The Talented Mr. Trimpey

Say what you like about denial, it’s fun. But experience (a comb given to the bald, according to a Chinese proverb) will move you to the next stage eventually, if you’re lucky. And I feel lucky being able to talk to others who, one way or another, also feel lucky.

For some, this proves that I am a member (or a victim) of a cult. Google “A.A.” and “cult” and you will find thousands of pages saying so. (Actually, google anything and you will find thousands of pages on it. I just googled “anything” and got 1 through 10 of 453 million results.)

In the OED, a cult is “worship; reverential homage rendered to a divine being;” “a system of religious worship, esp. as expressed in ceremonies, ritual, etc.;” “devotion or homage paid to a person or thing, esp. a fashionable enthusiasm;” [and] derog. a transient fad of an in-group.” But the A.A.-is-a-cult folks don’t mean any of this when they say A.A. is a cult. What they do mean is something more along the lines of the Branch Davidians, Jonestown, Kool-Aid.

Take Jack Trimpey, Alcoholics Anonymous: Of Course It’s A Cult, since that’s the first one thrown up (almost literally) by the search engine, and since he volunteers, with no prompting, to rigorously apply “the seventeen academic criteria of cultism” to prove his point. A few representative proofs thrown up (almost literally) by the rigorous Mr. Trimpey include the following:

Families split apart based on AA membership, just as religious conflict often disrupts family ties. At least one Methodist church has gone belly-up to ‘those people who meet in the basement,’ who arose to conduct Sunday services with a teddy bear affixed over the altar where the image of Christ had been.

It appears likely that AA has destroyed the economic foundation of more families than addiction itself has.

No cult has succeeded in stigmatizing its members to the extent AA has. Even the HeavensGate cult, requiring uniforms and castration, failed to gain the support of the scientific community to support its bizarre concept of a rescuing UFO hidden in the tail of comet Hale-Bopp … It isn’t much of a stretch to imagine a more highly developed and better organized HeavensGate cult, in which a good number of M.D.’s and psychologists had become devout members. (Heaven knows something more bizarre than that has happened in the “addictionology” field.)

Essentially, AA is a drug-cult which holds various substances to be “desecrating sacraments” which are necessary for eventual cleansing of the soul. It is clearly not an organization devoted to teaching people any means to end substance addictions.

AA now has a faction which believes that Bill W. was Christ reincarnated, that the original Jesus was an alcoholic who authored the 12-steps, that the Last Supper was the first AA meeting, that Old Testament prophecies predict that AA will rise as the dominant world religion during our times, and that the Age of Sobriety, actually the prophesied Kingdom of God, will commence on the year 2000.

If by violence we include intellectual violence, all cults are violent, and AA surpasses most of them … The 12 steps appear to be laced with something that makes people mean and arrogant. The more seriously people take them, the weirder they become, in comparison to their pre-cult personalities. They also appear more inclined to mistreat their fellow beings — all in the name of treatment or recovery, of course. One caller likened the AA cult indoctrination to vampirism, in which, once-bitten, one will go on to bite others.

Sadly, none of this – grammatical error, the teddy bear idolatry, the stigma greater than that inflicted upon uniformed eunuchs, Bill W. fulfilling Messianic prophecy and Jesus coming to believe that a power greater than Himself could restore him to sanity – is misquoted.

Jack Trimpey has an argument – government-mandated A.A. participation is unconstitutional because of the (perceived) religious content of the A.A. program – but he doesn’t appear particularly interested in (or capable of) making it because it is of no real use to him. A.A. has to be madder and badder than that. He needs A.A. to be the invasion of the body snatchers because he wants to sell you a tin foil hat. He has merchandise to shift.

Trimpey is, in fact, the founder of Rational Recovery (“RR”), a for-profit organization offering counseling and guidance on self-recovery from addiction. The key tool of RR is AVRT, or Addictive Voice Recognition Technique, the quality of which is evidenced by the fact that it “has been posted on the Internet since 1995.” A set of five AVRT DVDs is a giveaway at $449, although you may need a booster shot (AVRTune Up, The Beast Came Back DVD, $229) and, if especially hard-headed, at least one further reminder (But I’m A Really Tough Case DVD, $39.95). If you can make your way to California, AVRT: The Class is a mere $2,600 (this does not include air fair or accommodation, of course, but a light breakfast and a full lunch are provided).

Fortunately, you can preview the AVRT Crash Course and join “many thousands of men and women [who] have taken back their lives from addiction and recoveryism solely by clicking through the twenty-eight flash cards” that constitute “Bullets for my Beast.” There really are twenty-eight of them as well, each as witty as the next.

In brief, AVRT identifies your desire for the pleasure of alcohol (and other drugs) as “the Beast®” which is a registered trademark. The Beast® “cannot speak, it cannot see, it has no arms or legs, and it has no intelligence of its own,” but “persuades you to use your hands, arms, and legs in order to obtain its favorite substance.” It is “an animal mentality that can talk in your head.” The Beast® hides in the dark; it fears you because “it knows that you can kill it once you see it … and – you get to kill.”

As if that’s not fun enough, before graduating to killing you get to toy with the Beast® for a while: “First, think of never drinking or fixing again. Now, think of having a drink or fixing right now. Shift back and forth between quitting right now for good and drinking full blast forever. Notice what is happening to you as you shift back and forth. You are teasing your Beast. Then torturing it. Shame on you.”

The voice that says “never say never” drink again is the voice of the Beast®, and AVRT will teach you to recognize it and realize that, although “it is a worthy opponent … humans prevail over beasts.” All you need is “a big plan:” “Make a plan to resume drinking in two hundred years. Decide exactly what you will drink (or use) … to celebrate two centuries of abstinence. See? The Beast is quite stupid so you can trick it this way.” This is because your Beast is “functionally immortal, and doesn’t understand that you will die.” Knowing all this “you are armed for the kill.”

Sadly, having clicked through twenty-eight pages, and been tickled and teased with all this killing business, you don’t actually get to experience the joys of killing the Beast® after all but are advised, instead, to “stay alert for new Beast activity, which may be sudden or gradual,” and which may, presumably, force you to part with a lot of hard-earned money. Possibly, to get to the murder stage, you have to make that California trip, but, as a consolation prize, if you have made it thus far through this drivel, you are given your RR PhD (which is to say, you get to look at a box on a web page that says Phormer Drunk).

As a cult, it has to be said that A.A. isn’t particularly robust: it demands no money, attendance is entirely voluntary, you get to decide if you want to talk or listen, there are no qualifications for membership other than a desire to stop drinking, and I, for one, haven’t seen a teddy bear once. And if you happen to feel that you are a fully-paid-up member of the society of drunks for whom the next drink may be the gateway drink to your last, the majority of people you meet will not be serving up Kool-Aid: they are there, in fact, to avoid drinking the stuff and to help you do the same.

But Mr. Trimpey has a living to make, even at the expense of a life or two, so over again to the man with the plan: “AA is not only a religious cult, it is a radical cult, an evil cult, a widespread cult, and a dangerous cult … an engine of social decay … [and] a cancer on the soul of the nation.”

I would like to say you couldn’t make this up. But of course you could.