The television commercial shows an ornate building with the appearance of being elaborate hotel. A booming voice says, “We treat the causes of addiction. We’re not a twelve step program.” The scene shifts to a young man, who says “I used to be an addict and now I’m not.” (If he was an addict, by the ASAM definition, he still is, even if is clean and sober and in recovery).
A representative of a treatment program, when asked about Motivational Interviewing, says “We don’t do that. It isn’t Twelve Step.”
A representative of an adolescent program says, “You can’t do Twelve Step work with adolescents.” We believe that people saying that are only describing their own competence. Competent clinicians can work with adolescents using a Twelve Step approach. It may or may not be the best method to use in any given situation, but the suggestion that it can't be done is just not true.
Although we do find refreshing exceptions, for the most part both the treatment “industry” (we don’t like that word for treatment programming but we lack a good alternative) is divided into what too often seems like two armed camps. On the one hand we have the twelve step loyalists who claim that anything other than the basics of Twelve Step work is a distraction from becoming and remaining clean and sober. On the other extreme, we have people who rely on alternative methods who claim that twelve step is religious brainwashing and rarely effective. They attack each other in what sounds like the worst of negative political advertising.
Article continues, Member access.
At this time we are modifying the full article for Member Access to include very legitimate points of debate between twelve step advocates an advocates for alternative methodologies. When we complete that, we will change the name of that page and this to reflect that we are looking at more than just the destructive attacks between advocates from the two sides.
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These are related to Substance abuse and Addiction:
- Go to full article on The Destructive Battle over Recovery Methods (Member Access)
- Return to Substance Abuse and Addiction (MSN)
- See Related article on Twelve Step Resources
- See Related article on Twelve Step Alternatives
- See Related article on the History of Differences over Addiction Treatment
- See related article on The Seven Challenges
- See related article on Motivational Interviewing, Stages of Change, Transtheoretical Model
- See related article on Harm Reduction Model
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Last update November 27, 2017