Sunday, June 28, 2015
Stanton the Anti Bill
AA: Cult or Cure?
Stanton Peele discusses AA Cult or Cure by Charles Bufe.
Resisting 12 Step Coercion
Dr. Peele discusses court-ordered AA attendance.
Coercive Psychiatry
Dr. Peele talks about forced psychiatric treatment.
Stanton Peele is a psychologist, an attorney, and a media personality who speaks and writes about many topics, including the efficacy of Alcoholics Anonymous, available alternative recovery methods, 1st amendment rights violations,
and other issues relating to mental health and addiction.
and other issues relating to mental health and addiction.
Dr. Peele's latest book Addiction Proof Your Child is for sale on Amazon.
Charles Bufe's AA Cult or Cure can be purchased on Amazon,
and is also available for online reading here.
Juliet Rocks AA
Alcoholics Anonymous: Dangerous Side Effects
More of Juliet's entertaining "slide shows" are available
for view on her YouTube channel.
Jason and the Anti-AA
AA is a Death Sentence
Jason Bartley is a "Viking warrior" of the Anti-AA, waging battle against the Cult of AA.
A former AA member himself, Jason attended meetings for 10 years before deciding to walk away.
His videos address several AA controversies, including dual-diagnosis, depression, and the13th-step.
In several of his YouTube videos Jason discusses court mandates and how ordering offenders
to attend A.A. meetings violates the first amendment rights of United States citizens.
I am honored to present two of my personal favorites.
The Real Alcoholics Anonymous
A full collection of Jason's videos can be seen on his YouTube channel.
You can link to his other webpages here: about Jason Bartley
AA, Depression, and Suicide
The Fall of AA
Interview with Jason on blogtalkradio:
AA Slogans-their true meanings
Saturday, June 27, 2015
Friday, June 26, 2015
AA vs Anti-AA
The Flame War Rages On
Alcoholics Anonymous Violations
All over the Internet, it's AA versus anti-AA. It's been that way for decades.
To understand the battle between AA and the Anti-AA, it's necessary to be familiar with the traditions. Members and ex-members alike object strongly to the practice in the US of mandating criminals to attend AA meetings. This violates not only the establishment clause of the 1st amendment to the constitution, but AA's tradition 6.
To understand the battle between AA and the Anti-AA, it's necessary to be familiar with the traditions. Members and ex-members alike object strongly to the practice in the US of mandating criminals to attend AA meetings. This violates not only the establishment clause of the 1st amendment to the constitution, but AA's tradition 6.
By affiliating itself with the courts, the General Service Organization of AA has greatly damaged the fellowship. Large numbers of non-compliant offenders have flooded AA meetings, endangering the welfare of voluntary members as well as the integrity of AA itself. If it were not for the coercion of criminals into the fellowship, the number of members would undoubtedly be smaller, but AA would not be undergoing the intense scrutiny of the present day.
Most people probably already know that drunken drivers are being ordered into AA, but few people realize that the courts routinely trade reduced sentences to violent criminals and sex offenders in return for their promise to attend meetings. This is the focus of Monica Richardson's film, The 13th Step.
The General Service Organization acts in violation of its own 6th tradition by affiliating itself with not only the for-profit recovery industry but with the US court system.
The Twelve Traditions of AA (long form)
2. For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority — a loving God as He may express Himself in our group conscience.
3. Our membership ought to include all who suffer from alcoholism. Hence we may refuse none who wish to recover. Nor ought A.A. membership ever depend upon money or conformity. Any two or three alcoholics gathered together for sobriety may call themselves an A.A. group, provided that, as a group, they have no other affiliation.
4. With respect to its own affairs, each A.A. group should be responsible to no other authority than its own conscience. But when its plans concern the welfare of neighboring groups also, those groups ought to be consulted. And no group, regional committee, or individual should ever take any action that might greatly affect A.A. as a whole without conferring with the trustees of the General Service Board. On such issues our common welfare is paramount.
5. Each Alcoholics Anonymous group ought to be a spiritual entity having but one primary purpose — that of carrying its message to the alcoholic who still suffers.
6. Problems of money, property, and authority may easily divert us from our primary spiritual aim. We think, therefore, that any considerable property of genuine use to A.A. should be separately incorporated and managed, thus dividing the material from the spiritual. An A.A. group, as such, should never go into business. Secondary aids to A.A., such as clubs or hospitals which require much property or administration, ought to be incorporated and so set apart that, if necessary, they can be freely discarded by the groups. Hence such facilities ought not to use the A.A. name. Their management should be the sole responsibility of those people who financially support them. For clubs, A.A. managers are usually preferred. But hospitals, as well as other places of recuperation, ought to be well outside A.A. and medically supervised. While an A.A. group may cooperate with anyone, such cooperation ought never go so far as affiliation or endorsement, actual or implied. An A.A. group can bind itself to no one.
7. The A.A. groups themselves ought to be fully supported by the voluntary contributions of their own members. We think that each group should soon achieve this ideal; that any public solicitation of funds using the name of Alcoholics Anonymous is highly dangerous, whether by groups, clubs, hospitals, or other outside agencies; that acceptance of large gifts from any source, or of contributions carrying any obligation whatever, is unwise. Then too, we view with much concern those A.A. treasuries which continue, beyond prudent reserves, to accumulate funds for no stated A.A. purpose. Experience has often warned us that nothing can so surely destroy our spiritual heritage as futile disputes over property, money, and authority.
8. Alcoholics Anonymous should remain forever nonprofessional. We define professionalism as the occupation of counseling alcoholics for fees or hire. But we may employ alcoholics where they are going to perform those services for which we might otherwise have to engage non-alcoholics. Such special services may be well recompensed. But our usual A.A. 12 Step work is never to be paid for.
9. Each A.A. group needs the least possible organization. Rotating leadership is the best. The small group may elect its secretary, the large group its rotating committee, and the groups of a large metropolitan area their central or intergroup committee, which often employs a full-time secretary. The trustees of the General Service Board are, in effect, our A.A. General Service Committee. They are the custodians of our A.A. Tradition and the receivers of voluntary A.A. contributions by which we maintain our A.A. General Service Office at New York. They are authorized by the groups to handle our over-all public relations and they guarantee the integrity of our principal newspaper, the A.A. Grapevine. All such representatives are to be guided in the spirit of service, for true leaders in A.A. are but trusted and experienced servants of the whole. They derive no real authority from their titles; they do not govern. Universal respect is the key to their usefulness.
10. No A.A. group or member should ever, in such a way as to implicate A.A., express any opinion on outside controversial issues — particularly those of politics, alcohol reform, or sectarian religion. The Alcoholics Anonymous groups oppose no one. Concerning such matters they can express no views whatever.
11. Our relations with the general public should be characterized by personal anonymity. We think A.A. ought to avoid sensational advertising. Our names and pictures as A.A. members ought not be broadcast, filmed, or publicly printed. Our public relations should be guided by the principle of attraction rather than promotion. There is never need to praise ourselves. We feel it better to let our friends recommend us.
12. And finally, we of Alcoholics Anonymous believe that the principle of anonymity has an immense spiritual significance. It reminds us that we are to place principles before personalities; that we are actually to practice a genuine humility. This to the end that our great blessings may never spoil us; that we shall forever live in thankful contemplation of Him who presides over us all.
Until the GSO takes a fearless and searching moral inventory of its own policies, AA will be seen by the many members who left in disgust as well as much of the general public as dishonest and lacking in integrity.
As things stand, the moral and righteous facade that AA presents to the world is utter and total...
The 13th Step Film
The Controversial documentary "The 13th Step" is finally finished and is currently making the rounds at film festivals across the globe. We've all been anxiously awaiting its completion, but we're going to have to wait a little longer to watch it online. Right now Monica and her film are at Cannes.
There was an enormous backlash to the film during its production, with current AA members doing their best to prevent it from being made, and ex-members cheering Monica on. The backlash continues.
AA faithful and "stand-up comedian" Danielle Stewart had a lot to say about the documentary, none of it good. Her article, Debunking the 13th Step Movie, can be seen on rehabreviews.com.
It reads like a catalog of every aspersion commonly cast by practicing AA members on the integrity of any AA critic. The litany of insults is tedious; "Monica is drinking", "Monica failed AA", "Monica has a resentment", "Monica is an AA-basher".
But the libel doesn't end there. Comments beneath the film's review, which is posted, by the way, not on a movie site, but on the Rehab Reviews website. Rehabreviews.com is dedicated to providing interested parties with information about, well, rehabs, definitely not my first choice when I'm looking for information about a movie. The webpage does, however, provide a clear and shining example of the kind of reaction you can expect if you dare to question or speak ill of the sacred cow Alcoholics Anonymous.
I found the comments below the article to be much more interesting than the review. There was plenty of flaming of the usual AA versus Anti-AA variety, albeit more vituperative than usual, with lots of slander and even the full names of members and ex-members being thrown back and forth.
But I found one comment, posted by someone who claims to be a current member, startling in its straightforward honesty and condemnation of the choices made by paid employees who run the non-profit organization from behind the scenes, away from the prying eyes of the public and even AA members.
You can read the comment on the RehabReview website, but I'm also posting it below.
JB on JUNE 3, 2015 6:19 AM
All I can say is WOW. This whole thread quickly devolved into a clash of egos. I am a grateful member of AA for decades and I can easily say that AA has brought these problems on itself by not following its Traditions. For years it was thought that the Traditions were just an after thought. So much power was given to the groups autonomy because it was believed that the groups would always be filled with parties that loved AA and would want to follow the Traditions. The Traditions are very simple and mild suggests but they like the steps need to be followed to the best of our ability. Why? once you violate them you no longer have an AA group. 35 years ago we started to affiliate with the courts. This eventually flooded the meetings will thousands of members who did not meet the requirement for membership. Bill W. stated that a member was anyone who had an issue with alcohol AND wanted our way of life. Once we started the IMPLIED (see long form of Tradition 6) affiliation with the treatment centers and worse with the courts we opened up our meetings to a whole host of tradition breaks i.e. anonymity, singleness of purpose etc. Not the least of which is the bad publicity this film has provided. The big book says we should not work with the unwilling and yet our meetings are now filled with more unwilling than willing. These parties do their time and then go forth and defame AA. They should because we did not follow our own Traditions or even the words of the program of recovery. We have not been honest and we have been hypocritical. Appearance becomes fact. If a DUI offender is sent to AA and he does not want to get sober he will not. He has every right to violate all our Traditions and to speak his truth. We were part of his sentence and it was part of a sentence that our book said would not work! Yet we affiliated with court to force him into AA. Then we hid behind the “no comment on outside issues” banner. If its inside our meetings then it is not an outside issue! My only beef with the film is that it didn’t get to root cause of all our problems. The ego based Tradition breaks. Monica has focused on the violent offenders instead of the true first errant step we took way up stream. I am grateful she used her talents to expose the problems and I hope AA will use this opportunity to take its own inventory and start following the Traditions to the letter and to follow the words of the Big Book in “Working with Others”, “There is a Solution”, To the Employers”, “Into Action”, “How it Works”, “Working with Others” and other writings that state that we can not force anyone to do anything and we should not AFFILIATE with anyone who does.
******
Rarely have I seen this willingness to confront AA coming from a practicing member. That's a shame, because if AA members were more willing to investigate the organization and judge it by the same standards the program asks them to judge themselves, Monica's film would never have been necessary, and there would be no clash between those members who believe in AA and those who found it lacking.
Until steps are taken by AA's GSO to protect the unwary from predation by other AA members and hangers-on, and until AA at the organizational level makes an effort to adhere to the principles it extols, I will remain as I am; a "failed-AA member, probably drinking resentment holder on a vendetta", just another AA "demonizer".
As always, keeping it anonymous in order to avoid repercussions:
Motchka and anonymous friends
my personal story of drinking, depression, and alcoholics Anonymous can be seen on
Another Ultimate Flame
I cut my flame warrior teeth on the AA/Anti-AA battles back in the late 90's. On the forums I frequented, lax regulations and html allowed me to utilize my preferred ordnance, the jpg and the animated gif.
Unfortunately, YouTube doesn't let me write code, so like any other dedicated YouTube flamer, I was forced to invest in a literary arsenal. Thanks to pervasive internet aggression, I've had ample opportunity to hone my verbal rapier. Although I do not yet consider myself to be a master at verbal jousting, I can usually hold my ground when battling AA trolls.
I dearly miss the days when an unexpected fifty Hitler post could disarm the incautious adversary, and I could crush my opponent with an elaborately photoshopped image.
Inspired by one version of the "ultimate flame" that's been bouncing around the Internet for quite some time, I decided to try my hand at writing one of my own.
So here it is; I dedicate this to my most detested and seemingly inexhaustible Troll.
To our most despised monster:
I hesitate to put finger to keyboard because I'm not certain that I have the stamina to adequately express my disdain for you, the monster whose mere presence marks the near-death of the human race. The horror produced when one is forced to accept the existence of any organism as revolting, contemptible, and toxic to life as you, can only be relieved by expelling that disgust and committing it to paper.
From the moment of your arrival on the planet, your outstanding feature has been a complete lack of life-affirming traits. Your physical being is a Frankensteinian amalgamation of every organic substance known to elicit disgust, combined and amplified to a life-endangering level, and then some. It is impossible for any organism more highly evolved than a maggot to endure even the most fleeting glance at your physical form. The mere sight of you produces a visceral response that cannot be equaled by consumption of the most powerful emetic available in the human pharmacopoeia. Wracking and often fatal convulsions of the digestive system always follow any accidental sighting of you.
As if visual recognition of you were not revolting enough, the scent glands of your body produce such an objectionable odor that one of our foremost minds was inspired to refer to it as the olfactory equivalent of the Tsar Bomba. Sustained exposure to your corrosive fumes, indeed, any exposure lasting longer than a few seconds, will result in complete disintegration of any complex organism, most of the viruses and prions, and, truth be told, a large number of inorganic substances. The most elaborate gas masks available offer no protection from your emissions, and the protective outerwear provided to astronauts for use in outer space is of limited effectiveness in your proximity. It has been theorized that you are more toxic to carbon-based lifeforms than vacuum itself.
Your mother would never have survived your delivery if not for the previously unknown and extraordinarily durable elastic caul that surrounded your fetal form. The moment your head became visible during your birth, an unendurably foul odor issued forth from the birth canal, forcing the entire medical staff to flee the hospital. Most of them were never heard from again. Their shrieks of agony and terror could be heard long after they had disappeared from sight. Your mother, (who mercifully experienced complete amnesia of several days preceding your birth and more than a week after it), did not need to strain to expel your monstrous form. A series of racking convulsions, induced within her womb by your repulsively squirming larval body were so powerful that, in addition to squirting your slime covered, lumpen, reeking and squalling mass across the room, out the door, and 75 feet down an adjacent hallway, broke 17 bones in her body and reduced her to permanent, blithering insanity punctuated by moments of abject terror.
You were not raised by humans. No human, however saintly, physically resilient, and lacking in sensory perception, could tolerate the sight, sounds, and smell of any object as revolting as you. Like a snake you shed your disgusting caul and slithered out of the hospital, across the parking lot, and into an adjacent bog. You were quickly approached, and later adopted by an enormous, aging and maternally-deprived lamprey who almost rejected you as unfit. You repaid the animal affection of this piscean worm by consuming her, as well as every other living being in the immediate vicinity, shortly after the second anniversary of your birth.
As you matured, large colonies of slime molds established themselves upon much of what I hesitate to refer to as your skin. You took on a faintly phosphorescent greenish hue. Your odor ripened and increased to a level commensurate with that of the interior of a tightly sealed Limburger cheese factory that had been left unattended under a scorching sun after an environmental disaster.
Had anyone been courageous enough to attempt to examine you, they would have discovered that you had no discernible brain, or even a recognizable nervous system. For years you reeked and squalled, polluting the Earth's atmosphere so badly that any vertebrate life form that was unable to find refuge at least a mile beneath the Earth's crust fell ill and subsequently expired. Your only companions, if one could refer to them as that, were a very few specimens of the lower life forms that were especially resistant to organic toxins.
During the decades you roamed your small corner of the scorched planet, you expressed your feeble instinctual desires with loudly reverberating grunts, squeals, and shrieks. You were possessed of powerful vestigial lungs. You lacked, as one would suspect, any sense of rhythm altogether.
As you matured into adolescence and later adulthood, our ravaged planet was visited by various exploratory teams of extraterrestrials. You had no knowledge of the mechanics of reproduction, but you did possess a rudimentary instinctual urge, and you attempted to mate with the vessels that conveyed these unfortunate aliens. Your blundering attempts at procreation resulted in great agony and loss of life. Eventually the word spread that the planet Earth, formerly praised throughout the galaxy as a paradise for sentient carbon-based lifeforms, was currently uninhabitable.
Further exploratory forays were cancelled. Sensors were strategically placed in the upper atmosphere in anticipation of your inevitable demise and the restoration of Earth's former life-supporting ecology. Estimates of the amount of time that would be necessary for a complete recovery of the planet's surface were calculated. Opinions differed, but most interplanetary experts agreed that complete dispersion of your toxic byproducts would require several centuries. It was estimated that new life forms would not evolve to replace the ones your poisons had eliminated for several millennia.
The planet Earth was subsequently designated on cosmic maps by cryptic hieroglyphs that represented the human vocal sound forms "Tom Perkins". These hieroglyphs were sometimes replaced by the revolting image of a fattish, round, orange and lumpy, vaguely humanoid sensory organ that contained several horrifying but closed orifices. Earth's vicinity was also designated by the universal symbol for chemical toxicity, a pair of human thigh bones forming a diagonal cross.
As the tiny remnant of humans who had possessed enough fortitude to survive your presence for long enough to migrate to shelter deep beneath the Earth's surface awaits, anxiously, your demise, we near the 60th anniversary of your apocalyptic birth. Our most learned scientific minds predict that, given enough time and much careful nurturing, the Earth's surface can recover to a level adequate to sustain human life.
Superstitious rituals and religious ceremonies, intended as appeals to the Gods for intervention have formed, dissolved, and reformed throughout the decades mankind has been forced by your presence above to exist underground.
Several excursions to the surface were recently launched by valiant groups of explorers; they confirmed that you have entered into the physical deterioration any complex organism can expect to experience at the end of its life cycle. Bits of your skin have begun to slough off, and your odor is even more nausea-producing than previously. These olfactory emanations appear to be slightly less corrosive and toxic than in the past.
Sightings of newly sprouted plant life have been reported, tiny and weak, but deliciously green; these harbingers of newly evolved vegetal life offer hope that we may one day return to Earth's surface. The horrifying shrieks and curdles that our learned scientists believe signify your attempts to obtain a mate have lessened greatly in strength and quantity. These changes parallel the inevitable deterioration characteristic of advanced age in that species from which your mutated form was spawned.
We wait. Hopefully, in supplication to the powers we invoke, we wait for delivery from the horrible affliction visited upon our beleaguered planet by your birth. We impatiently await your death, longing to return to the surface of our planet, our mother, our most revered Goddess, our beloved home, the Earth.
