Have You Been Forced To Participate In Alcoholics Anonymous?
©2007 Jack Trimpey, all rights reserved
Some Background to Consider
Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) evolved from the Oxford Group, founded by
Frank Buchman, a maverick Lutheran clergyman who discovered
the awesome potential of mind-control,
which he called "God-control." The Oxford group, known as "groupism," rose to social prominence during the 1920's and then fell
into disrepute in the late 1930's when he endorsed the rising
European politician, Adolph Hitler. The Oxford group quickly mutated into two another social action
groups, Moral Re-Armament (MRA) and Alcoholics Anonymous.
MRA
survives in significant strength today as an international consortium
of social leaders devoted to the conversion of national governments
to Buchman's theocratic notions. AA has
skyrocketed to become a new world religion with the aim of world
domination through evangelical social cultism.
The 12-step syndicate
AA is essentially an evangelical fellowship of addiction, its practices, doctrines, and creeds based entirely upon the inverted perceptions, beliefs, values, and loyalties of addicted people. Their common fear is not of relapse but of the moral injunction against self-intoxication by problem drinkers and drug addicts. Because addictive desire emulates our other legitimate survival drives (food, sex, O2, safety, shelter), fellowships of addiction such as AA are ruthless in furthering their influence in the world at large, to make the world more tolerant to substance abuse.
AA has gained power by discrediting independent recovery as a viable option for substance abusers who have come to the attention of professional licensing boards, and requiring 12-step indoctrination as a condition of retaining their licenses. (One of AA’s profoundly addicted co-founders, Dr. Bob Smith, was a physician who accepted the impaired logic of yet another seriously addicted man, Bill Wilson, who proposed that addiction is an illness in itself, a disease that explains self-intoxication as a one of its symptoms.) Those impaired professionals who reject these “diversion programs” are culled from the health and counseling professions, allowing only those who have submitted to AA to continue in their professions.
As a self-created, unanimous, majority of experts, these politically rehabilitated, tentatively sober, health care professionals become “two-hatters” who are serving two masters, the public interest and the interests of Alcoholics Anonymous. They are in an intolerable professional conflict of interest, but divert attention from this by posing as experts on the mysteries of addictive disease.
Using the peerless credibility of the medical profession, AA has aggressively insinuated itself into every functioning elements of American society, including Congress, all of our social agencies, our entire health care system, our corrections and justice systems, the business community including all employers and corporations and so on. Very often AA enlists the force of law to increase its membership, imposing prison sentences upon persons who refuse indoctronation in 12-step recoveryism, even though they would gladly quit drinking for life in exchange for exemption from coerced AA participation.
Despite its lofty status in our society, Alcoholics Anonymous fits any reasonable definition of "cult," and meets the criteria usually applied to define cults. It is an aggressive cult which imposes proselytizing duties upon each member, while instructing them to say, "No one speaks for AA." Members are extraordinarily loyal, perceiving that AA saved their lives, or made life worth living, and that they would perish if deprived of AA. Their first principle is "AA Above All," subordinating the interests of members to the interests of the organization.
The doctrine of AA is clear, “My recovery comes first.” Thus the soul of our social service system, the health care system itself, has been converted from traditional scientific and ethical standards to mere emulations found in a parallel social service system we should refer to as the “12-step syndicate.”
Recoveryism versus addiction recovery
The heart of AA is its 12-step program, which substitutes the
disease concept of misbehavior for the moral axis of human behavior.
They perceive that people who habitually misbehave are victims
of an inherited disease which renders them incapable of moral
conduct. Consequently, AA is attractive and contagious among
those prone to antisocial behavior, particularly substance abusers.
AA beseeches members to surrender personal responsibility for
curbing their base, biological drives, and to turn their lives
over to the control of an external, higher authority, such as
the group or any self-defined deity. This is in sharp contradiction
to the the accumulated wisdom of human history, which defines
antisocial behavior as a punishable outcome of free will.
Participants are actively prevented from accepting moral responsibility
for abstinence; such inclinations are labeled "denial,"
or diagnosed, "dry drunk." The loftiest goal is tentative
abstinence, one day at a time, while attempting to unravel cosmic
mysteries supposedly contained in the 12-step program.
The 12-steps and their surrounding dogma are highly sophisticated
in their ability to quickly burrow into the consciousness of
newcomers. An excellent example is AA's indulgent use of the
format and familiar clichés of religion, while firmly
denying that it is "religious." Participants, always
vulnerable in some way, usually submit to the group's arcane
definition of words, gradually betraying their foundation of
common sense for socially acceptable "groupthink."
The conversion process is threatening to anyone, the more so
for people desperate for any kind of help, and many develop
serious recovery group disorders. These disorders include unbridled
substance abuse, irritability, depression, and suicide. The
abstinent outcome for all recovery group organizations is very
low, in the single digits, around 5%. Addiction treatment research
uses the forms of scientific discourse to lend credibility and
respectability to preposterous claims such as "Addiction
is a treatable disease," "Treatment works," and
"It works if you work it." Addiction research is essentially
a marketing effort guided by the addiction treatment industry,
which benefits directly from government-sponsored studies claiming
to measure the success of addiction treatment.
Rational Recovery Monitor Program
Rational Recovery has been the voice of resistance against the 12-step syndicate for a quarter of a century, and our unyielding, pro-choice message has had an impact on many lives, and upon our social service system as well. We have taken a strong stand against the addiction treatment industry, as in this article in the Congressional Quarterly, and in some jurisdictions, Rational Recovery is specifically accepted in lieu of forced participation in recovery groups. Other jurisdictions in several states accept Rational Recovery Monitor Program on a case-by-case basis.
The Rational Recovery Monitor Program (RRMP) is part of the membership area of the RR website. Quite a number of people from different parts of the country post there regularly, a good number of whom are exempted from the usual requirement of 12-step meetings. The terms of the RRMP are described here. You will have access to the Advanced Crash Course on AVRT®, which is more sophisticated and "weighty" than the version in the book, and you can enter the Rational Recovery Discussion Forums, to look upon others also learning AVRT-based recovery, and get some occasional expert guidance from yours truly.
Many people subscribe to the RRMP even though their local courts will not accept independent recovery through planned, permanent abstinence, even though lifetime abstinence far surpasses the passive non-achievement of one-day-at-a-time sobriety. The RRMP is a good place to hang your hat while you endure required 12-step meetings, and is probably essential if you plan to fight city hall.
Things for you to know:
The law is entirely on your side. AA has been ruled "religious" almost every time it has been challenged as such in federal
and state supreme courts. There is little compliance by public
agencies, however, due to the extent of employment of AA members
by public agencies, and the public addiction hysteria which
seems to justify any impropriety to combat the imagined epidemic
of addictive disease. Justice is expensive, however. You may
need local legal counsel, but there are a number of things you
may accomplish on your own. It boils down to how far you are
willing to be pushed, and how much you are willing to risk in
order to demand respect for your Constitutional rights.
Science is on your side. No evidence of addictive disease has
been found. Addiction, ironically, is a robust desire for intense
pleasure found in healthy people. No treatment for addiction
exists, although many futile remedies in use are called addiction
treatment.
Common sense is on your side. Although politically correct
thinking has it that addiction is a treatable disease, most
people harbor serious misgivings about this silly notion. When
the disease concept of addiction is openly challenged, it has
trouble passing the giggle test. When the 12-step program is
presented to uninformed people, they usually gasp to see how
religious it is, and how irrelevant it is to quitting the use
of alcohol and other drugs.
Professional ethics are on your side. Membership in a 12-step organization disqualifies any professional person from providing direct services to addicted people or to other substance abusers. For a thorough review of conflict of interest, read this analysis, which has been submitted to the National Association of Social Workers.
Although AA says the only requirement for membership is the
desire to quit drinking/using, AA is bound together by the desire
to continue drinking or using drugs, which we call the Beast.
AAers deeply fear lifetime abstinence, so much so that they
believe they are incapable of willing it. AA aggressively apprehends
substance abusers at a vulnerable time in order to place its
stamp of disease upon the person. With a doctrine of tentative
abstinence, the 12-step movement prevents people from taking
personal (read: moral) responsibility for permanent abstinence,
leaving the door open to future self-intoxication one day at
a time. This plays directly into the original problem of being
tempted to get high, and people thus willingly succumb to the
ideas of powerlessness and a lifetime struggle to remain sober.
Know thine enemies
People who take personal respsponsibility for addiction and
their own recoveries are an extreme threat to the addiction
treatment industry, whose employees are nearly all members of
the 12-step community. Twelve-steppers will use various means
to discredit your accomplishment of becoming permanently abstinent,
most often by "undiagnosing" you (Didn't have the
problem in the first place), or calling your accomplishment
"spontaneous remission." Failing that, they will portray
you as a sick, disgusting person, essentially mentally ill,
who is in deep denial, and who will inevitably drink or use
again unless forced to participate in AA.
Each time you try
to stand up they will pull you down, to make sure that your
solution to the problem of addiction — moral responsibility for
permanent abstinence — is never imposed upon them. So, remember,
they desperately want you to fail on your own, and will do everything
they can to get you to drink or use again. They will predict
it over and over, and pull dirty tricks on you to test your
ability to abstain in the face of frustration. In Drug Courts,
which are AA kangaroo courts, you may be legally better off to drink and
use drugs than to produce proof of your abstinence based on
your own personal integrity. As long as you call your binges "relapses" you will be welcomed back into the program
and avoid incarceration. If you speak against AA in Drug Court,
you may be expelled from class and imprisoned by a judge who
may himself be member of AA. Similar conditions exist in practically
all drunk driver and impaired professional diversion programs, as described in this Congressional Quarterly article.
They, the AA zealots who have a hold on you, will never let
you go. They will use the professions of medicine, psychology,
and social work to indict you with new diseases and infirmities.
They will employ psychologists to write damning reports about how you are “in deep denial” and portray you as a menace to society because of your rejection of AA. They will use mysterious language to incite judges and juries
against you, always holding out their cherished 12-step program
as your imminent savior. Immediately, stop labeling yourself
an alcoholic. This marks you as a second class citizen who will
be discriminated against before the law.
Your captors will always squeeze you at your weakest point,
and will threaten anything you hold dear to retain you as a
group member, i.e., your job, your driver's license, your child,
your health care, your reputation, your physical freedom. Anything
goes, anything at all, but the public turns a blind eye to this
atrocity, believing substance addiction to be so bad that any
measures, no matter how extreme, are justifiable to combat the
imagined epidemic of addictive disease. To “two-hatters,” the professionals who are also AA members, a
small dose of authority acts like the rabies virus, causing
misuse of authority and vicious attacks on dissenters and critics.
This is partly because they sense that they sense are dying
inside, and are desperately trying to justify selling out their
own lives to the addiction of recovery by forcing their cult
doctrine upon others. Remember that you are dealing with desperate
people who will do anything to advance their cause. What you see in them is exactly what you are trying to avoid in your own life.
Everything you say will be used against you. They show the
friendly side of their tyranny, often make up incriminating information in their clinical and court records. By promising that you will benefit greatly by telling on yourself, they will cajole and seduce you
into admitting things about yourself that are nobody's business but your own,
and then pass that incriminating information to the court.
Do not hesitate to lie to any member of AA in authority; it
is well established that when you know the evil intentions of
an inquisitor, lying is a moral response. AA groupers are morally
deficient across the board, since they have accepted the false
doctrine of addictive disease to explain their own past immoral
conduct.
Here is some guidance, based on our experience
and what is happening elsewhere.
1. Before you make any decisions on what course you will take,
get everything you can in writing, especially any documents
containing the words Alcoholics Anonymous or addiction treatment.
This includes the child protective services records, the court
records or documents, etc. Prepare your own manuscript, telling
your story of misguidance and mistreatment. Keep it current.
2. As in 1., above, make a list of all who have harmed you
by conspiring to force you into the 12-step program of Alcoholics
Anonymous, and become willing to make matters right for yourself
and others who will follow you. Using the best means at your
disposal, determine who of those are members of any 12-step
program. If any of those individuals is licensed by a professional
board, prepare to file grievances to those boards, and to file
malpractice lawsuits and civil rights lawsuits against them
all. Whether you decide to move forward with this is initially
less important than being prepared and willing to do so.
3. Rational Recovery will help you draft complaints and grievances.
4. Talk with an attorney. Ask first these questions:
- Are you or anyone you know a member of Alcoholics Anonymous?
- Have you ever seen a copy of the 12-step program of Alcoholics
Anonymous? If not, show him/her a copy.
- Do you believe that AA is a religion as referred to in
the First Amendment?
- Subscribe immediately to the Rational Recovery Monitor Program,
and get these publications from the RR bookstore:
- Rational Recovery: The New Cure for Substance Addiction
- The Journal of Rational Recovery (complete collection on CD)
- Rational Recovery Defends the Untreatables (DVD)
- Semd me email to fill me in on a little more about you, i.e., occupation,
addiction history, etc. If you have status with EEOC, this could
be very important.
- Visit the link, The
Forced Speak Out, and the other feedback links at this website.
Contribute your own story as a way of getting your case together.
We do not urge or incite people to resist AA, but we are the
resistance. Our general position is, "You draw the line,
and we'll step up to it." We know that you are closer to
the problem and know best what risks you are willing to make
for your own interests and others'. If you want to fight, we
are spoiling for a fight, because we view AA as the collective
Beast, organized to preserve tentative abstinence in a society
that has always been intolerant of inebriety.
I hope you will spend some time writing up your story in greater
detail, including information about the individuals and agencies
that are violating you.
You may be able to file a civil rights suit on your own behalf
without obtaining an attorney.
Keep in touch.
Jack Trimpey
