon and humor. I mean, the idea of a drunk claiming to be diseased or powerless over drink is pretty strange, if viewed objectively. Ridicule of drunkenness is politically incorrect during these times, but I think it serves a highly constructive purpose.

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I am serious about reducing pain meds I am addicted to. I happened upon your site, went to the 'Meet Your Sponsor' page, and when I saw that finger pointing straight at me I nearly fell off the chair laughing! How true that is! I have always suspected that there is no "easy fix,"that the answer was likely inside me. Right on!

When you can laugh at yourself, recovery gets easier. Ridicule is one of the best remedies for stupidity I know of. You knew better than the 12-step crap all along, but found it easy and convenient to sell out on your own better judgment. That is because you were addicted, and the Beast mentality found a great opportunity to extend its life through the powerlessness part of the program.

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For years I have been thinking the same way you have, but been told that it's a family disease. "You wouldn't do that to someone that has cancer." A large part of my life was on this sickiness wagon; Oh there he goes again falling off that wagon. Always being called some AA term no matter what I did or didn't do. Now he's remarried and sober and he did it all by himself, not through AA. He showed no responseiblity for anything to do with his recovery. It was easier to put the blame on me or his disease; when the courts ordered AA meetings or rehab progarms he would just take up space and talk the talk, but never really quit drinking. He didn't have to: it's a disease. I can't help myself. Or it was me being co-dependent or some so-called term? I thank you again for giving a part of me back I always felt same as you; he is the one with the problem, not me. I have sent another friend of mine your address so she can see the light also.

It's hard to hold the line against 12-step social cultism because groupers always make newcomers feel like a minority of one. In your case, your husband used the 12-step program as a shield against criticism and blame, but later got better on his own. This certainly shows how the 12-step program is essentially the Addictive Voice, from its doctrines, to its practices, to its slogans. The idea that addiction is a family disease is an extremely anti-family idea. Families rarely survive the intrusion of the 12-step program, and when they do, it is quite weird, as you describe.

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My name is JR, and I am happy to say that your (our) program is quite simply the best thing I have heard in a very long time of use. I've said to others that by going to meetings it always made me think of getting high or in my case like old home week, seeing people that I used with. I am grateful for your website and quite shocked that it can be so simple.

Isn't is shocking that anyone would be shocked to discover that human beings can refrain from certain pleasures? Our culture is so immersed in disease/treatment thinking, that no one expects substance abusers to knock it off, including the substance abusers themselves. The recovery group movement has held high the lowest common denominator, and America is now endeavoring to live down to it. We in Rational Recovery hold up human competency, challenge people to take responsibility for abstinence, and show exactly how to end an addiction, and people are shocked.

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I can't thank you enough for the valuable information you have provided on your Web site! My experiences (note the plural) with AA mirror virtually word-for-word what you have described. The main problem with AA is that they insist that you are stuck in your behavior pattern FOREVER and only "the organization" can help you. (If I wanted to turn my life over to an cult, it would be Scientology - at least I could rub elbows with the stars! ;-)

I found AA members as a whole to be engaged in what can only be described as mental and emotional masochism. Whenever it was my turn to speak, I would always try to offer some form of joy in the fact that I personally didn't need to drink. (I guess I was practicing a form of AVRT without realizing it!) Such positive testimonies are rare in AA, and one soon discovers that they are not welcome. It's far better in their eyes to beat yourself up over and over and cry "woe is me". Ironically, I'd often go to meetings after work NOT wanting to drink, but would walk out of there thinking, "Man, I'm depressed - I want a drink".

I understand now that my "Beast" was telling me that that was a good way to deal with the depression brought on by being in such a negative, self-defeating environment. I realize that I really don't want to drink, IT does, and all I have to do is say no. It can only challenge me as much as I let it.

I've also come to the realization that I honestly don't like to drink. I have a friend who doesn't drink because she says liquor tastes bad. It does! Honestly, do people drink beer and whiskey for the TASTE? I think not. And as for daquiris and ice cream drinks, the yummy taste isn't from the alchohol - it's from the fruit and ice cream.

Life is better when I'm not drunk. I can deal with situations head on, have rational conversations, have FUN, etc. I find that when I go out with friends, they react positively to the real me. In spite of what AA members believe, I'm not such an awful person afterall. And bartenders LOVE me: if they charge me at all for my soda or coffee, they bring me refills the rest of the night. I guess they're saying to themselves, "Thank God, one less drunk to deal with!" The more I apply the simple instructions of AVRT, the more I can be around alchohol and not want it. I think of it as being at a restaurant that specializes in liver -- yes, it's the specialite de la maison, but I can't stand the stuff and there MUST be something else on the menu...

In closing, please accept my most sincere thanks. I've passed on the URL to friends, always with the preface that this plan isn't the same old hairshirt they've been told to put on. Your program is aptly titled. No penance, no "woe is me", just a simple, effective plan that works because it ackowledges the human ability to reason.

It may sound unbelievable that human beings can decide to not like something they love.

You have discovered this very simple ability, which is to write off your desire to drink as not yours, but as the memory of a past pleasure that you will never repeat.

You have also discovered the ability to look at booze both ways, "See the pretty bottle? Now I see the ugly bottle."

You have discovered that when you own the decision to forever abstain, it is impossible to blame or resent others for that decision.

You have disovered your complete freedom to be wherever you choose to be without fearing you will inexplicably explode.

And best of all, you have discovered that it was your Beast that loved to attend AA while you sat in utter exasperation through excruciatingly stupid meetings, tolerating people you would never choose as friends, while the speakers howled at the moon of drunks past, inciting the call of the wild.

When it becomes apparent how utterly simple addiction recovery is, and how AA has obliterated the truth for its own self-serving deceptions and illusions, the tragedy of addiction is multiplied many times. You found the Beast's dreaded "easier, softer way," and I congratulate you for rising to the occasion when the information was finally made available.

Rational Recovery ®