"Credentials" – Who are the REAL DEAL People?

Many Treatment center staffers give big lip service to our Big Books Twelve Step Program – but how many of them are speaking from an experience they have actually HAD? I have to wonder.

Many “Addictions Counselors” rewrite the steps (Usually only the first three) and mold them into new forms and formats – you know . . . Xeroxed “Handouts” that can be used in group sessions and such – supplemented with Internet materials from all sources except the Big Book.

Anyone with experience with the actual Program can look at those materials and weep. They are garbage – not even resembling the Big Book experience and directions. They are interpretations, reinterpretations and downright perversions. IMPOSTERS.

I worked at a place called Gosnold here on the POD. (See link) It’s pretty much all there is on the POD and as far as treatment facilities go, Gosnold is a big fish in a tiny pond – but there’s more food in that pond than you can imagine.

Cape Cod is after all a beautiful peninsula strewn with quaint drinking villages that has a severe fishing problem.

Since most of the AA Program in the Big Book invalidates their “treatment” methods most Treatment Centers are always on the lookout for anyone who is familiar with the Big Book so they can prevent them from speaking to their clients on “incoming speaking commitments” or even worse – getting “On-staff”. Our types are very bad for business.

It took them all of two weeks to figure out that I was “One of those” (“Those” typically have more experience in successfully helping others to recover than do the treatment center personnel.) - and of course I got canned.
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Here is a guy employed at a twenty eight day treatment facility – telling people about AAs Twelve Steps – and literally knows NOTHING about them.
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While at this facility I read one of the senior counselors handouts on Step One. It was unrecognizable as Step One.Three quarters of it was an opinion about Step Two! I was shocked! It was absolute crap that he had written himself.

So now here is a guy, employed at a twenty eight day treatment facility – telling people about AAs Twelve Steps – and he literally knows NOTHING about them – thinks he does – and has convinced others that he does, simply because he’s been sober and licensed for so many years. And there’s no one to check on him because THEY DON’T KNOW EITHER!

I can’ think of a worse tragedy in that deal.

Addiction Rehabilitation services are not cheap. Facilities like this charge ten to thirty thousand dollars for a single stint – and when it doesn’t work, blame the client. It is outrageous.

Many “clients” finance these charges on credit cards and secure loans by putting liens on their houses or relatives homes. Distraught relatives are often forced by “Love” to withdraw bucks out of their retirement funds in order to come up with the dough.

How sad is this – and Gosnold is not an isolated case. These are people (Not only staffers at Gosnold but at treatment facilities all over the country) who individually kill more people each year, on their own, than Charles Manson ever did. Manson only killed nine people on two occaiisions.

These counselors are in DIRECT contact with perhaps a dozen “Clients” each month. Every day that they are in contact with a real alcoholic is another “occassion” fro them.

I realize that I do have a penchant for hyperbole. I am a writer – but this is no exaggeration. It is THAT BAD. These folks are often lauded for their work, receive weekly paychecks for it, and are known to bask in their own “Charity” for working for such low wages considering all they “Good” they do.

The good news about treatment centers is that many clients DO have a problem with alcohol and drugs but CAN probably stop without the “Real Deal” anyway – if only they will – and can learn some good Rehab “tricks“.

Perhaps you have heard some of the tricks: Having a plan, keeping in a structured environment, (“I need structure”) staying away from “Slippery places”, sharing their problems at meetings, going to lots of meetings (Sometimes three or four a day – what a life huh?) The centers teach them that stuff. But pity the real alcoholic that falls into their domain for whom the only solution is a spiritual awakening.

Professional Jealousy against “We” who actually try and often succeed in carry the message to the alcoholic is rampant. The “Johnny Come Latelies“* - and that’s what the treatment industry is – are doing all they can to discredit AA. I get press releases every day about non-spiritual and “non-twelve step” approaches to alcoholism and AA is getting a huge bashing in these efforts and in the press. Don’t think this isn’t all intentional.

“There’s money in them thar hills!”

There are always exceptions. And in that respect there are some GOOD TREATMENT CENTERS. But there are a HELL of a lot of really bad ones. There are some exceptional counselors out there. They operate under the radar of their employers for as long as they can. Some wind up in private practice. God bless them. They must take a lot of heat! Their jobs are exceeding more difficult than the well-meaning but misinformed, middle-of-the-road based solutions “Addictons counselor“ who hangs a certificate, collect a salary and lies by telling people that he is “Pro AA” but “a drug is a drug is a drug”, and and unwittingly put alcoholics into the dirt. He is not “Pro AA” – he is “Pro-meetings” and “meetings” ain’t the AA Program. The Twelve Steps are.

WHAT NERVE!
If you want to really get sick to your stomach then have a look at this news article Headline.

You will freak. Are there REALLY people out there calling themselves “AA Counselors“?

Peace,

Danny S

* “Alcoholics Anonymous” (1939) was written and it’s Step were being practiced at a time when doctors were routinely committing our type of alcoholics – the hopeless variety – to asylums to “Solve” the problem. Some solve.