It demands that their patients surrender to the program and God, look at the 12 steps:
This part is flexible. God is conceived of as "a power greater than ourselves" in AA, there's a section in the Alcoholics Anonymous book addressed for agnostics that covers this. For some, this is the power of the group setting, or a spiritual connection with the universe, etc.
It's personal surrender, which doesn't end well once they fall back into substances over how they've been trained to see themselves as nothing. It turns the entire process black & white, and how is an agnostic supposed to cover steps 3, 6, 7, and 11? The bandage becomes a trapdoor solution with cult undertones, which is why wellness programs convert into them so easily. Self-surrender is not healthy, and I've watched numerous addicts get worse through the ideology of the program being double-edged through enabling weakness and self-pity.
The best idea honestly is the sunken investment of success, the count of how many days they've made it sober being represented by a physical fetish object (the sobriety chip) since that, rather than pushing the idea of surrender, instead pushes a slow willpower gain with a representation of how far you've come and how much they'd be letting go of. This sort of idea works by contrast over how it's not designed to have you mill yourself down, but rather pride yourself over achieving something like running a marathon.
Rather than teaching personal willpower and how to moderate it pushes a feast or famine model on the basis of giving up, making it easy to give up on giving up. It also makes them act more like bitch boys until their faith is no longer enough, then it's like when college-aged Christians leave the closet and go whole hog into sin.
Willpower can be a reasonable safeguard certain people. There are those where I am that are in their 50s and 60s, and they've tried moderation, usually many times since their 20s. Any drug use for them has led back to their drug of choice, and then often to criminal behavior, prison, and a total collapse in the living situation. Many of these people will say that they have no self control once they make the first step, and that drug use just isn't worth what comes with it. Addiction is something to be avoided at all costs for these people. There are lots of stories here of people that were here or other local treatment centers that end up relapsing and dying.
This is why I see more hope from Antabuse programs, as it actually conditions your automatic responses. The only issue I see with Antabuse is ensuring the patient takes it or if they're desperate enough to try to adapt to the debilitating sickness of it from 'normal' feeling that awful.
If the autopilots go against the person's own desires, it makes sense to target those rather than throw your life into the very same surrender from the other side of the coin. There has to be a base of tenacity or it just becomes a series of transitions, and the work ought to focus on converting stubborn behaviors against addiction instead of simply proxying the surrender elsewhere, turning God into their new Happy Hour until Happy Hour becomes their God.
I argue similarly against programs where you dissociate all your problems into a Tiger or some other beast. While the metaphor of 'feeding the beast' is an effective one I've also seen it used as a source of splitting, having them essentially behave as if there are two senses of themselves rather than training one sense of self to be strong.
Those who have had severe addiction but may not necessarily be confined to that with use (I include myself in that group) should be able to live normally with willpower. It can be risky, especially for people such as myself that sees the end goal as the heavily intoxicated experience as opposed to a few drinks or one pill. It's a game of dose frequency, spacing, and gauging lifestyle permeation that requires a lot of care and investment in other obligations.
You aren't worried about the slippery slope of perception and an adaptive tolerance?
I would be a fool to not worry about that. I still haven't completely thought out how I want to conduct all of this yet.
The biggest trap is the inconsistency of tolerance, and I wish I had an answer for that but I really don't beyond self-abuse rather than self-surrender. Like many things I've argued it has to hurt to get better, and that pain has to be grit through rather than gently pushed.
If people could have a consistent tolerance across their entire lives, addiction would not be nearly as much of a pitfall trap. If someone found joy in just drinking one or two shots, that joy will slowly wean as they adjust to it, requiring more to get to that same place until the next thing you know you're downing an entire bottle to get you where those last two shots used to.
Moderation requires divorcing from fun, seeing the substance almost more like medication rather than gluttony.
If you call that working and not integrating, then yeah we could even call Synanon 'healthy'.
AA doesn't seem very sinister to me. One might miss out on a bit of fun if they're one of the people who could develop adequate discipline in a responsible way, or if they fall victim to a "13th stepper."
Synanon didn't seem sinister either, and they were showing great strides in changing how people behave with their 72 hour brainwashing sessions. You also mentioned Scientology on your list of examples which isn't really any better about this.
AA also survives entirely on the backs of it's followers, through donations to the program and sales of their literature. Conditioning lifelong followers to practice self-surrender is a pretty easy way to get people to be willing to throw their cash at the program, and even if they aren't themselves planning to turn it into something else down the line the practices themselves I'd still argue are psychologically damaging against one's grit and determination, the opposite of what they're trying to promise people.
It's the fact that the very same path that leads to success can be accomplished just as easily as failure with the substance by changing your immediate company and switching out your deity.
Ę̵̚x̸͎̾i̴͚̽s̵̻͐t̷͐ͅe̷̯͠n̴̤̚t̵̻̅i̵͉̿a̴̮͊l̵͍̂ ̴̹̕D̵̤̀e̸͓͂t̵̢͂e̴͕̓c̸̗̄t̴̗̿ï̶̪v̷̲̍é̵͔
