Originally Posted by
Vlad 
I discovered AVRT about 6 months in. Trimpey helped me organize what I was already doing.
AVRT is not "new" - it is as old as the hills, and people have been using variations of it for as long as people have been addicted. The only reason it is controversial is because we have been bombarded with messages that nobody can quit the old fashioned way. If you trace the development of Rational Recovery, it started out as a secular alternative which relied on meetings.
The way Trimpey tells it, after RR had spread, he started getting phone calls from alcoholics/addicts who were still going to RR meetings after several years, which was not his original intention. He had imagined that people would eventually move on, and so he shut down the meetings.
The real message of Rational Recovery is that you can indeed do it alone, and that once you learn AVRT, you don't need to rely on RR any longer.