Rational Recovery Defends The Untreatables
Jack Trimpey
Because AVRT-based recovery is streamlined and effective, your
years of addiction will soon be covered with the sands of time.
Freed at last from addiction and its rear guard, AA, you may feel
inspired to protect others from the harmful effects of recovery
groups and addiction treatment services. Although there are no
RR groups anywhere, there is a way you can help to bring Rational
Recovery to your community.
Frequent Flyers: The Untreatables
In the past, attempts to introduce RR to their
communities have been unsuccessful because AVRT is incompatible
with the American social service system, particularly its heavy-handed,
parentis in loci style. AVRT is
self-recovery, without the use
of groups, counseling, and addiction treatment centers. Therefore,
offering AVRT through social agencies is like trying to push a
rope.
Addiction treatment, however, produces an abstinent
outcome of around zero, and it survives as a business largely
through repeat business, i.e., the "frequent flyers"
who "keep coming back" for detox, treatment, aftercare,
relapse, active addiction, then back to detox, treatment, aftercare,
relapse, active addiction, then detox, and so on. In every community,
especially larger population centers, large, complex social service
agencies "serve" large caseloads of chronically addicted
people who are trapped in the relapse/treatment cycle, often for
decades, often for dozens of admissions
to residential rehabs, with no sign that addiction treatment is
producing any benefit or abstinence. Although some may abstain
following treatment, many more do so with no treatment, or in
spite of treatment, so those successes following treatment episodes
should not be viewed as a direct result of "treatment."
Public agencies are not interested in any genuine
alternative to their existing menu of services, especially any
service or information that would disqualify any client for continuing
services, i.e., full or complete recovery, a
la AVRT. Addiction treatment agencies usually employ members
of AA/NA to provide direct services to addicted clients. They
are fully encased in the Addictive Voice and incapable of providing
competent guidance to people who are addicted to alcohol and other
drugs. They do not believe their clients are capable of resolving
their problems independently, or even abstaining without frequent
group attendance. Treatment agencies often offer therapies such
as acupuncture, massage therapy, aroma therapy, recreation therapy,
polarity therapy, and other marginal practices, but only as adjuncts
to a core belief system consistent with the 12-step program.
To understand the existing system, it is crucial
to understand that the system is not designed to help people to
quit addictions, or to abstain from alcohol and other drugs. The
sole purpose of the addiction treatment industry, from the recovery
groups, to outpatient counseling, to the residential centers,
to the hospital based inpatient programs, is to engage the individual
in the "process of recovery," i.e., billable
program compliance. Thus, no data on abstinent outcome
is collected by public addiction treatment programs; only data
on program compliance and other peripheral measures.
The Opt-Out Initiative
The deplorable abstinence outcome of addiction
treatment creates a real opportunity for change, not by substituting
other services for existing services, but with the very reasonable,
irresistible argument:
When treatment repeatedly
(2+) fails, treatment should first of all be discontinued.
That is what RR is now about, the Opt-Out
Initiative, whereby clients must first of all
give informed
consent to treatment, including the vital information
that self-recovery is commonplace
and a learnable skill, and secondly that the disease concept of
addiction is not factual, but a highly
controversial idea within the professional community. From
there, people who are unsuccessfully treated may opt
out of the addict identity, and undertake recovery through
planned, permanent abstinence as a matter
of principle rather than as an outcome of addiction treatment
services.
