Maybe someone more educated then my BA in business can explain to me why some folks believe Stanton Peele is more credible the Dr. Drew or better Dr. Phil.
I personally think it is because Oprah by passed Stanton for a show and grabbed Phil and as far as Dr. Drew, well lets face it, he is just better looking. More pleasing to look at on TV then Stanton.
If you have ever read "Iron John" by Robert Bly (great american poet) Robert talks about the hairy beast that lives at the bottom of the swamp, metaphorically of course. Stanton every time I see him reminds me of this beast. This beast must be exorcised.
I find people marketing and selling something of their own while denigrating someone else or something else very difficult to hear. I don't care if it is the American way of capitalism (uck!!! drug addicts used for capitalism).
Stanton needs to just focus on his brand of behavioral treatments and leave it at that.
If it works great, if not or people are not being swayed towards your brand of addiction recovery then go back to the drawing board.
Hey Stanton, try being centered on one passion.
Dr. Drew is pure "HoolyWood" plain and simple. Most of his patients are Actors. It is a "reality show" that most say in the end, helped them. Who is to say it did not. Not me.
I found in all my years being in and around drugs and alcohol people straighten out in many ways, there is no "ONE WAY" or "THE WAY".
What I do like about AA is that it does not criticize other alternatives.
I honestly am not well versed on Drew nor Dr Phil... nor Peele for that matter.
ReplyDeleteAs far as reality TV goes, here's my take; reality is what happens when they turn the cameras off.
Dr. Drew and Dr Phil are talking heads with their own TV shows. Dr Peele has a web site and has written several books regarding addiction. All three are Psychologists. They all have opinions and are legends in their own minds. I seldom watch TV and pay no attention to any of them.
ReplyDeleteI don't think Dr.Phil or Stanton Peele are Board Certified Doctors of Psychology but I get the point you are making.
ReplyDeleteI can throw out Dr.Drew and Phil as sensationalizing their methods but Peele has made it a mission of his to invalidate AA. I was just curious and wanted to see if there was any interest in looking into Peele without bias.See exactly what he is saying and possibly why.
Joe, what is DILLIGAS???
ReplyDeleteShit, Danny, I though your Corps experience would have taught you all those terms. DILLIGAS means Do I Look Like I Give A Shit? DILLIRATGAS means Do I Look Like I Really And Truly Give A Shit? They're just smart ass terms we used to use, mostly in the aviation community. (I was a Navy Pilot and flew with Marines a lot)
ReplyDeleteThere was no offense meant, just something I couldn't resist throwing out. Your dates in the corps aren't really that important for you to correct them. No one around here pays any attention to that stuff.
If you look back here I did a thread in an attempt to draw attention to Peele's support of Audrey Kishline's Moderation Management... until she drank a little too much and killed a man and his 12 year old daughter.
ReplyDeleteThat's not to say I should have an opinion on the man nor MM for that matter.
Dr Phil license to practice expired a few years back and to my knowledge was never renewed. Not sure about Drew. Peele, as I said in a couple of previous posts and comments, is denigrating AA to sell his own program. It's the principle of making the other guy look bad, therefore you must be good.
ReplyDeleteI think that Peele really believes what he's preaching, that his way is indeed good and that AA is indeed bad. Being a typical Psychologist (excuse me, a typical social/clinical psychologist) he latches on to a theory and will stick with it throughout his career. They all do that. Just ask Jim.
Their way becomes the true religion and all else is heresy. Peele has to work awfully hard to get his message across as his only real following or reputation is on the internet. He's not exactly a household name.
Just remember the old adage. Opinions are like assholes.....
Joe, I started in the airwing @ Fatima just north of Kadena Airforce base, Okinawa, MWSG-17. I was a door gunner on a CH-47. Got back stateside ended up in G-1, Intell.
ReplyDeleteI never heard of DILLIGAS that one got by me.
I have heard of "Joe and Angia".
I am not against Peele or any entity that is trying to help the alcoholic and addict. Why would I be, my main purpose I this earth is to help others. I try to do this without bias. Many I help today want nothing to do with AA, a friend of mine told me upon hearing this to let the fools alone. I could not do this. I helped this man and he found his sobriety somewhere other then AA. This was over two years ago. I am so happy for him.
ReplyDeleteMy problem with folks like Peele is they forget there isn't just one solution. AA maybe nothing more then a stepping stone for someone on there way to a fulfilling life. To minimize a partial solution to the overall objective is irresponsible in my opinion.
Read Dr. Harry Tiebout's writings on psychotherapy and alcoholism. There is some of his stuff in “A.A. Comes Of Age” and I have several of his old GrapeVine articles saved as word docs if anyone wants them.
ReplyDeleteHere's a conversation between a famous psychiatrist and an alcoholic:
The doctor said, "You have the mind of a chronic alcoholic. I have never seen one single recover where that state of mind existed to the extent that it does in you."
He just told the alcoholic that he is fucked. Alkie knows he is fucked because he feels like the gates of hell just slammed shut on him. But like a good alcoholic he says “Is there any exception?”
“Yes” says the doctor, there is. Exceptions to cases such as yours have been occurring since early times (the beginning of the written word). Here and there, once in a while, alcoholics have had what are called vital spiritual experiences. To me these occurrences are phenomena. They appear to be in the nature of huge emotional displacements and rearrangements. Ideas, emotions, and attitudes which were one the guiding forces of the lives of these men are suddenly cast aside and a completely new set of conceptions and motives begin to dominate them. In fact, I have been trying to produce some such emotional rearrangement within you. With many individuals the methods which I have employed have been successful, but I have never been successful with an alcoholic of your description.”
"There Is A Solution", pg. 27. 4th Edition. I just read this with a sponsee yesterday afternoon.
ReplyDeleteHarry Tiebout Gv article, Part One:
ReplyDeleteWhat Does "Surrender" Mean?
One of AA's first friends in psychiatry points out "the road beyond the miracle
MY first two or three years of contact with AA were the most exciting in my whole professional life. AA was then in its miracle phase; everything that happened seemed strange, wonderful, out of this world. Hopeless drunks were being lifted out of the gutter. Individuals who had sought every known means of help, without success, were responding to this new approach. To be close to any such group even by proxy was in itself most electrifying.
In addition, professionally, a whole new avenue to the problem of alcoholism had opened up. Somewhere in the AA experience was the key to sobriety. Here was the first authentic clue after many years of fruitless effort. Needless to say, the possibilities ahead were most intriguing. Perhaps I could learn how AA worked and thus could learn something about how people stopped drinking.
My future was now clear: I would try to discover what made AA tick. In this quest for understanding, I would never have gotten beyond first base if it had not been for Bill W. and many of the early members. A study of the Twelve Steps helped a little, but of far greater importance were the many insights already possessed by Bill and the others in the process through which AA brought about its results. I heard of the need to "hit bottom," of the necessity for accepting a Higher Power, of the indispensability of humility--ideas which had never crossed my professional horizon and had certainly never influenced my non-professional thinking or attitudes.
Revolutionary as they were, they nevertheless made sense and I found myself embarked on a tour of discovery. I began to recognize more clearly what "hitting bottom" really implied and I began to do what I could to induce the experience in patients--always wondering what was happening inside the individual as he went through the crisis of hitting bottom. Finally fortune smiled on me again, this time from a patient.
Harry Tiebout, Part Two:
ReplyDeleteFor some period she had been under my new brand of psychotherapy designed to promote hitting bottom. For reasons completely unknown, she experienced a mild but typical conversion which brought her into a positive state of mind. Led by the newly-found spiritual elements, weak though they were, she started attending various churches in town. One Monday morning she entered my office, her eyes ablaze, and at once commenced talking. "I know what happened to me. I heard it in church yesterday. I surrendered."
With that word "surrender" she handed me my first real awareness of what occurred during the period of hitting bottom. The individual was fighting an admission of being licked, of admitting he was powerless. If and when he surrendered, he quit fighting, could admit he was licked and could accept that he was powerless and needed help. If he did not surrender, a thousand crises could hit him and nothing would happen. The need to induce surrender became the new therapeutic goal.
Harry Tiebout, Part Three:
ReplyDeleteThe miracle of AA was now a little clearer. For reasons still obscure, the program and the fellowship of AA could cause a surrender which in turn would lead to a period of no drinking.
As might be expected, I, too, had a thrill all my own. I was getting in on what was happening, always an enjoyable experience.
Still questing eagerly, I shifted my therapeutic attack. The job now was to induce surrender. When I tried to cause that I ran into a whole nest of resistances to the idea, totally new territory to be explored. As I continued my tour, it became ever more apparent that in everyone's psyche there existed an unconquerable ego which bitterly opposed any thought of defeat. Until that ego was somehow reduced or rendered ineffective, no likelihood of surrender could be anticipated.
The shifts in emphasis from hitting bottom to surrender to ego reduction all occurred during the first five or six years after my initial contact with AA. I well remember the first AA meeting to which I spoke on the subject of ego reduction. AA, still very much in its infancy, was celebrating a third or fourth anniversary of one of the groups. The speaker immediately preceding me told in detail of the efforts of his local group--which consisted of two men--to get him to dry up and become its third member. After several months of vain efforts on their part and repeated nose-dives on his, the speaker went on to say: "Finally I got cut down to size and have been sober ever since," a matter of some two or three years.
There is more, but you get the gist.
ReplyDeleteYeah Jim, I like this. It ties in nicely with the best definition of bottom that I've heard: "Hitting bottom signals that the message 'I have truly lost control of my use of alcohol' has penetrated the alcoholic's system of denial." George Vaillant "The Natural History of Alcoholism Revisited."
ReplyDeleteHere we see Tiebolt putting this together the relationship of hitting bottom and surrendering as being interdependent with ego. The acceptance of loss of control was a big hit on my ego, and when that fact finally penetrated the wall of denial I had built around me I was finally at at my bottom.
Then,and only then, could my recovery begin.
AA never did anything for me. I spent years there. I am not powerless. I do not have a disease. I am sober today and have a great support system (no sponsor).
ReplyDeleteGood for you. If you don't have the disease, then you wasted all that time going to AA.
ReplyDeleteHow very nice for you Misty.It is good that you are no longer in AA, it is even better that you are not sponsoring anyone.
ReplyDeleteMay I suggest you visit our friends at http://stinkin-thinkin.com
I suspect you will find the folks over there more to your liking.
Most of us on this forum are disease ridden alkies who depend on God and aren't very warm and cuddly types. Thanks for popping in.
Hi Misty. Unlike you, I've found meetings to be as varied as the folks who attend them.
ReplyDeleteSome meetings I go to usually have something in there that makes the hour worthwhile for me. Some have good coffee and some have bad coffee. Some have good cookies and some have stale cookies... but I must say, a stale cookie is better than no cookie.
But regardless of whether I get something out of the meeting or not, I usually have something to offer that meeting. If I'm there, folks are gonna hear something because I bring the heat. Once in a while, there is someone else in there who has something to offer besides me. But in any case, never have I met such a diverse bunch of folks. Normally, we would not mix, but whether these folks are real alkies or not, motivated to do steps or not, I find the folks interesting.
Now, as far as going to meetings just for the sake of going to meetings, that seems pretty boring to me. I don't believe in this notion of sponsor worship or any of that nonsense. You do a set of steps. Then you are sponsor free.
I'm sponsor free. Nobody is dependent on me either.
If you are sober without A.A., then great. This doesn't mean that you cannot better yourself on this planet in some form or another. If you are one of those who grits your teeth and spends your time hating on A.A., then I pity you. If you've found a sufficient substitute to booze then great. You ought to bottle it up and pass it on.
If you're in a spot to help others, then great. If you're not, that's ok too. Keep plugging along and if you get a head of steam and your nose above water, maybe give someone less fortunate a little pick me up or something. You might come to find that you both benefit from it.
Those folks over at ST, some of them may offer a great service. They shed light on the "dark underbelly of A.A.", but some grit their teeth and focus their hatred for things they don't have much control over.
If you truly come across evil or some form of unjustice, shed light on it and make it right. We cannot tackle all the evil on the face of the earth, but we can "clean up the fields we know... for it is our duty to leave a clean field for those who follow us... but it's up to God to see that it gets watered." - a paraphrase of Scott Peck, author of People of the Lie
Damn Patrick,
ReplyDeleteThat was downright kind, caring and diplomatic, makes me feel a tad bad about my smarmy comment....Now I'm over it.
I don't know if I'm with you though on the stale cookie vs. no cookie issue. The group I consider myself a member of usually has one or two bakers bring in some real good treats. They don't last long enough to get stale.
Right. I'm not so sure about the stale cookie either. Especially if they're brittle too.
ReplyDeleteOh, and welcome again Misty!
Could you be the very Misty from www.city-data.com/forum?
If so, I'd like to invite y'all over to my Message forum, a place that I'd inhabited since before I met you. I'd been there since about December of 2006.
http://www.city-data.com/forum/mental-health/1319238-passages-malibu-claims-cure-alcoholism.html
That particular link is where I recently encountered one mistygurl092. If this is the same one, she infact know ftg, MA, massiveattack, etc.
You guys might find the forum interesting in its diversity as it has many many subforums. It's heavily moderated, so be careful on there. I'm over there as McGowdog. Easy enough to remember. The alcoholism/addiction stuff seems to have landed in the Health and Wellness/Mental Health subforum. Enjoy!