Ex-Drinker Offers a Sobering Alternative : Alcoholism: Jack Trimpey says that AA isn’t the only way to control the disease. His rehab group dismisses spiritual tenet of recovery.

Except for the “recovery group disorder” he thinks it espouses, the “individual powerlessness” he insists it encourages and the “higher power” he believes it “stuffs down people’s throats,” Jack Trimpey thinks there’s not a whole lot wrong with Alcoholics Anonymous.

Oh, yes.

There’s also the “victim mentality,” the “ritual affection” and the “forceful indoctrination” that Trimpey contends come along with the AA turf.

“AA is a good organization,” Trimpey says, sounding momentarily generous and possibly even sweet. “But it has become a sacred cow.”

Trimpey, a 50-year-old licensed clinical social worker, calls himself a recovered alcoholic--in contrast with AA’s description of former drinkers as recovering alcoholics.

He is also the founder of Rational Recovery Systems, one of a growing number of alternative organizations attempting to minister to the needs of an estimated 20 million Americans with alcohol disorders. Like such other counter-AA groups as the Secular Organization for Sobriety and Women for Sobriety, Rational Recovery distinguishes itself from the giant of alcohol rehabilitation programs in large part because of its objection to AA’s spiritual implications.

Rational Recovery, Trimpey says, “is for people who are not interested in spiritual life. We’re a group of people who won’t be told what to think or what to believe--and we have better things to do with sobriety than waste it on recovery.”

If AA is aware of Trimpey or his program, no one is talking. A spokesperson for Alcoholics Anonymous World Services in New York would only say that “Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion whatsoever” about other forms of treatment.

“It’s that simple,” the spokesperson said. “We don’t say or do anything.”

Trimpey established Rational Recovery in 1986 in his hometown of Lotus, in Northern California’s Gold Rush country. RR’s name, he says, is a deliberate play on the alliterative popularity of AA, the 57-year-old program that annually serves an estimated 2 million Americans.

He says he brought the same “wry humor” to the title of RR’s unofficial manual. “The Small Book,” to be published this month by Delacorte Press, is a playful wag by Trimpey at “The Big Book,” the volume to which AA members turn.

Emily Reichert, executive editor of Delacorte, offered Trimpey “a very generous six-figure” advance for “The Small Book” after “half the publishers in New York” competed to acquire it. Reichert says she was initially skeptical of what she now believes is RR’s “completely new approach to recovery” because “almost every single publisher has at least one, if not 10 or 15, books” based on the 12-Step recovery system pioneered by AA.

“In a way, it was a shocking book to come across our desks,” Reichert says. “Even I thought, ‘What’s this guy raising trouble for? AA works.’ But then I realized I know a lot of people for whom it fails. It’s just like there’s no one cancer therapy that works for everybody.”

Trimpey is more inclined to cast the comparison in political terms. AA, he says, has for too long occupied a monopoly position: “And see, when you don’t have two parties, it’s called a tyranny.”

From behind a full beard, a full face and a burly body that give him the illusion of a large and usually friendly grizzly, the founder of Rational Recovery smiles.

“All we want here is balance,” he declares.

But for groups like RR, parity remains elusive. No figures are available for participation in RR nationwide, but the organization now endorses groups that meet in about 350 cities, including at least 25 meetings in Southern California. By comparison, AA and its affiliates have about 4,000 meetings each week in Los Angeles County alone.

But despite the inevitable ant-versus-elephant comparison, Dr. Mark Kern, another AA dropout and the RR coordinator for Los Angeles, contends that “of the secular groups, we have grown the fastest.”

Rational Recovery claims its origins in Trimpey’s own battle with alcoholism. “Profoundly dependent” on alcohol for most of his 20s and 30s, Trimpey tried “lots of AA” in his quest to end his addiction.

He says he well remembers--and still shudders at the memory of--the last AA meeting he attended. It was a decade ago, and a man approached him and, “with the best of intentions,” told Trimpey how much his 20 years of meetings had meant to him.

“I felt like a truck was parked on my chest,” Trimpey says. “Twenty years?”

Trimpey says he was able to give up drinking entirely by using a combination of his own determination and his training in rational-emotive therapy (RET), a set of psychological principles developed by Dr. Albert Ellis.

Essentially, Trimpey says he used RET to teach himself to recognize and combat his own “addictive voice.” His guiding principle, he says, was his belief that “you feel the way you think” and that, therefore, a change in thoughts will produce a change in feelings and in actions. Trimpey labels this quality a “natural capacity to self-correct” and argues that anyone who thinks about it can employ it.

Applied to addictive behavior, such as excessive drinking, Trimpey says this conviction translates to something as uncomplicated as choice. “Drinking is purposeful behavior,” he says. Therefore, “you can make a decision and stick to it--you can make a decision not to drink. You can choose not to drink.

“There’s really no great mystery here,” Trimpey says. “We’re dealing with something very closely related to common sense.”

Again, AA makes no official comment on other alcohol treatment methods. But Alan Redhead, who has long advocated and employed 12-Step recovery programs in his work as executive director of the Clare Foundation, dismisses the theory behind Rational Recovery as “another of the joke” approaches to alcoholism.

Redhead’s Santa Monica-based foundation sponsors 13 different programs for alcohol rehabilitation and education--all centered around the 12-Step tenets of AA. It is Redhead’s belief that rational does not belong in the same sentence as alcoholism.

“I’ve always felt that alcoholism is a physical and emotional illness,” Redhead says. “We go to the intellect, and there is no answer there.”

Trimpey calls this resistance to other approaches typical of what he believes is “indoctrination” on the part of AA. Similar “coercive methods,” he says, all but convinced him in the early days of his commitment to lifelong abstinence from alcohol that he would inevitably go back to drinking. AA’s insistence that he was powerless against his dependency was “almost like a curse,” he argues.

“It took me a couple of years to realize I was entirely recovered,” Trimpey says. “I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop--until I realized there was no other shoe.”

As his personal rehabilitation transformed into the foundation for Rational Recovery, Trimpey, who describes himself as “a humanist, not an atheist,” says he found he was not alone in his discomfort with AA’s focus on a “higher power.” Direct references to God and to the unnamed “higher power” in AA’s 12 Steps connote “weakness, frailty and degeneracy” on the part of those seeking to recover, he says.

At a recent RR meeting in Anaheim where Trimpey made a guest appearance, a remark by someone who gave his name only as Bob seemed to embody this position.

“I was in and out of AA,” Bob said when it was time for introductions. “I’m an atheist, and I couldn’t grasp any of the spiritual aspects of it.”

Mark Kern, the RR coordinator for Los Angeles, explains that resistance to the spirituality of AA “is the No. 1 reason that I have heard over and over” from people who quit that organization. “Even if they are religious themselves, they want to take responsibility for their own recovery,” Kern says.

Jay Winsten, director of the Alcohol Project at the Harvard University School of Public Health, says that “for many people, the higher-power concept of AA is an insurmountable barrier that prevents them from participating.”

Nevertheless, Winsten points to AA’s long history of success. “My reaction is that a program like Rational Recovery is not a substitute for AA. It is, rather, an important alternative that needs to be offered,” he says.

Yet John Brown, executive director of the Los Angeles Center for Alcohol and Drug Abuse, observes: “There are atheists who do 12-Step programs. They believe that the higher power is themselves.”

At the Los Angeles County Office of Alcohol Programs, director Al Wright says his agency has had “some complaints at some programs that we fund that there has been essentially religious proselytizing” going on in the guise of acknowledgment of a higher power.

While declaring that “we take these complaints seriously, because we wouldn’t want to be doing that with county money,” Wright says the emerging options in alcoholism treatment can be judged only by their results.

“My understanding of the research into alcoholism is that there is no one particular approach that works for everyone--and that, alternately, there’s just about no approach that doesn’t work for somebody,” Wright says. “Ultimately, the proof is in the pudding.”

To Redhead, the spiritual qualities of AA represent the program’s major strength. “It just so happens that AA is probably the biggest spiritual movement of our time, and maybe there’s some reason for that,” he says.

In characteristic fashion, Trimpey grows impatient with the debate. He says he is not interested in bashing AA or any other program but in helping people to recover from alcoholism. “I have a professional stance that is firm and clear. We’re determined to make a change,” he says.

The spiritual component is not all that troubles Trimpey. He declaims, for example, what he calls AA’s “cycle of guilt, blame and denial.” Whereas AA encourages regular attendance at meetings to maintain sobriety, Trimpey teaches that alcoholics can conquer their addiction in a relatively short time, perhaps in no more than six months to one year of RR meetings. And he maintains that the occasional backslide is not tantamount to total failure.

To bring attention to Rational Recovery, Trimpey and his wife, Lois, piled into their motor home a year ago and made a three-month trip across the country. In each state they stopped in, Trimpey says, they left behind a RR program. In some cities, they also stirred up some discussion with AA advocates.

Mark Kern thinks the dialogue has been helpful to RR. “It had to start out as a debate, because there was such a closed-door policy in terms of thinking of other ways,” he says. “There needed to be some provocative discussion, because without some controversy, people’s minds stay closed.”

Trimpey seems to agree. The 1990s, he predicts, will bring emerging options in treatment for dependencies of all kinds. With an impish smile, he adds: “The cat is out of the bag. It’s all right to just say no to AA.”