"Confronting Confrontation Therapy"

A victim of a Synanon “Tough Love”/ 12-step rehab in the UK shares his experience, strength and hope...

 “I had just been on a prodigious alcoholic bender…

…I decided that some form of treatment might help. Not having twenty-thousand-or-so pounds lying around for an inpatient stay, I decided to try a local “community-rehab” which offers a cost-free programme. I was treated for a total of four weeks as an outpatient before I left the programme in disgust. My rehab practised a version of what is termed variously “attack therapy”, “confrontation therapy”, “reality therapy” or the “Minnesota model”. The underlying premise of the method is to take the group participants through the first five steps of the twelve steps found in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous…

…The rehab facility I attended is part of an organisation that offers a wide range of different services to addicts and alcoholics in my local area. I believe it is partly funded by the local health authority, and partly by charitable sources. They treat service users on an outpatient basis, in one-on-one, group-therapy and family sessions. As a group, we were only expected to come in for one full day a week. During that day we were required to spend all our time with the group and to participate in two two-hour group therapy sessions. We also had a weekly one-to-one with our designated counselor.

I’m not sure exactly what it was, but something about the group didn’t sit right with me from the outset. Maybe it was the way that we were required to mercilessly interrogate and belittle the other group members. It may have had something to do with the fact that the group was trying to get me to accept that I was “powerless” and broken, and that only unconditionally accepting a bunch of crazy-sounding, guilt-inducing religious dogmas could possibly save me from the intangible demonic force of “alcoholism”. Anyway, something about this group made me want to go out and ask some serious questions about it…

...Synanon members would sit around and verbally lay into each other, no holds barred, in what was claimed to be a treatment for alcoholism/addiction. “The game” also seems to have involved public confession of sins. The leader of the group, Dederich, eventually seems to have used the sessions to pressurise people into carrying out his will. The practice of verbally attacking a Synanon member was also known as giving her/him a “haircut”.

The sessions at my rehab match this description perfectly, minus the “improvisational comedy”. (They were humorous, but only in a “laugh at them” kind of way.) The group sessions were extremely confrontational. We were initially a group of six, although that number halved very quickly. From the outset, we were told that holding back or refusing to join in the confrontational process actually displayed a lack of concern for our fellow group members. Compassion kills, people! We needed to give them “tough-love” or they would surely meet with a grim alcoholic demise. In case we still found it difficult to lay into the other members, we were assured that we were “challenging the addiction, not the person”…

We invite you to read on - an intelligent and thought provoking article: 

https://mybestthinking.wordpress.com/2017/01/10/confronting-confrontation-therapy-some-reflections-on-my-twelve-step-rehab/

– And ask some serious questions, not only about misuse of the book "Alcoholics Anonymous" as an addiction treatment by the rehab, but also the A.A. members this person encountered. Both of the rehab's lead counselors are described as "group elders" of "local twelve-step meetings." Based on this experience this person now believes that either A.A. is a cult, or he's a banana.

The meaning and intent of the book “Alcoholics Anonymous” together with the Alcoholics Anonymous Twelve Steps, and indeed the minds of some A.A. members themselves, are being psychologically twisted by the addiction treatment industry in a manner only cults and corporations can.

With Government implementation of the Synanon Cult based Therapeutic Communities Movement’s Recovery Orientated Integration System (ROIS) (also known as Recovery Oriented Systems of Care) into British drug addiction and alcoholism treatment systems. A.A. groups and intergroups in England, Scotland and Wales can expect to see the establishment of an increasing number of this type of hybrid Synanon/12-step  rehab. For more details see AA Minority Report 2017