CultNEWS101 Articles: 5/10/2021

Love Has One, Scientology, Australia, Gwyneth Paltrow, Blueface,  IndoctriNation Podcast, AA, Narcissists

Meaww: Carlson? Decayed corpse of 'Love Has Won' cult leader found in Colorado, group arrested

"The remains of the so-called cult's group leader were found in their Colorado headquarters, a mobile home. Members in custody were charged with child abuse and tampering with deceased human remains, however, no foul play is suspected.

"Described as a bizarre spiritual cult group, the leader of 'Love Has Won' was found dead in Colorado. The remains were extremely decayed and an investigation into the same resulted in the arrest of the group members. The remains were found in a mobile home in Casada Park, west of Crestone.

The police found the body after receiving a tip from a member who had revealed that the body of the woman, who is a self-proclaimed "divine being", was transported to Colorado from across the country. The connection between the leader's death and the group in Colorado was first reported by Be Scofield. This group that had quarantined in Kauai has been labeled as a cult by a law enforcement officer. They claim however that they are a religion."

SMH: OPINION, The peculiar experience of being targeted by Scientology

"A month ago, I wrote an investigation in The Age and Sydney Morning Herald that looked into how Scientology shifted tens of millions of dollars into Australia's tax and scrutiny-friendly jurisdiction. It showed how Scientology held extensive assets here for both Australia and the UK and examined its extraordinary wealth against its dwindling number of adherents.

Since then, it's fair to say I've been inundated by blowback. Some of it is so absurd I've laughed out loud.

"I wouldn't be surprised if he has been paid to put out his smear camping (sic) on behalf of top psychs and big pharma," another account wrote.
So let me confirm: I'm not working for Vladimir Putin and I am not a paid agent for anyone other than The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, where I've worked for the past 15 years.
Other material has been less laughable. A Scientology organisation called STAND accused me of inciting genocide, of being a bigot akin to an anti-Semite or Islamophobe and of being the "proud new face of hate in Australia".

One Scientologist wrote of me: "Could it be the dark side of his Germanic DNA gave rise to such bigoted and false claims?"
That would be news to my family, who suffered through Nazi invasion and occupation in Europe in the 1940s."

The Guardian: Gwyneth's Ark: sailing towards wellness but never quite getting there

"If you want to get rich, you start a religion." This was the reported opinion of Scientology founder L Ron Hubbard, who in 1967 bought the first in what was to become a fleet of cruise ships. According to various whistleblower accounts, longtime devotees were finally initiated into the innermost secrets of Scientology on board one of these vessels, having spent years passing through various confected levels and parting with incremental payments totalling hundreds of thousands of dollars. This was where you found out about Xenu, among more weapons-grade lunacy, the galactic tyrant who 75bn years ago exiled multiple individuals to Earth in special craft that weirdly looked exactly like DC10s, then imprisoned them in mountains before blowing them up with hydrogen bombs and brainwashing them with a huge 3D film. My theory has always been that they told you this stuff at sea to reinforce the notion that you were now in too deep to get off the boat, both literally and metaphorically.

So, yes: it's no real surprise to learn this week that turbocapitalist fanny egg pedlar Gwyneth Paltrow has got into the cruise business. Face it, there's never been a better time, with the possible exception of 13 minutes after the end of the Black Death.

As it turns out, Gwyneth had announced a cruise as part of her Goop brand over a year ago but was forced to hit pause with the advent of The Great Unpleasantness. But there was obviously no way a deadly pandemic was going to sink Gwyneth's latest big idea for long. Indeed, you wouldn't even fancy an iceberg's chances against a Goop cruise.

Anyway, madam has partnered with Celebrity Cruises, and will become the brand's new "wellbeing adviser". "I'll be behind the scenes, working on some special projects," explained Gwyneth with the air of someone who would rather die than mingle front-of-house with whichever dreary civilians actually go on these things. "My team @goop is curating programming and fitness kits to add to Celebrity's wellness the [sic] experience."

Ah, there it is: wellness. "Wellness" is part of a class of words unified by the fact that only the most dreadful bores on Earth know what they mean. See also "neoliberalism". Celebrity Cruises itself adds that the fitness kits will enhance "self-care and collective wellbeing", with Gwyneth's role expected to focus on "wellness programming" and something called the "Women in Wellness initiative".

Along with Goop's £1,000-a-day health summits, it all marks a move towards more organised forms of wellness religion by Gwyneth. "She's not necessarily discovering new things," Goop's former content director once breathed reverentially, "but she's bringing ancient things into the mainstream." Mainstream life expectancy in the ancient times was about 32, but whatever floats your cruise ship, of course.

Certainly, Paltrow has often described setting up Goop as "a calling". Without wishing to come off as Joan of Snark, though, you have to wonder what sort of company much of her activity places her in, however she might hate to admit it. A few years ago, the business publication Quartz produced a fascinating article revealing how large numbers of the exact same products were sold on both Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop and Alex Jones's Infowars outlet, only with different packaging. (To refresh your memory chakra, Jones is the far-right wing nut and conspiracy theorist who believes the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax, among myriad other grotesqueries.) A supplement called Bacopa is marketed on Goop as part of a pack branded Why Am I So Effing Tired, and promises to "rebalance an over-taxed system". Over on Infowars, Bacopa features in Jones's signature Brain Force pills, pushed on the premise that "Top scientists and researchers agree: we are being hit by toxic weapons in the food and water supply that are making us fat, sick, and stupid."

Not quite the words Gwyneth would ever use – and yet, how they lurk beneath the surface of a $250m-plus empire that unavoidably implies the path to happiness is via intense consumerism. It's also very much an iterated journey – you buy the vagina egg for one problem, which gives you back pain, so you buy the FasciaBlaster, which gives you bruising, so you buy the homeopathic arnica montana. And so on and so on, forever course-correcting towards wellness but never quite attaining its shores. It's possible to see your life in this church as a cascade of highly priced non-solutions, each purchase flowing from the problems caused by the previous one. How does it end? I guess by then you're an old lady and you swallow a horse. And end up dead, of course.

It goes without saying that Paltrow is not short of believers. Whether Gwyneth's pushing post-Covid quackery or recommending something called "whole body vibration" as a treatment for multiple sclerosis, there is something powerfully religious about the brand she has created in her own image."

Daily Beast: The hip hop star's been compared to R. Kelly and called a "cult leader" for allegedly pressuring the women of his 'Blue Girls Club' to brawl, strip, and get a tattoo or go home.

" ... 24-year-old Blueface saw ... potential: to house an entire show on OnlyFans. The poorly produced content never garnered too much attention outside his fan base until this week, when some social media users went so far as to liken him to R. Kelly after a portion of the latest episode was leaked outside the site.
"Ready to get tatted?" Blueface asks a room of sleeping women that he had flown out to his $1.3 million home in the quiet Los Angeles suburb of Chatsworth in early April. The cameraman pans around the room showing unmade bunk beds and clothes strewn around. "Tattoo or go home, which one is it?" he asks."

IndoctriNation: Part 2 of our conversation with Erin and Rachel Alder. 

"If it's negative, it's a lie" w/ Erin and Rachel Alder. In the second part of this 3-part story, the Alders detail some of the most heart-wrenching experiences they endured during their time in the group and explain the painful lessons they learned while trying to overcome tragedy. 

https://radiopublic.com/indoctrination-Gb1JeZ/s1!19f6a 

Filter: Deprogramming From AA—When a Fellowship Resembles a Cult.

Rachel Bernstein without condemning AA itself, Bernstein acknowledges the dangers of this kind that AA's program can pose for some people. 

IndoctriNation Podcast:  Rachel reveals a few red flags that are common patterns of narcissists.

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Secular groups fight exclusion from AA: 'The best support system in the world'

Alcoholics Anonymous’ religious undertone is under fire in Canada, where an atheist lodged a human rights complaint and secular groups have been delisted

The Guardian

Ashifa Kassam in Toronto

Tuesday 8 November 2016 

The Almighty plays a central part in the hallowed 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Six of them make reference to God, Him or Power. In one step, members vow to hand “our will and our lives” to God while another implores Him to remove their shortcomings.

Now the organisation’s religious undertone – and its utility in fighting alcoholism – has come under fire in Canada, where an atheist has lodged a human rights complaint alleging AA discriminated against him.

For more than two years, Lawrence Knight has watched his complaint snake through the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. Earlier this year, the tribunal said the complaint raised a number of complex legal issues and recommended it go to a full hearing.
More than 23 years sober, Knight says he always found that the world of AA was an uneasy fit. “I come from a long line of humanists,” said the 59-year-old.

We Agnostics, a Toronto secular AA group created in 2010, seemed the perfect solution, offering all the support and companionship of AA but without the trappings of God. Here the 12 steps were still followed – each carefully rewritten to scrub out any mention of God or prayer.

But the group’s separation of church and sobriety didn’t sit well with some. In 2011, We Agnostics and Toronto’s other secular AA group, Beyond Belief, were delisted from the Toronto AA website and directory, in effect removing them from the city’s network of 500 weekly meetings.

The decision prompted tears and shock among the three dozen or so people who had embraced the secular groups. “It was painful. It’s shunning,” said Knight. “It was unbelievable that an organisation that can’t kick anybody out, and that prides itself on that, had kicked us out.”

Members of the secular groups – worried that their hard-won efforts at staying sober were now in jeopardy – vowed to push forward. What emerged was a parallel system of sorts, one that has today swelled to about 350 members in 12 secular AA groups across Toronto.

As the secular movement grew in numbers, Knight and others continued to push to be brought back into Toronto’s AA fold. They appealed to the city’s coordinating body, urging them to reconsider the decision. “We ran into a brick wall,” said Knight.

Frustration drove him to lodge a human rights complaint two years ago, claiming that AA had discriminated against his group on the basis of creed. While directed at Toronto’s coordinating body, the complaint also names the highest levels of the organisation in North America. “They didn’t make any decisions directly,” said Knight. “But there is something that they did do, in my opinion, and that is the fact that there have been agnostic meetings for 40 years, but they haven’t clarified anything; they didn’t have any human rights protocols in place.”

The result is a scattered approach to secularism around the world. In some places, such as New York City, secular groups are allowed to operate freely and under the umbrella of the local AA hierarchy. Other secular groups – from Des Moines to Vancouver – have been treated similarly to those in Toronto, pushed out and left to their own devices over their rejection of God.

Knight’s complaint will head to mediation in the coming weeks. To date, AA has argued to the tribunal that it is a special interest organisation, a status that affords it the right to restrict its membership.

The dispute hints at a broader question being asked among the group’s two million members worldwide as they seek to incorporate 12 steps first penned in the 1930s into modern times: How important is God and religion in AA’s quest to empower people to fight alcoholism?

Some, like Knight, argue that AA’s curative power lies not in religion, but instead in the fellowship it fosters. A growing body of research, he pointed out, now suggests that the roots of addiction are tangled in isolation and loneliness.

The argument clashes with the Toronto coordinating body, which has argued to the tribunal that a belief in the higher power of God is a bona fide requirement for groups in Toronto.

Officials in Toronto declined to comment, while a spokesperson from AA World Services in New York City said the organisation was unable to comment as the matter was before the Human Rights Tribunal.

Knight is hoping that the human rights complaint will force the organisation to definitively address the long-simmering issue. “Alcoholism kills more people than it saves. It’s killed a lot of my friends, it’s killed a lot of my family, it’s an insidious thing. And the best support system in the world is AA.”

But the strength of that support hinges on AA being accessible to all. “The point is that anybody should be able to go to a meeting and not feel intimidated, not feel forced out or that they have to believe in something that somebody else believes,” he said. “Because that’s just ludicrous in this day and age.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/08/alcoholics-anonymous-canada-religion-secular-groups-aa?utm_source=Pew+Research+Center&utm_campaign=ede8c99633-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2016_11_08&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_3e953b9b70-ede8c99633-400018169

Former Vancouver nurse forced into AA substance abuse program says his religious freedom was violated

Glen Schaefer
Vancouver Sun
October 4, 2016

Byron Wood is complaining that he was forced out of the nursing profession because he refused to continue with AA-style meetings. He's an atheist.

A former Vancouver nurse is claiming his rights as an atheist were violated because his employer and union forced him into Alcoholics Anonymous following a psychotic episode.

Byron Wood was involuntarily committed to hospital by a doctor in October 2013, taken there by ambulance after police were called to a walk-in clinic. Wood, 39, said he was suffering withdrawal symptoms from a combination of alcohol and prescription and street drugs.

“I had some time off work and I had been using substances during that time,” Wood said this week. “Before going back to work I stopped using substances, and I experienced severe withdrawal symptoms which caused me to become psychotic.”

Wood’s B.C. Human Rights Tribunal complaint against the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority and the B.C. Nurses’ Union is set for a pre-hearing meeting this December after the tribunal ruled recently that the complaint can go ahead.

While committed to hospital for two weeks, Wood voluntarily changed his nursing status from practising to non-practising.

“The plan was that if I followed this treatment plan it would be converted back to practising,” he said. “I had never been someone who was using substances all the time. It was more something where at certain points in my life I ran into problems with substances.”

Before the October incident, Wood said he worked for Vancouver Coastal Health for about two years as a mental health nurse in the Downtown Eastside.

“I was a case manager for a mental health team,” he said. “I had a case load of around 50 clients with severe mental illness. So I would be responsible for managing their medications and helping them with all sorts of social issues that they encounter.”

In November, 2013, a doctor recommended a treatment program, and that Wood attend AA meetings. Wood was also to submit to random drug testing and was prohibited from accessing, handling or administering sedatives or narcotics at work for two years.

Wood attended a residential treatment program in Ontario in the spring 2014, staying for five weeks, though he took issue with their methods.

“If I questioned the 12-step philosophy or tried to discuss scientific explanations and treatments for addiction, I was labelled as ‘in denial’,” Wood said. “I was told to admit that I am powerless, and to submit to a higher power. It was unhelpful and humiliating.

“There was a mentality among staff that addiction is a moral failing in need of salvation. We were encouraged to pray.”

After completing that program, Wood said, he returned to B.C. and continued attending AA meetings as ordered. “I continued to correspond with coastal health, the union and the college. I gave them names of secular treatment options . . . I asked for alternatives.”

Ultimately, he said he refused to continue with the mandated three AA meetings a week and was fired in February 2015. He grieved his dismissal, and his union and employer agreed in March 2015 that he be allowed to resign instead.

Wood filed his Human Right complaint Sept. 21, 2015, past the usual six-month time limit for such complaints. The tribunal’s recent decision allowed the complaint to proceed despite that.

That decision noted that the health authority, the College of Registered Nurses of B.C., and the union all denied that they were made aware of Wood’s religious concerns.

“The BCNU denied that it forced the complainant to resign,” tribunal member V.A. Pylypchuk wrote. “The BCNU asserted that, had it known about the complainant’s religious objections, it would have investigated.”

If a resolution isn’t reached at the December meeting, Wood’s complaint could go to a tribunal hearing.

http://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/former-nurse-forced-into-aa-substance-abuse-program-says-his-religious-freedom-was-violated

The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry

Since its founding in the 1930s, Alcoholics Anonymous has become part of the fabric of American society. AA and the many 12-step groups it inspired have become the country's go-to solution for addiction in all of its forms. These recovery programs are mandated by drug courts, prescribed by doctors and widely praised by reformed addicts.

Dr. Lance Dodes sees a big problem with that. The psychiatrist has spent more than 20 years studying and treating addiction. His latest book on the subject is The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry.

Dodes tells NPR's Arun Rath that 12-step recovery simply doesn't work, despite anecdotes about success.

"We hear from the people who do well; we don't hear from the people who don't do well," he says.

Interview Highlights

On Alcoholics Anonymous' success rate

There is a large body of evidence now looking at AA success rate, and the success rate of AA is between 5 and 10 percent. Most people don't seem to know that because it's not widely publicized. ... There are some studies that have claimed to show scientifically that AA is useful. These studies are riddled with scientific errors and they say no more than what we knew to begin with, which is that AA has probably the worst success rate in all of medicine.

It's not only that AA has a 5 to 10 percent success rate; if it was successful and was neutral the rest of the time, we'd say OK. But it's harmful to the 90 percent who don't do well. And it's harmful for several important reasons. One of them is that everyone believes that AA is the right treatment. AA is never wrong, according to AA. If you fail in AA, it's you that's failed.

On why 12-step programs can work

The reason that the 5 to 10 percent do well in AA actually doesn't have to do with the 12 steps themselves; it has to do with the camaraderie. It's a supportive organization with people who are on the whole kind to you, and it gives you a structure. Some people can make a lot of use of that. And to its credit, AA describes itself as a brotherhood rather than a treatment.

So as you can imagine, a few people given that kind of setting are able to change their behavior at least temporarily, maybe permanently. But most people can't deal with their addiction, which is deeply driven, by just being in a brotherhood.

On a psychological approach to addiction

When people are confronted with a feeling of being trapped, of being overwhelmingly helpless, they have to do something. It isn't necessarily the "something" that actually deals with the problem. ... Why addiction, though — why drink? Well, that's the "something" that they do. In psychology we call it a displacement; you could call it a substitute ...

When people can understand their addiction and what drives it, not only are they able to manage it but they can predict the next time the addictive urge will come up, because they know the kind of things that will make them feel overwhelmingly helpless. Given that forewarning, they can manage it much better.

But unlike AA, I would never claim that what I've suggested is right for everybody. But ... let's say I had nothing better to offer: It wouldn't matter — we still need to change the system as it is because we are harming 90 percent of the people.

http://www.npr.org/2014/03/23/291405829/with-sobering-science-doctor-debunks-12-step-recovery

A Struggle Inside AA

Nick Summers
Newsweek

May 7, 2007

Recovering alcoholics say a Washington, D.C., group has hijacked the 12-step program's name.

By the time May Clancy turned 15 years old, she was well on her way to drinking herself to death. A middle-school student from Potomac, Md., she had been through 11 different psychiatric and alcohol-rehab programs in two years. Each time, she started drinking again as soon as she got out. Her parents were terrified. "We'd taken her to hospitals—everything possible to get her the best care that we could," says May's father, Mike. "And all these places told us that they didn't think she could make it without Alcoholics Anonymous."

So in November 2005, when May agreed to begin attending meetings at Midtown, one of the oldest and largest AA groups in the Washington, D.C., area, it felt like a miracle. Other AA meetings in the city attracted mostly older men and women; Midtown was known as a place for recovering alcoholics in their teens and 20s. Some of the group's senior members were older, but there were also dozens of high-school and college kids with stories a lot like hers. From the moment she arrived, they seemed to go out of their way to welcome her. At first, May was thrilled to find a group of people who accepted her as she was. "When I went there," she says, "I didn't really talk to anybody, didn't trust anybody. And these people would hang out with me even if I didn't say anything, and include me in conversations. I was desperate to be liked at that point."

But something about Midtown was not right. After a few months, the group's embrace of May began to feel like a chokehold. She says the sponsor assigned to give her moral support and help keep her sober pressured her to cut off ties to anyone outside the group. Another member snatched her cell phone and deleted names in the directory. She says she was pressured to stop taking the medication a doctor had prescribed to manage her bipolar disorder: group members told her she couldn't be sober if she was taking any kind of drug. There was a hierarchy to the group. Younger members were sometimes expected to wash cars, clean houses and do other menial chores for more senior members.

May says she was especially uncomfortable with the emphasis on dating within the group and sex between members. She would listen as girls her age compared notes on the men in the group they had been encouraged to sleep with, some of whom were decades older.

Her suspicions were confirmed when she left Midtown and began attending a different AA meeting. She was surprised—and relieved—to find that many of Midtown's common practices were exactly the opposite of what Alcoholics Anonymous literature teaches. By design, there are no "leaders" in AA groups who exert control over other members. AA doesn't expect members to ignore doctors' prescriptions. It doesn't tell them to turn their backs on friends and family. And far from encouraging sex, AA groups overwhelmingly frown on intimate relationships for the first year of sobriety, when a recovering alcoholic is thought to be most vulnerable.

May's story isn't unique. Now 16, she is one of hundreds of recovering alcoholics who are taking sides in a bitter, unprecedented dispute among Alcoholics Anonymous adherents that pits members of Midtown, who insist the organization has saved their lives and kept them sober, against angry former members, who charge it is a coercive, cultlike group that uses the trusted AA name to induce young alcoholics into a radical fringe movement that has little resemblance to traditional AA.

It is a fight that has been largely waged in private. Some of Midtown's most driven critics organized a committee, dubbed the Concerned Friends Group, and created an anonymous MySpace page for ex-members to share stories. They have, unsuccessfully, tried to have Midtown expelled from churches where its meetings are held and have made numerous complaints to the police. (Law-enforcement officials say they have investigated the group but have not found evidence of criminal wrongdoing.) Many of the people involved in the dispute are recovering alcoholics and have been reluctant to go public with their allegations—both because it is a violation of AA's "anonymous" credo, and because they do not want it known that they are alcoholics. But in dozens of interviews with NEWSWEEK, recovering alcoholics and mental-health professionals describe a group that exerts an unusual amount of control and sometimes seems to put the social desires of some members above the recovery of others.

Despite repeated requests for comment, no current Midtown members agreed to be interviewed on the record, citing AA's tradition of anonymity in the press and their belief that negative publicity scares on-the-fence alcoholics from getting the help they need. But those who spoke or e-mailed without giving their names for publication say that Midtown is a flourishing group that has saved their lives, and that those who criticize it resent their success, have scores to settle or are simply making it all up.

Lauren Dougherty says that doesn't describe her at all. Now 29, she loved all the attention she got when she decided to sober up and join Midtown 11 years ago. A member of her family was an alcoholic, and Dougherty had sat in the back during AA meetings before. But Midtown was different from the meetings she remembered. Her first night, she was introduced to another member of the group and told, "She's your sponsor." Dougherty thought that was odd. AA sponsors are chosen, not assigned. But everyone was so friendly she let it pass. They gave her specific instructions about which Midtown meeting she should attend each day, and told her to cut off friends from her old life, even the ones who didn't drink. Soon her new circle of friends insisted she get an "AA boyfriend." Like May, Dougherty says there was pressure to sleep with older group members, which she refused to do. ("They live off of sex," says Meredith, a 19-year-old former member who, like several others, did not want her full name used to avoid being outed as an alcoholic. "I feel like their way of dealing with alcohol addiction is just by having sex with each other. Being in that group made me want to drink more.")

Disgusted, Dougherty tried to quit the group. She says her sponsor was furious. "You can't trust any of your own thoughts," she said. "You can't go into your own head unsupervised." At first, Dougherty didn't know what to believe, until a rehab counselor told her in no uncertain terms to get out.

Some former members say they too were made to believe that leaving Midtown would doom their recovery. Twenty-six-year-old Kristen spent eight years with the group, shunning family and outside friends. When she applied to go to art school in Richmond, Va., her sponsor, an older man, cursed her out. "You will drink," he told her. "You will fail. You will die." The reaction of her sponsor persuaded her to leave the group once and for all. She began secretly attending other AA meetings in the area. "I was so tired of being afraid all the time," she says. "I'd rather die than be in Midtown again."

Former members claim that Midtown makes it difficult to leave in other ways. About half the group's approximately 300 members rent houses with each other across the D.C. area. Many find work through contacts in the group. For them, exiting Midtown is not just a matter of walking out the door—it means getting evicted, breaking up with a boyfriend or girlfriend, and starting a social life from scratch.

The group's practices have raised concerns among some recovery professionals. Jay Eubanks, who oversees the Gaithersburg, Md., branch of the Kolmac Clinic chain of intensive outpatient rehabs, says patients who come to him from Midtown often need "damage control" to unlearn what the group taught them. "They start isolating people, getting them away from any feedback other than their own ... Only go to their meetings, only talk to people in their group. If you're seeing a therapist, stop seeing a therapist; if you're in treatment, stop going to treatment; if you're being medicated, stop seeing a doctor."

Midtown's approach to treatment so concerned Dr. Ellen Dye, a clinical psychologist in Rockville, Md., that she wrote an open letter to the Washington recovery community in August 2006, detailing two patients' experiences with the group. One young woman, she wrote, was "assigned a boyfriend" and pressured to go off antidepressants; she became actively suicidal and was hospitalized. The second was bossed so severely that he is now unwilling to attend any AA meetings, despite his worsening alcoholism. "At this point," Dye concluded, "I am very apprehensive about referring any clients to AA even if they are severe alcoholics. I think that it is essential that this group be eliminated from AA so that my colleagues and I can feel safe making these referrals again." While most recovery specialists know about Midtown, Dye said, parents and general therapists don't. "We're all saying, 'Go to AA, go to AA,' and we may be sending people into this terrible situation and not realizing it."

Other recovery specialists are more conflicted. Beth Kane-Davidson, director of the addictions center at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Md., says that the center stopped steering patients to Midtown during the past year. But, she adds, "the flip side is, I know people in the group that have long-term sobriety and are doing great." For some recovering alcoholics, she says, "Midtown has been a real godsend. It's taken them in and structured their activities, and filled the void left because they're not using anymore. But where do you draw the line? Given that the line is so fine, we try to err on the safe side."

David Hanrahan has a similar perspective. He got sober in 1985 while attending some of the meetings that later coalesced into the Midtown network; in his mid-30s, he drifted away when he decided he was more comfortable around recovering alcoholics closer to his own age. Hanrahan says a little disorder and disagreement inside AA isn't necessarily a bad thing—in fact, it almost always works out for the good. "I think AA is a miraculous organization that is run by nobody and controlled by nobody, and is complete, pure anarchy—as long as it's tied to the 12 steps—and I mean that in a good way," he says. "There are meetings all over the world, and anyone can start one, and nobody's in charge of it. That's AA's strength and weakness, right there." Hanrahan is concerned by the direction Midtown has taken in the past 20 years, but he also fears that its most organized critics care more about harming the group than reforming AA.

What does Alcoholics Anonymous itself have to say about Midtown? Nothing. A completely decentralized organization, AA has no spokesperson and no national leaders. Its worldwide headquarters in New York—which largely serves to distribute its literature and help people set up local meetings—declined to comment. AA has always relied on locals to govern themselves. Midtown can claim as much right to the Alcoholics Anonymous name as more traditional AA groups. For struggling alcoholics already wary of seeking help, it's another reminder that it isn't always easy to find someone to trust.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18368218/site/newsweek/

Critics Say Washington AA Chapter Is Cultlike

NICK SUMMERS

Newsweek 

May 6, 2007

By the time May Clancy turned 15 years old, she was well on her way to drinking herself to death. A middle-school student from Potomac, Md., she had been through 11 different psychiatric and alcohol-rehab programs in two years. Each time, she started drinking again as soon as she got out. Her parents were terrified. "We'd taken her to hospitals—everything possible to get her the best care that we could," says May's father, Mike. "And all these places told us that they didn't think she could make it without Alcoholics Anonymous."

So in November 2005, when May agreed to begin attending meetings at Midtown, one of the oldest and largest AA groups in the Washington, D.C., area, it felt like a miracle. Other AA meetings in the city attracted mostly older men and women; Midtown was known as a place for recovering alcoholics in their teens and 20s. Some of the group's senior members were older, but there were also dozens of high-school and college kids with stories a lot like hers. From the moment she arrived, they seemed to go out of their way to welcome her. At first, May was thrilled to find a group of people who accepted her as she was. "When I went there," she says, "I didn't really talk to anybody, didn't trust anybody. And these people would hang out with me even if I didn't say anything, and include me in conversations. I was desperate to be liked at that point."

But something about Midtown was not right. After a few months, the group's embrace of May began to feel like a chokehold. She says the sponsor assigned to give her moral support and help keep her sober pressured her to cut off ties to anyone outside the group. Another member snatched her cell phone and deleted names in the directory. She says she was pressured to stop taking the medication a doctor had prescribed to manage her bipolar disorder: group members told her she couldn't be sober if she was taking any kind of drug. There was a hierarchy to the group. Younger members were sometimes expected to wash cars, clean houses and do other menial chores for more senior members.

May says she was especially uncomfortable with the emphasis on dating within the group and sex between members. She would listen as girls her age compared notes on the men in the group they had been encouraged to sleep with, some of whom were decades older.

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Her suspicions were confirmed when she left Midtown and began attending a different AA meeting. She was surprised—and relieved—to find that many of Midtown's common practices were exactly the opposite of what Alcoholics Anonymous literature teaches. By design, there are no "leaders" in AA groups who exert control over other members. AA doesn't expect members to ignore doctors' prescriptions. It doesn't tell them to turn their backs on friends and family. And far from encouraging sex, AA groups overwhelmingly frown on intimate relationships for the first year of sobriety, when a recovering alcoholic is thought to be most vulnerable.

May's story isn't unique. Now 16, she is one of hundreds of recovering alcoholics who are taking sides in a bitter, unprecedented dispute among Alcoholics Anonymous adherents that pits members of Midtown, who insist the organization has saved their lives and kept them sober, against angry former members, who charge it is a coercive, cultlike group that uses the trusted AA name to induce young alcoholics into a radical fringe movement that has little resemblance to traditional AA.

It is a fight that has been largely waged in private. Some of Midtown's most driven critics organized a committee, dubbed the Concerned Friends Group, and created an anonymous MySpace page for ex-members to share stories. They have, unsuccessfully, tried to have Midtown expelled from churches where its meetings are held and have made numerous complaints to the police. (Law-enforcement officials say they have investigated the group but have not found evidence of criminal wrongdoing.) Many of the people involved in the dispute are recovering alcoholics and have been reluctant to go public with their allegations—both because it is a violation of AA's "anonymous" credo, and because they do not want it known that they are alcoholics. But in dozens of interviews with NEWSWEEK, recovering alcoholics and mental-health professionals describe a group that exerts an unusual amount of control and sometimes seems to put the social desires of some members above the recovery of others.

Despite repeated requests for comment, no current Midtown members agreed to be interviewed on the record, citing AA's tradition of anonymity in the press and their belief that negative publicity scares on-the-fence alcoholics from getting the help they need. But those who spoke or e-mailed without giving their names for publication say that Midtown is a flourishing group that has saved their lives, and that those who criticize it resent their success, have scores to settle or are simply making it all up.

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Lauren Dougherty says that doesn't describe her at all. Now 29, she loved all the attention she got when she decided to sober up and join Midtown 11 years ago. A member of her family was an alcoholic, and Dougherty had sat in the back during AA meetings before. But Midtown was different from the meetings she remembered. Her first night, she was introduced to another member of the group and told, "She's your sponsor." Dougherty thought that was odd. AA sponsors are chosen, not assigned. But everyone was so friendly she let it pass. They gave her specific instructions about which Midtown meeting she should attend each day, and told her to cut off friends from her old life, even the ones who didn't drink. Soon her new circle of friends insisted she get an "AA boyfriend." Like May, Dougherty says there was pressure to sleep with older group members, which she refused to do. ("They live off of sex," says Meredith, a 19-year-old former member who, like several others, did not want her full name used to avoid being outed as an alcoholic. "I feel like their way of dealing with alcohol addiction is just by having sex with each other. Being in that group made me want to drink more.")

Disgusted, Dougherty tried to quit the group. She says her sponsor was furious. "You can't trust any of your own thoughts," she said. "You can't go into your own head unsupervised." At first, Dougherty didn't know what to believe, until a rehab counselor told her in no uncertain terms to get out.

Some former members say they too were made to believe that leaving Midtown would doom their recovery. Twenty-six-year-old Kristen spent eight years with the group, shunning family and outside friends. When she applied to go to art school in Richmond, Va., her sponsor, an older man, cursed her out. "You will drink," he told her. "You will fail. You will die." The reaction of her sponsor persuaded her to leave the group once and for all. She began secretly attending other AA meetings in the area. "I was so tired of being afraid all the time," she says. "I'd rather die than be in Midtown again."

Former members claim that Midtown makes it difficult to leave in other ways. About half the group's approximately 300 members rent houses with each other across the D.C. area. Many find work through contacts in the group. For them, exiting Midtown is not just a matter of walking out the door—it means getting evicted, breaking up with a boyfriend or girlfriend, and starting a social life from scratch.

The group's practices have raised concerns among some recovery professionals. Jay Eubanks, who oversees the Gaithersburg, Md., branch of the Kolmac Clinic chain of intensive outpatient rehabs, says patients who come to him from Midtown often need "damage control" to unlearn what the group taught them. "They start isolating people, getting them away from any feedback other than their own ... Only go to their meetings, only talk to people in their group. If you're seeing a therapist, stop seeing a therapist; if you're in treatment, stop going to treatment; if you're being medicated, stop seeing a doctor."

Midtown's approach to treatment so concerned Dr. Ellen Dye, a clinical psychologist in Rockville, Md., that she wrote an open letter to the Washington recovery community in August 2006, detailing two patients' experiences with the group. One young woman, she wrote, was "assigned a boyfriend" and pressured to go off antidepressants; she became actively suicidal and was hospitalized. The second was bossed so severely that he is now unwilling to attend any AA meetings, despite his worsening alcoholism. "At this point," Dye concluded, "I am very apprehensive about referring any clients to AA even if they are severe alcoholics. I think that it is essential that this group be eliminated from AA so that my colleagues and I can feel safe making these referrals again." While most recovery specialists know about Midtown, Dye said, parents and general therapists don't. "We're all saying, 'Go to AA, go to AA,' and we may be sending people into this terrible situation and not realizing it."

Other recovery specialists are more conflicted. Beth Kane-Davidson, director of the addictions center at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Md., says that the center stopped steering patients to Midtown during the past year. But, she adds, "the flip side is, I know people in the group that have long-term sobriety and are doing great." For some recovering alcoholics, she says, "Midtown has been a real godsend. It's taken them in and structured their activities, and filled the void left because they're not using anymore. But where do you draw the line? Given that the line is so fine, we try to err on the safe side."

David Hanrahan has a similar perspective. He got sober in 1985 while attending some of the meetings that later coalesced into the Midtown network; in his mid-30s, he drifted away when he decided he was more comfortable around recovering alcoholics closer to his own age. Hanrahan says a little disorder and disagreement inside AA isn't necessarily a bad thing—in fact, it almost always works out for the good. "I think AA is a miraculous organization that is run by nobody and controlled by nobody, and is complete, pure anarchy—as long as it's tied to the 12 steps—and I mean that in a good way," he says. "There are meetings all over the world, and anyone can start one, and nobody's in charge of it. That's AA's strength and weakness, right there." Hanrahan is concerned by the direction Midtown has taken in the past 20 years, but he also fears that its most organized critics care more about harming the group than reforming AA.

What does Alcoholics Anonymous itself have to say about Midtown? Nothing. A completely decentralized organization, AA has no spokesperson and no national leaders. Its worldwide headquarters in New York—which largely serves to distribute its literature and help people set up local meetings—declined to comment. AA has always relied on locals to govern themselves. Midtown can claim as much right to the Alcoholics Anonymous name as more traditional AA groups. For struggling alcoholics already wary of seeking help, it's another reminder that it isn't always easy to find someone to trust.

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