Professionals in Alcoholics Anonymous are illegally coercing clients into AA, even when it is evidently counterproductive, and they are willfully negligent towards clients who claim to have been harmed by AA and want to explore alternatives and avoid the AA-dominated recovery industry.
After about a half a year of sucessfully exploring alternatives and deciding firmly that AA was confusing me more than helping, AA members involved with my case began twisting any lapse into proof that I couldn’t think for myself, and was an ‘alcoholic’ with all the character defects, denial, and lack of faith attributed to the alcoholic of the Big Book. My therapist told me that she was required to recommend me to go to AA meetings, and eventually terminated me because I decided it was not helpful for me, even though I wanted to continue the discussion.
In June 2014 I filed complaints which were completely ignored. The content of my complaint was similar to this video, and also included a class action complaint about the ethics issues involved when social workers bring their AA religious beliefs to bear on clients. http://www.rational.org/pdf_files/nasw_complaint.pdf It was a clear message that I had no interest in seeing any counselor who is an AA member. They would not meet with me unless I went to AA.
Since my complaint seemed to be willfully neglected (there was no follow up, and I only received a termination letter referring me again to the same treatment I had refused), I was left in some ways completely confused and hurt, and in other ways more and more sure that there is something seriously wrong with AA’s involvement in social work.
The facts are clear. AA is deemed religious in nature by federal circuit courts. Any religious coercion by licensed professionals is against the law, and AA has no place in professional treatment.
Really, there is nothing funny about serious and deadly effects of this malpractice, and it is not something to be brushed aside and simply accepted and forgiven while it continues to happen over and over again. People are being mistreated and left worse off, and then ignored. But it’s not just the termination that bothered me. They had my reviews removed from Yelp, and had my account deleted when I tried to repost it. This is criminal.
So this video shows my experience and the continual retraumatization I experienced by these organizations I went to in hopes of finding professional help in understanding the failure of Alcoholics Anonymous: Samaritan Counseling Center of the Capital Region, Saint Peters Addiction Recovery Center (SPARC), Recovery Resource Center of Albany, Pinnacle Behavioral Health, Capital District Psychiatric Center (NYS OMH), and others.
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