Stanton Peele is an attorney, psychologist and an addictions expert. He has been writing about addiction since the 70s, has published a number of books and essays and writes regularly for the Huffington Post. He is an ardent critic of AA and 12 step recovery movements, which has made him very unpopular.

I first heard of him on this site last year, forgot about him and happened upon him again a couple of weeks ago, and since then have read a lot about him.

In a nutshell, Peele believes that addictions are not diseases, he says that they are "negative patterns of behavior that result from an over-attachment people form to experiences generated from a range of involvements."

He argues that most people experience addiction to some degree at least for periods of time during their lives.

He does not view addictions as medical problems but as "problems of life" that most people overcome. The failure to do so is the exception rather than the rule.

I find his delivery/presentation a bit brutish and arrogant at times, he has a caustic tongue, and I think this might also (as well as being anti-AA) be why he's not listened to more. That being said, I find that what he says has a lot of merit. He is one of the pioneers of Harm Reduction and Behavioural Therapy in addiction treatment.

He's all over the internet, here is his site: http://www.peele.net/

To summarise him is difficult but his major theories are:

* Addiction is not necessarily caused by substances, Peele was one of the first to say this and fought for the reclassification of Addiction in the DSM to include behaviours; gambling, sex etc... He was also one of the first to show that nicotine was an addictive substance. In other words: some people become addicted to non-addictive substances/activities and some people use addictive substances without becoming addicted.

* Most people recover naturally from addiction. Most people will fall into addictive behaviour at some point in their lives, the majority of these people will rectify this behaviour without ever seeking treatment.

* Harm Reduction is the most important advancement in addiction treatment, abstinence is an unrealistic and unsuccessful goal, teaching people how to moderate and take control of their drinking is far more useful.

* Treatment should be more than providing support for addicts to quit. He advocates Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) because it empowers the addict to change his behaviour instead of forcing him to accept helplessness. Self-efficacy is a critical component of CBT, which strives to convince people that they have the capabilities and competence to manage their own lives. Any success is attributed to them and reflects back on their self-image; failure helps clients learn how to improve their self-management skills and rebuild their confidence.

I could go on and on but these are the principals that most spoke to me. I found it liberating to realise that just because I displayed addictive behaviour at one point in my life does not mean that I am powerless over alcohol and condemned to either a life of begrudged abstinence or a life of hopeless addiction with the prospect of "jails institutions or death"

Up until reading Peele, I thought that TSM had "saved" me. I thought I had been fortunate enough to be neuro-chemically reprogrammed.

And maybe that's true.

Or maybe it's not, or at least not the whole story, maybe I could have regained control of my drinking anyway, on my own.
Maybe most of us here could.

I can't help but wonder how it would be if none of us ever heard of AA, never had anything to do with AA and just decided to cut back and, if necessary, do CBT?

Seriously, think about that for a bit. The thing is that we would never have learned that :

We were "powerless alcoholics" incapable of managing our lives,
That abstinence was the only way and that any deviation from abstinence is failure - Day 1.
That we are incapable of doing it on our own, that we need "support" and a "higher power"
That we need a "higher power" to "return us to "sanity"" implying that we are insane
That we are "flawed" have "short comings" we have "wronged"
etc ...

They are powerful words, and even if we consciously or intellectually didn't accept/believe them, I can't help but wonder if subconsciously we absorbed them, identified with them ... If you tell a beautiful child that they are ugly, they will grow to believe it, despite what they see in the mirror.

See, I can't help wondering if people had never heard those negative, disabling, disempowering and psychologically damaging messages, would they have more confidence in their ability to moderate their drinking? It's hard to judge after the event but I think it's not unlikely.

And for those who couldn't, what if the standard treatment were CBT and not AA? How big a difference would that make?

Of course the problem is that all of us here know AA to varying degrees, our self-confidence is already damaged in that respect, but does knowing the fact that most people regain control of their addictions on their own, help your confidence?

Do you think it's idealistic piffle?

What do you think?

Curi

I read "Love & Addiction" years and years ago (in the context of an addictive relationship), and hadn't thought of Peele since then. Can you recc'd. a particular book? He has written a slew.

When I just put his name on the search at my library, 3 titles came up, one being the collaboration w/ Audrey Kishline. That is a sad association for him, fueling his critics, no doubt.

Hi Chrissy,

That was a tragic event on so many levels!

Did he co-write her book or just write the introduction? I'm sure he probably got slack, it was a media frenzy and the Abstinence/12 Step movements used the tragedy as proof that Moderation Management didn't work. Peele quipped that it was ironic that the accident happened after Kishline had returned to AA and abstinence, (which she had) and added that it was as just as unfair to blame AA for the accident as it was to blame MM :0)

As for what book to read? Well, I guess it depends what you're interested in, if you're looking for a self-help book about how to control your addiction I think 7 Tools to Beat Addiction is the best one to read first. You can read the first chapter for free on his site: http://www.peele.net/7tools/index.html

If you're more interested in Addiction in general, then try either The Meaning of Addiction or The Truth About Addiction and Recovery If you're interested in shaking free from AA then Resisting 12 Step Coersion is the one. And finally if you are more interested in the politics, philosophy and history of the Disease theory, then The Diseasing of America is the one.

Here are all his books:

http://www.peele.net/bookstore/index.html

I wanted to post a video of him but he's not a great public speaker, I find it impossible to get to the of his videos, his thoughts don't seem collected or something, or that he presumes you know what he's talking about, I don't know, I prefer to read him.

Did Love and Addiction help?

Curi

Ah, thank you for all the details. I will start w/ the first chapter on his website..."free" has a certain draw.

I can't remember anything about Love & Addiction, but I'm very glad to be reminded of that (horrible) stage of my life. From about age 25 - 31, I was miserably strung out on a man in a way MUCH worse than mere alcohol!!!

I'll be very curious to see how your experiment drinking off Nal goes...I have every confidence you will either do well, or go back to "sniffing" the 12.5 mg dosage as needed !

That was an interesting comment you made to Elipee, about him being ahead of the game in coming off 5 months of abstinence. That really reduces the ADE? For me, w/ the AF days that is still a factor (at least mentally). And though my moderate days following an AF still have higher units than I'd like, at a certain point drinking more just seems like too much trouble. I guess that's one way to get there - not admirable, yet it seems to be working.