Stay away from recovery groups.

If recovery groups and addiction treatment simply didn't work, that would be reason enough to avoid those avenues. The truth is that recovery groups and addiction treatment are harmful to practically everyone involved, including families. The reason is very simple, as follows.

People voluntarily attending their first recovery group meeting are already on the brink of full recovery! They need only guidance and encouragement from other veterans of the struggle against addictive desire. None are “in denial;” they obviously know they have a problem, and are obviously mobilized to take some constructive action. They already strongly suspect or fully understand that, to escape the pain of addiction, they will have to forego the use of alcohol and other drugs, most likely for the rest of their lives.

When they walk through the door for their first meeting, they are looking for guidance from people who have actually recovered from addiction. The recovery group newcomer already has a foundation of knowledge, beliefs and values gained from his original family and his life experience. He is not shopping for a new religion, does not want or need spoon-fed wisdom, and has no desire or need for adult supervision. Recovery group newcomers desperately want "inside information" from successfully recovered people on how to abstain from alcohol and other drugs. They desperately need encouragement that they are entirely capable of succeeding on their own efforts and have a 100% chance of success in reaching the goal of secure, permanent abstinence in a mercifully brief time.

The recovery group newcomer assumes that he is passing through a group that will help him function independently. He is unaware that the group has designs to possess him. Instead of receiving guidance or encouragement in abstinence, he is hit broadside with the demand that he surrender his struggle against bodily desire, give up the idea that abstinence is a sufficient goal, and that he cast himself upon the mercy of a newfound higher power of his own sodden imagination. He is admonished to become dependent upon the group as an external, social restraint and to accept the group as the primary source of truth, wisdom, and guidance in all of his personal affairs. The group’s demand for submission is called a "suggestion," but to desperate people the meanings are one and the same, e.g., "We suggest that after jumping you open your parachute."

Newcomers are shocked back from the brink of recovery and made ashamed of their “foolish, sick” desire to simply quit using once and for all. They are cast into a passive mode of socializing with others who share epiphanies, crippling beliefs, testimonials, and the amazing rhetoric of recovery group doctrine. Along with dismay at the inversions of truth, comes relief from the burden of self-restraint, as in the oft-repeated oath, "When I learned I have a disease, it was as if a great burden was lifted from my shoulders."

For all recovery group newcomers, the first meeting is a strange and memorable event beset with conflicted values and feelings. On one hand, the rituals of inventories and sharing seem meaningful, even providential, but on the other hand, they also appear wrong-headed, strange, or simply irrelevant. While the group seems a haven of hope and personal betterment, a look around the room finds a forlorn, group-bound fellowship of men and women who have far more than their share of problems, who aspire to little more than one-day-at-a-time "sobriety," and who collectively represent an average of a month or two since their last use.

The newcomer faces a unified group that ridicules free will, and claims that their upside-down program "works if you work it," and that no one can "go it alone." The group teaches him to attribute all of his doubts and reservations about the organization or the program to "denial," starting with his resistance to calling himself "alcoholic" or "addict." At the moment he names himself "alcoholic," or "addict," his problem drinking or drug use is transformed into chronic addiction, and his life is defined by one-meeting-at-a-time recoveryism.

Life "in recovery" is life in addiction, complete with addict-identity, the sacrament of relapse, and the distortions of logic and perception that accompany the high life. These distortions combine as a serious, disabling condition, recovery group disorder, characterized by increasing self-doubt, social alienation, relapse anxiety, group dependence, increased drinking or using, free-fall-to-bottom, and depression. With time, many people "in recovery" are faced with an impossible choice between two equally intolerable alternatives - life in addiction and life in recovery. The choice is truly impossible because it is between two forms of the same thing, and the resulting hopelessness and depression can be, and often is, fatal.