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In Re: The Seed and their Successes

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CHAR:
My thinking on this is the end never justifies the means. I might be saccharine in saying this but to me a line from a Jewel song says it all. "In the end,love only matters" And there was no love in the Seed. There was only abuse. Parents that have no business being parents put their children in places like this because they do not want to deal. If a child is hurting it has to do with the parents. To me it does not matter how many people the Seed "physically rescued" it matters how may broken spirits it caused, whether they were "physically rescued" or not.

You're just like a pill, instead of making me better, you keep making me ill" - PINK

GregFL:
I cut and paste the words below from another forum I post to. The sub topic was "is AA a cult". Of course, my answer was yes. I provided links to support my contention:

http://www.aadeprogramming.com/
http://www.peele.net/lib/bufe.html
http://www.rational.org/Cult.html
http://www.moonmac.com/Cult_Called_AA.html


The following is a respose from  someone whom had been thru AA and my response to him. It is lengthy but right on topic about sucesses and the impact on the rest of us: Hope you guys enjoy it.

Thanks to Greg for all the links. If only they had had the internet when I was "finding myself" or more accurately, finding my own way- I could have saved alot of time. But I don't usually get into what-ifs as I find them singularly useless.

One thing that I observed in my experience with AA is covered roundabout in one of the links that Greg provided.

It stated that there are people who value the ideology but not the affilitation and others that value the affiliation and not the ideology. It left out that there are those who value and apparently need and benefit from both. Thus, though a cult, AA serves these people in a way that to my knowledge no other organisation does. Even a fundamentalist religion doesn't have the structure for a level of participation that some people need and get from AA.

As I started to say, in my experience with AA I noticed the different people described above. I idn't break it down that far at the time, but I came to recognise those people who had become sober and were moving on and those who had "replaced their addiction" with AA. Now for some this is simply a matter of taste- one guy becomes Mr. AA and another becomes Mr. Jogger, Mr. Superdad, Mr. Overtime, Mr. Hobbyist. But for others the immersion in AA is essential to their survival. Whether that is true or because they believe it to be true is irrelevant. If this person is going to self destruct outside the program than they might not be able to afford to do the sort of personal pathfinding that I and many others have done. That is not a value judgement even though it may sound like one. I sincerely believe that the alcoholic that AA considers themodel and the rule, does indeed exist. Unfortunately, as one of the AA-as-cult sites said, AA dogma insists that this is the rule and many hinge their entire well being on accpetance of this rule.

AA culture actually acknowledges the different kinds of alcoholics, but only situationally and "projects" the "rule" onto the exception. Personally my experience was that the exceptions outnumbered the rule in any given AA gathering.

AA culture call them "high bottoms" who are people who haven't lost everything to their behavior, who may well not have lost anything. There is the classic story of the woman who joined AA simply because she got drunk one night and didn't feed her pet bird. Finding it dead in the morning she attributed it's death to her alcoholism. Whether this is true or not is irrelevant - it's part of the AA culture. But it does point out the latitude that AA allows for self diagnosis.

There are also the AA members that most anyone would call "hard-core". These are the very few, but often the most influential in the AA culture. These are people who drink in a classic alcoholic pattern that most people, and most people who self label as Alcoholic (captial A) simply do not understand.

This superdrunk is not the person who simply woke up one morning and said "I can't live like this. My goals aren't being realized. I party too much........etc." These are the run for the bottle types. These are the people who really do wake up in jail or Lake Tahoe with no idea how they got there. This would be the man I knew who would be dry for the entire time he was at sea, and the minute he set foot on land would get a half gallon of vodka and drink it until it was gone. These are the people for whom the pleasure, or social aspects of alcohol are the five minutes between the fifth drink and the sixth.

The rest of the people in AA, and the majority of people in AA are people who were drawn to it because they built a social life around drinking, and in the absence of that social acceptance, or owing to an event that scared them, have joined the group for support.

Soberman truly believes what he says. And to some degree he is correct- I don't think that most people truly can "understand" the hard core drunk/addict who has hit rock bottom. I personally had an alarm that went off in my head one day- it said "I'm dying. I can't live like this." I wouldn't consider myself a "high bottom" but compared to some that I met, I wasn't a rock bottom either. My party was over. But this isn't about me.

AA is a cult. hands down no argument- it is by definition a cult. But it is also where alot of alcoholics/addict need to be. Brainwashed or adaptive acceptance of the dogma is irrelevant to the importance of the program to such people. The predictions of doom for leaving the program are probably true for these select people. They are not the whole, nor in my opinion the majority of the members of AA.

So AA is a cult. The courts have no business forcing people to go to AA for that reason. But to completely discount the value of AA is an error. For the hardcore addict to leave AA because it is a cult would make as much sense as a person with bone cancer refusing morphine because they are afraid of becoming addicted to it.

Whether hard core or high bottom, AA is a lesser evil for most of the people who go there and find comfort and structure in the program.

But that doesn't mean that we can't have an honest discussion about it. That is the objection to some of the views of Soberman. AA allows no dissent. It labels any alternatives as heresy which is understandable because some of the people there don't have anymore second chances. But there is room for discussion outside the walls of AA about addiction and how people cope with and come through it. Simply stamping your foot and saying "It's an incurable and progressive "disease". If you don't do it our way you will be dead or in jail." or Soberman's completely over-the-top pronouncement that using alcohol and drugs is immoral- doesn't change the fact that AA's reign on the subject of addiction is over. The removal of the stigma has brought the discussion out into the light and too many people have gone htrough and come through it on their own path (which from the article links seem to fall into much similarity) for a single view to dominate and replace the conversation."


And this my response to Him:


great post species. So nice to hear rational thought coming from someone who has been thru AA.

Yes, I acknowledge that AA is a good alternative for some people.Those that go that don't really need it is a whole different topic that we could spend hours on. I am speaking here of those hard core drink from the bottle addicts. It is just sad that these same people are so weak that they must replace their addictive behavior with an addiction for "group" and group cultspeak. Soberman's post are repleat with AA cult slang like "newcomer" "inventory", etc.

These same weaklings, once discovering their personal alternative to laying in the gutter, then set out to save the rest of us from their own weak genetic compulsive behavior. They project their "disease" upon the rest of society, when in fact we don't have it. They force their modality, thru coercion and law upon the rest of us and infiltrate our government and legit organizations with their dangerous societal views.

This is one of many areas that I find problematic with AA and like cultic organizations. Their dogma has far reaching implications for those of us that don't want or need to be saved. As they goosestep towards saving society from the evils of drugs (alcohol), we become less free as a nation and by proxy end up paying for their collective social disease. This is unacceptable to me."





[ This Message was edited by: GregFL on 2002-07-27 13:51 ]

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