Quit Now For Life! The big button below is blue, for the blue skies of life after recovery. If you aren't under the influence right now, go ahead and click the button. Programmed instruction will guide you through the decision making process for full recovery, before you sleep tonight. Updated 2014  AVRTeleConference  AVRTeleConference is five 1-hour sessions of direct, face-to-face instruction on Addictive Voice Recognition Technique® (AVRT®)  conducted by Jack Trimpey via FaceTime teleconferencing connection. The first two sessions are usually completed within the first week, the remainder weekly or longer intervals. Whenever possible, a family member or significant other sits in as a participant-observer. Required Apple devices include iMac, MacBook, iPhone, iPad, late model iPod, or iTouch. Voice telephone is also available.  Call 530-621-2667 Why Self-Recovery? Stick with the real experts: the millions who quit their addictions based upon their own native beliefs and common sense. Find Your Rational Recovery Sponsor  AVRT: Live! Direct, learn-by-video AVRT® in the privacy of your own home. This set of five (5) professionally-edited DVDs contains the entire curriculum of AVRT-based recovery presented to an ideal subject by AVRT® pioneer, Jack Trimpey.  [More Inside]   Deborah Springborn Deborah Springborn wears many hats in Rational Recovery® operations. She is a friendly voice who often answers the Rational Recovery hot line, the editor and producer of many multimedia productions in the RR Bookstore, creates educational website resources such as the AVRT quizzes on this page, video photographer for community activities, and moderator for the Rational Recovery Discussion Forums. Test Your AVRT IQ Take a short quiz on your understanding of AVRT®. You will get a score with suggestions for improvement. 9th District Prohibits Jail for Refusing AA September 03, 2013: This landmark ruling may become a landslide that will bury the 12-step addiction treatment industry — a counterculture, criminal syndicate that has been operating in our social service system since the 1970’s.     AVRT® in a Nutshell Rational Recovery Monitor Program Notice to Attorneys, Judges, Courts, Licensing Boards, Monitoring Authorities: When substance abuse interrupts a career, disrupts an organization, or endangers the public, strong, decisive action must be taken to protect the parties involved. In the spirit of tolerance and leniency, diversion programs have been instituted nationwide to protect the public interest while addressing the individual’s problem of substance addiction. Unfortunately, substance abuse diversion programs universally adhere to the recovery doctrines of AA/NA, requiring intensive meeting attendance and substance and addiction treatment services based upon the variants of the disease concept of addiction. The Rational Recovery Monitor Program is accepted in a number of jurisdictions as meeting the requirements for diversion programs for impaired professionals (physicians, nurses, dentists, professional counselors, attorneys, airline and military pilots, etc.), employees, DUI/DWI offenders, and cases involving child custody. The RRMP is a password-protected, monitored discussion forum for persons willing to accept lifetime abstinence in lieu of one-day-at-a-time sobriety under evening supervision. RRMP is in the subscriber’s area, dsecribed more completely… [Read more..] A Mazing Road to Recovery     Addictive Voice Recognition Technique®, (AVRT®), Rational Recovery®, and Beast® are service marks registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. This website: ©2012 Jack Trimpey, all rights reserved.

Addiction and Recovery, through the lens of 

Addictive Voice Recognition Technique® (AVRT®) 

 

©2014 Jack Trimpey, all rights reserved. 

 

Ever wonder why alcoholics and problem drinkers drink so much? It’s because alcohol produces in them a pleasure greater than all others — an unspoken pleasure far greater than the normal survival drives of sex, eating, family life, the desire to succeed in life, and physical safety. The resulting drive to repeat that pleasure is proportionately stronger than normal survival drives. Alcohol is a synthetic, man-made substance, among a group of synthetic drugs that produce pleasure greater than evolution has prepared us to manage, a disorienting pleasure that causes one's moral compass to point south toward death rather than toward true north and life.

 

Ever wonder why alcoholics never really get better, but only stay sober one-day-at-a-time? It is because alcoholics believe… 

[more inside…]

 

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Quick Start on AVRT®
©2010, Jack Trimpey. All rights reserved.

There is enough information at this website for you to fully recover from any addiction, e.g., alcohol, crank, crack, heroin, opiates, sex and porn addiction, overeating, computer addiction, gambling, or other personal behavior that goes against your own better judgment. 

•  If you're drinking/using today, you won't learn much of anything. Come back in the morning or when you aren't under the influence.
•  To quit your addiction you must first stop drinking/using long enough to learn AVRT®.

[…More Inside.]

The Barest Essentials of AVRT®
©2010, Jack Trimpey. All rights reserved.

You are not your body. You are a conscious, self-identity — a human being residing in the body of an animal, homo sapiens. “Human” means, “not animal.” A party animal is an animal being. Addicted people are animal beings. Recite this to yourself: "I am me, a human being. My body is it, an animal being. It, not I, wants to drink/use. I will never drink/use again." Feel your body's alarm when you say this.

As a conscious, human being, you cannot be an addict or alcoholic because you are not a physical entity. Addicts function as animals, party animals, but are no less animal than a dog.

You run your body. Your body is powerless to do anything without your direction or consent. Your body wants to run your life, but it can't. It must talk to you in your head, in English, commanding and telling you in a thousand ways to do animal things related to survival, especially pleasurable activities such as eating, sex, and the ultimate pleasure -- your favorite fix. 

Humans live by universal family values, such as these:

Honesty, integrity, personal responsibility, industriousness, love, affection, loyalty, self-discipline, compassion, cheer, generosity, and mutual respect 

In addiction, these human traits are lost without being missed by the addict. Through human eyes, significant others see the addict's coarse, animal disposition and feel alienated from him/her.  

Here are some key definitions:

Addiction: The high life. Persistent use of alcohol and other drugs to obtain addictive pleasures, against your own better judgment. Addiction is the pursuit of pleasure that exceeds the pleasures associated with survival, e.g., food, sex, O2, safety, shelter, etc. The desire for addictive pleasure  is accordingly stronger. Therefore, the desire for pleasure, even addictive pleasure, is a sign of robust health, not of disease. Addiction is a natural function of a healthy body exposed to synthetic substances and experiences.

Addictive Voice (AV): Any thinking, in words and images, that directs, supports or suggests the possible future use of alcohol and other drugs.

The Beast: Addictive desire. The animal desire for addictive pleasures, to get high. Your Beast is a perverted survival drive that speaks with awesome, sometimes God-like, authority, but takes on charming and seductive tones as well.

Bark —> Dog = AV —> Beast

Your AV will give you a hard time as you attempt to make your Big Plan. That’s what AVRT® is for: defeating the thoughts produced by your body which perpetuate habitual self-intoxication. Remember, AVRT-based recovery is effortless for you, but a frightening, painful experience for the Beast. Poor thing.

The Big Plan: A principled commitment to lifetime abstinence from alcohol and other pleasure producing drugs, with no allowance for relapses, i.e., “I will never drink/use again.” 

The Recoil and the Reply: When you make your Big Plan, you’ll feel an emotional recoil — anxiety or a sinking feeling. You'll also hear your head voice saying “Yeah, right. You can’t say never,” or  “You’re doomed to fail,” or, “Life’s no good without drinking/using." The emotional recoil is the Beast. The head noise is your AV, i.e., “It.” Your Big Plan forces the Beast into consciousness, creating the “I/it split” of AVRT-based recovery.

Abstinence Commitment Effect (ACE): The immediate and sustained, uplifted feelings arising from your Big Plan. The return of your human spirit and family values.

Recoveryism: Addiction disguised as recovery. Life according to the rules of addiction, e.g., “Never say never,” one-day-at-a-time sobriety, “Imanalcoholic,” recovery group disorder, infinite tolerance of self-intoxication, disease concept of addiction. (Clue 4 U: Recovery groups and substance abuse counseling are based on doctrinal forms of the Addictive Voice. Check it out, using the definition of the AV, above.)

The goal in AVRT-based recovery is to live comfortably with residual addictive desire, and not to silence or stave off your Addictive Voice. You should welcome the AV as a sign of health, and not as a threat, because your Beast is utterly powerless to act independently of your will.

Stay away from recovery groups of all kinds, substance abuse counselors, and other bad company as well. Set your confidence for lifetime abstinence arbitrarily at 100%, recognize all self-doubt as your Addictive Voice, seek worthy relationships, and you’ll do fine.

The Family Strikes Back!

©2010, Jack Trimpey. All rights reserved.

No family can survive addiction of even one of its members. Addiction is a black hole that consumes all of a family’s finances and emotional resources, and then still demands more. Families of addiction live under a cloud of uncertainty and deception, not only the lying, betrayal, and manipulation of addiction, but also the deceit of the disease concept of addiction, which transforms a perfect ass into a sacred alcoholic. 

Here is an action plan for any family or family member to take against the addicted family member, while also granting him the sense of freedom necessary for self-inspired recovery. Notice the absence of sweetness, compassion, tolerance, and support as you read this simple plan protect you and your family. Review the other resources at this website to get broader understanding of Addictive Voice Recognition Technique® (AVRT®).

1. How long? 

Decide, with as much agreement in the family as possible, how much longer you will tolerate his drinking/using or other vice. You can measure how long in time, like days, weeks, years, or you may decide on a certain number of betrayals. Six months? Three more “relapses,” like three strikes and you’re out? Till death do us part, as in the marriage vows? One more week? One more drop/fix?

Keep in mind that the addiction has continued in large part because the family has been accommodating it, tolerating endless betrayals, accepting one-day-at-a-time sobriety, even sharing in the responsibility for his drinking/using as an “enabler” or “codependent.” Be assured that the addict will continue drinking/using as long as you and the rest of the family will tolerate it, and perhaps longer as well. Addiction expands into the tolerance that surrounds it.

2. Make a Plan B

Before the Family Council, when he’ll be told how much longer you and the family will tolerate his addiction, decide exactly what you will do if he chooses to continue drinking/using. This could be something quite mild, such as refusing to speak to him, keep him in a will, cook for him, or use the same master bedroom, or occupy the same room in the house, or plan any vacations with him. Or, it might be separation or divorce. If children are involved, they will need protection against the long-term ugliness of addiction.

3. Plan the zero-tolerance ultimatum

This is quite unlike the famous intervention, a social sobfest of “tough love” while the rehab van idles outside. The ultimatum is just that — a final demand accompanied by your solemn promise to take a certain action if he continues to indulge his addiction. However, keep in mind that your zero-tolerance ultimatum is not a way of getting rid of your addicted family member, and not a demand that he quit or even stop his addiction. It is simply a demand that he choose between addiction and his family. Big difference. However he chooses, everyone is a winner, because everyone is exercising free will. 

Make sure every family member has a copy of The Art of AVRT, one of which your addicted family member will be given during or prior to your ultimatum. Tell your addicted family member that AVRT is a summary of the (your last name) family values, and that sobriety isn’t good enough for you, for the family, nor for him.

4. Here are the words for your zero-tolerance ultimatum:

Convene the Family Council before he has had his first drink of the day. Begin, without anger or spite, “I/we have decided that I/we will no longer accept your addiction because it is too painful, ugly, and depressing. We love the memory of the better person you once were, but we do not love the stinky, dangerous animal you’ve become. Now you must choose between your addiction and this family. You can’t have it both ways any longer. You must answer this question, so listen carefully: What is your plan for the future use of alcohol and other drugs? Are you going to use again in this lifetime, or are you not? You don’t have to answer me immediately, but I must have an answer by ____. (Say when, but keep it within 24 hours maximum, preferably 2 - 4 hours later). We hope you’ll choose to stay in the family, but please believe me, your next drink/fix will be your way of leaving this family. If you continue your self-intoxication, wherever you are, you will be free to follow your your addiction wherever it takes you, but you will no longer be welcome here or in our hearts.”

Tell him you expect a personal guarantee that he’ll never drink again, and with only one strike and he’s out. For success, the addicted family member should be expected to permanently withdraw from recovery group participation and addiction treatment services, and, of course, the family must desist from participating in the anti-family, addiction-coddling programming of Al-Anon.

The AVRT zero-tolerance ultimatum applies to all addicted family members including minors and persons under psychiatric care. The only exception is for mentally incompetent people, gravely disabled and unable to enter into personal agreements, an extremely rare situation. Addiction does not fall into any psychiatric category, no matter how many diagnostic manuals insist otherwise.

5. Take the Crash Course on AVRT for Families, which will improve your insight and develop some emotional muscle so you can force your addicted family member to choose between addiction and good standing in the family.  Distribute copies of Rational Recovery: The New Cure for Substance Addiction to all of the key family members who are affected by this addiction, including you. At that time, set a time for a Family Council, with other selected family members present, when the family addict will be required to choose between his addiction and family benefits, family participation, and/or family membership. Make sure that all parties are informed that AVRT is a summary of the (your last name) family values, and that one-day-at-a-time sobriety isn’t good enough for the family, nor for the family addict. All involved should make use of the extended Rational Recovery website, with the opional backup of AVRTeleConference services as a cost-effective avenue to life after addiction and recovery.

Zero-Tolerance Ultimatum for Your
Addicted Spouse or Significant Other (ASS)
©2010, Jack Trimpey. All rights reserved.

Addiction is insatiable, and will consume all of any family’s emotional and financial resources, and still demand more. In contrast to the addict-centered, disease/treatment way of thinking that puts the addict at the center of a family support system, AVRT-based recovery, is family-centered, requring the addicted family member to guarantee permanent abstinence as a condition of the benefits of family life. Families exercise their legitmate authority to force the addicted member to choose between his addiction and Plan B, an exact plan of self-protective action the family will take if and when the addict persists with self-intoxication. 

Plan B may include disownment, termination of family membership, separation, divorce, ending financial support, or other means of family protection. Accordingly, we heartily endorse the zero-tolerance ultimatum, in which a family spokesman confronts the addict with, "Today you must choose between your addiction and (Plan B)." Refusal to guarantee lifetime abstinence, including the promise of recovery group participation or addiction treatment services, should be interpreted as "Yes, I will have yummy relapses any time I really feel like it," and set in motion Plan B. 

Families are the source of legitimate, moral authority at the base of public law. Thus, families have powerful means at their disposal to deal directly and effectively with addiction within the ranks. Sadly, fellowships of addiction have conspired for over eighty years to dominate their families so that they become the political center of family life, requiring support, tolerance, and patient understanding in order to avoid continuing drunkenness, abuse, criminality, financial downfall, and mayhem. The culprit is the bogus disease concept of addiction, which transforms the ugliness of addiction into alarming symptoms of a major medical disease, makes addictive self-indulgence into innocent behavior, changes sociopathic addicts into disease victims worthy of compassionate attention, understanding and care. In short, the disease concept of immorality transforms the family's perfect ass into a sacred alcoholic at the center of family life.

The result of this medically-sponsored deception is that families of addiction feel unauthorized to deal logically and effectively with their adult, addicted family members. Following mainstream cultural beliefs and values, they interpret the ugly betrayal of addiction as a medical mystery and seek outside advice and professional advice. Eagerly awaiting them is an inverted family system, Al-Anon, a fellowship based upon the beliefs and values of addicted people, that views addiction/alcoholism as a family disease. Al-Anon is a auxilliary of AA that changes the real victims of addiction, innocent family members, into “enablers” and “codependents” who are largely responsible, genetically and psychologically, for the onset and perpetuation of addiction. In AVRT-based recovery, however, enablers and codependents are considered suckers, falling for the most transparent excuse for self-intoxication, the disease concept of addiction. Fellowships of addicted people, gathered separately as addicts and families, then spawn an endless stream of clinical-sounding excuses, e.g., triggers, stress, depression, isolation, missing meetings, hunger, anger, lonliness, fatigue, "untreated addiction," etc. The over-arching threat to families is that, if an addicted person under duress "relapses," comes to harm or dies, then responsibility lies with the self-protective acts of the family. In other words, the disease concept of addiction is the foundation of emotional blackmail of individual families and the larger human family that makes up society and the nation.

Along the same lines, you may have heard of “interventions,” in which the family has a little surprise party for their substance abuser, with the aim of shaming him/her into immediate enrollment in an addiction treatment center at which the staff are mostly "in recovery" themselves, estranged by addiction from their own families, and reserving for themselves the option of having yummy relapses under certain perfect conditions. The “tough-love” action of intervention is most unlikely to restore your addicted family member to your family, no more so than those "in recovery" who provide services at rehabs who "relapse" at an alarmingly high rate. Obviously, intervention is better called rehab abduction, and your family will come under the influence of recovery doctrines basesd upon the beliefs and values of chronically addicted people. For example, your family life will revolve around your ASS, who will reserve the option to have deeply pleasurable "relapses," while you are expected to live under the uncertainty of one-day-at-a-time sobriety. It is not surprising that the secure, abstinent outcome of addiction treatment services is so low that no such data is collected to support "evidence-based treatment." 

Setting the stage for action:
To follow in this article is a clear, 10-point outline to guide your family through… [More inside]

Jack and Lois Trimpey, Co-Founders

Background
When Lois and I decided to create a better path to addiction recovery back in 1985, it seemed we could improve on what already existed — the recovery group movement and its business arm, the addiction treatment industry. We launched a network of recovery groups based upon the idea that addiction is a psychological hangup which can be overcome through group discussions of cognitive-behavioral therapy. Following my professional pedigree, I linked Rational Recovery strongly with the addiction treatment industry by recruiting hundreds of professional counselors to oversee local RR groups. In doing so, I had joined two of the key features of AA that account for its dismal failure to arrive at prompt, full recovery, (1) the group format that allows fellowships of addiction to emerge as surrogate families, and (2) the clinical mindset of the psychological disease concept of addiction that views self-intoxication by problem drinkers and drug addicts as an innocent act committed by innocent individuals.

The network spread into a thousand cities, with participants "in recovery" joined together in the evenings, away from their families, socializing with other local substance abusers. RR groupers kept coming back year after year in a quest for sobriety based upon emotional comfort, inner peace, self-understanding, and the emotional support of a surrogate family of other substance abusers. By offering a secular alternative very similar to "the real thing," Rational Recovery dovetailed with mainstream thinking and became a mainstream media news story for several years. "Rationality" naturally became an exciting, new flavor of the more pious, 12-step, “spiritual” doctrine created long ago by and for addicted people. The agenda reached far beyond defeating addiction, into evangelistic atheism. Group facilitators even boasted of causing “humanist conversions,” revealing the political strivings of addicted people to create a society in their own base image.

 
Finally it became obvious that nothing had really changed because we had inadvertently created Rational Recovery in the image of Alcoholics Anonymous. During that time, a massive, federal research study, Project MATCH, revealed no difference in the effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral therapy and  12-step recovery, especially in the measure of secure, abstinent outcome. Little wonder, for I had practically cloned 12-step recovery by (1) providing RR group members with a rich source of clinical excuses for relapses and (2) encouraging the formation of relationships between chronically addicted people, relationships that common sense would identify as bad company. The groups necessarily continued the uncertainty principle of one-day-at-a-time sobriety, and reinforced the anti-family attitudes of shamelessness and guiltlessness that typify addiction itself.

Having been seriously addicted for many years myself, I finally understood the brutal truths -- that (1) any means of recovery devised by people in recovery, i.e., in addiction, will necessarily preserve and extend addiction, (2) clinical thought, my own included, is a perfect expression of the Addictive Voice, and (3) never-addicted people, professional or not, have little insight into the subjective experience of addiction and the commonplace experience of abrupt recovery based upon family values. The RR groups had merely substituted secularism for religion, and perpetuated the addict-centered approach we now call recoveryism. These insights alone brought about the end of the Rational Recovery Self-Help Network (RRSN) as well as severance from the addiction treatment industry.

Rational Recovery today is family centered. Our flagship, Addictive Voice Recognition Technique® (AVRT®), is based upon universal family values, meaning the addicted family member gets only the support which his own family sees fit to provide. Often this means no support, which is both logical and constructive, because addicts are not disease victims but traitors to their families who must earn respect through immediate, prolonged, guaranteed abstinence with zero-tolerance for any further indulgence.  

AVRT-based recovery is not tough love, not only because it's tough to love an addicted person, but mainly because addicts are loveless beings who fail to distinguish between love and affection and interpret love and support as tolerance for chronic, open-ended addiction. We know that behind their craziness, however, addicted people are usually good family people who can shoulder the burden of abstinence and grow strong from doing so. For a more in-depth understanding of independent recovery, read the acclaimed article, Why Self-Recovery?

We both wish AVRT® had been available when we needed it almost 30 years ago. That would have definitely saved our family enormous difficulties and despair. Our lives are dedicated to making AVRT® a viable option for all addicted people, including your family. You can get started immediately by reading the tabs above on My Recovery, Families, and Recoveryism. 

Jack and Lois Trimpey, 2013