I find the whole Charlie Sheen obsession to be sad and wrong on the part of the media (I have been sober 14 years and founded The Good Men Project…my story is here: http://goodmenproject.com/guy-talk/crash-and-learn/).

He is really sick and we all just keep feeding his addiction. There is nothing fun, funny or cool about sticking a microphone into an addict’s face while he spouts off. Just because he had a hit TV show or is famous doesn’t make it interesting. It makes it even more crushingly sad.

I believe in AA because I have seen how many people’s lives it has saved. But that doesn’t mean it is for everyone. To each their own. But suffice it to say if you are saying the things Charlie is, behaving the way he is, and looking the way he is, you are not well. And you need help. And you need all of our prayers. Not our voyeurism.

Our media has become all about finding and exploiting human train wrecks. How about we focus on the stories of goodness and redemption for a change, particularly when it comes to men?

@tmatlack
http://www.goodmenproject.com

AA is a cult. They demand people pronounce themselves helpless and the victims of a ‘disease’. Where is the disease? There is no provable problem with the body, no test, no scan, just behavior someone doesn’t like. This used to be called morality. Nothing robs a person of free will to change their bad habits by demanding they think of themselves as sick and helpless, that is the problem with the disease model of bad habits.

Bad habits are bad, yes. But you can change your bad habits by being empowered and using your will. Thinking of these habits as a disease, is a foolish leap of faith, and AA is a cult.

You people don’t want to ‘help’ Charlie Sheen, you just want to label him crazy and continue pushing your desire to have every other person in the world who has a bad habit or two to submit to your religion called ‘bad habits are diseases’. Why are they diseases? Pretty much just because those who believe this say this is so.

Cancer is a disease because there is a tumor of out of control cells eating your body alive. Drinking too much for your liking, is a disease just because you say it is. The best response most of you can come up with is, it is a disease ‘just because it is’. This doesn’t cut it with everybody in the world.

Show me another disease you only have when you’re awake.
If I have cancer, I have cancer at night when I’m asleep, and during the day when I’m awake. My will to change a bad habit will not change a ‘disease’, but it can stop me using substances too much. .

AA’s bastardizing of the definition of disease is offensive to people who actually have diseased bodies.

You call it substance ‘abuse’, and act as if this statement is somehow factual and medical, an objective fact about the world. In fact it is entirely a moral statement, nothing more. You drinking champagne on your honeymoon is substance ‘use’, not ‘abuse’, because you didn’t get messy… someone gets messy and all of a sudden it is ‘abuse’. Just because someone doesn’t like the nature of the ‘use’ doesn’t make your personal belief system value judgment about substance use somehow ‘scientific’, in fact it reeks of wishful thinking and quasi-scientific cultism.

Point the finger at the guy with the bad habit, and ‘claim’ something ‘medical’ is going on in his life. A choice is a choice is a choice, you don’t get to medicalize the world’s choices. In fact, if they don’t affect you it should be none of your business.

Sheen has said he’s stopped using substances. He’s said that him using substances was never helped by the AA cult’s belief system. Kids can look either at the people who broke their bad habits by themselves, or the people who walk around claiming they are helpless, powerless, and ‘diseased’ and see who ends up winning. I am someone who ended bad habits without the faith based ‘disease model’, and while it remains to be seen how well Sheen can end his bad habits, I’ll take his rejection of the AA cult any day over the clowns who push false notions of bad habits being a ‘medical’ problem.

Human beings are creatures of habits. Which habits are good and which habits are bad, are entirely a matter of morality and opinion. They are not a matter of objective scientific fact such as ‘this MRI says I have a brain tumor’, which is a real disease.

You may even be harming kids and crippling their sense of free will by indoctrinating them to believe that ‘out there’, there are ‘people with diseases call taking too much drugs’, and ‘you kid, may get this disease’. It’s AA that is the dangerous cult.

AA is definitely a religious cult. I wasted 18 years of my life in and out of AA believing that I had an incurable and progressive disease. In the end I left AA and got better.

It’s totally dishonest the way that AA goes about recruiting new members, and it caused a great deal of confusion in my life. AA’s learned helplessness and self defeatism turned out to be a prescription for attempted suicide.

No one ever talks about the people who leave AA in a state of confusion after having been fed the powerless doctrine, and after working AA’s guilt ridden 12 step religious mind melt. It seems like everyone is willing to rise to the defense of something they actually know little about.

Do some research and you’ll see that AA isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. AA is a religion in denial… a cult that has hijacked a branch of medicine.

I’d advise anyone thinking of going to an AA meeting to find something else. AA meetings are not a healthy place to be.

Why blast AA? Because he can justify his own failure at keeping up with the program by calling them useless. Truth is he did have some success when his dad used some tough love to get his life on track. But you can’t stay sober and drug-free if you continue in the same environment and surrounded by enablers. He may now have been drug-free for a few days (he did pass some tests), but that hardly makes him reformed. He thinks he can have a drink without getting drunk (he did say that in one of the TV interviews), a snort without binging (he didn’t say that, but no doubt he believes it). But, as any alcoholic and drug addict knows, that’s just impossible. This guy has all addictions known to men: Alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, gambling, and porn. He has spent his entire adult life surrounded by women that give him sex in exchange for money, and he sincerely believes that’s something to be proud of and the envy of all men. He’s totally out of touch with reality. His life is unraveling, and it will likely put him on a path of self destruction. He’ll have plenty of others to blame for it.

Typo I meant to say ‘Nothing MORE EFFECTIVELY AND TRAGICALLY robs a person of free will to change their bad habits LIKE AA’s philosophy of demanding they think of themselves as sick and helpless, that is the problem with the disease model of bad habits, this philosophy breeds learned helplessness.