The Recovery Diaries: The Talking Dog

     

     The last time I saw Jean, she was about to celebrate her fourth month of sobriety by trying out for a part in a film. Before the audition, we went for coffee. 

      She told me a joke. Jean had never told me a joke before. I had no idea she even had a sense of humor.

     "A guy sees an ad on-line about someone selling a talking dog for twenty bucks. So he shows up at the advertised address and knocks on the door. 

     The owner of the dog opens the door and the guy answering the ad says, "So, I hear you have a talking dog you're selling for twenty bucks?"

     The owner says, "That’s right."     
     The other guy says, "Can I see him?"     
     The owner says, "Sure, follow me."
     They go through the living room, up the stairs, and into a bedroom where a dog, is lying on the bed, reading a paper, and watching CNN. 
     The dog looks up and says, "Hi."
     The guy says, "Holy cow! You're a talking dog!"     
     The dog says, "Yeah, I guess."     
     The guy says, "Well . . . why are you just lying there in bed?"
     The dog says, "Well, I have been able to talk ever since I was a puppy. My first job was teaching other dogs how to be seeing-eye dogs for the blind which was rewarding but I needed different challenges so I trained to be a bomb sniffer and worked for the military for quite a while. Then l got a job helping the police sniff out drugs at airports. Found out I was a pretty good at tracking things but wanted a change so went into the theater and got some big parts on Broadway in New York. Then the whole World Trade Center 9-11 thing happened and I was recalled by the military to active duty and spent a lot of time retrieving bodies. At that point I figured as long as I was back in NY, I might as well help out the police again so I went back to work sniffing out drugs at airports. Then I realized I was just burnt out and needed some time off. So I moved to Chiang Mai. I just wanted to reflect on things, figure out what I want to do next, that kind of stuff. You know what I'm saying?"
     The guy says, "Uh, sure. I mean, Wow! That's amazing."
     The owner and the guy leave the roof. 
     The guy says, "Why in the world are you selling that dog so cheap?"
     The owner says, "'Cause that dog is an incredible liar!"

     After laughing, I asked her how she was doing,  (I also wondered why she had told me about a talking dog. But I didn't ask.)
     "Well," she said. "Even though I went to a Twelve Step treatment program, the program and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings left me pretty cold.  AA works for a lot of people according to the testimony I heard in meetings. But for me, it was like joining a fundamentalist religion. AA is faith based despite what it says to the contrary and hasn't incorporated any of the new scientific evidence that's been gathered about addiction and recovery since the AA movement started back in the 1930s."
     "In treatment and in meetings, I heard that it was the "one" way to recover. If I didn't subscribe to "this simple program, I was constitutionally unable to be honest with myself." Whenever I brought up my concerns about lack of scientific evidence supporting AA's claims about how people recover, its rigidity, and its promotion of "recoveryism" as opposed to health, I was told that I was in denial or resisting."
     This one size fits all approach to treatment didn't sit well with me.  I started exploring other approaches to lose my drinking habit. To my surprise, there are quite a few. For example, science writer and author of Inside Rehab, Anne Fletcher, described a number of evidence based alternatives to AA."

      But truth be told, I was still wondering about the talking dog. 

       Then Jean showed me the following New York Times article written by science and nutrition writer, Jane Brodie, in February, 2013, about alternatives to Alcoholics Anonymous.

      "According to Anne Fletcher's recent examinations of treatment programs, most

 are rooted in outdated methods rather than newer approaches shown in scientific studies to

 be more effective in helping people achieve and maintain addiction-free lives. People 

typically do more research when shopping for a new car than when seeking treatment for 

addiction."

       The body of The New York Times article went on to say:

"A groundbreaking report published last year by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University 
concluded that “the vast majority of people in need of addiction 
treatment do not receive anything that approximates evidence-
based care.” The report added, “Only a small fraction of individuals 
receive interventions or treatment consistent with scientific 
knowledge about what works.”

"The Columbia report found that most addiction treatment providers are not medical professionals and are not equipped with the knowledge, skills or credentials needed to provide the full range of evidence-based services, including medication and psychosocial therapy. The authors suggested that such insufficient care could be considered “a form of medical malpractice.”

"The failings of many treatment programs — and the comprehensive therapies that have been scientifically validated but remain vastly underused — are described in an eye-opening new book, “Inside Rehab,” by Anne M. Fletcher, a science writer whose previous books include the highly acclaimed “Sober for Good.”

“There are exceptions, but of the many thousands of treatment programs out there, most use exactly the same kind of treatment you would have received in 1950, not modern scientific approaches,” A. Thomas McLellan, co-founder of the Treatment Research Institute in Philadelphia, told Ms. Fletcher."

"Ms. Fletcher’s book, replete with the experiences of treated addicts, offers myriad suggestions to help patients find addiction treatments with the highest probability of success."

Below, are two alternates to Twelve Step approaches, Jean discovered while conducting her own on-line research. This was after she completed twenty-eight days of a Twelve Step residential treatment program and had attended fifty+ AA meetings.