Originally Posted by
soberlicious 
The self recovered population is certainly harder to examine since they aren't usually at meetings. Do you know roughly how many people Trimpey interviewed? Is that how he compiled these strategies? Wonder where he found these folks...
I don't have numbers, but recall that Rational Recovery at one point fielded the largest "alternative" recovery group movement to date, and did have meetings. Trimpey already had decades of experience in community mental health prior to founding RR, and was a trained RET/REBT therapist. Not surprisingly, he initially based RR on RET/REBT, but since he had himself recovered on his own, the seeds of AVRT were present. This can be seen plainly from the 25-page chapter titled "Voices" in
The Small Book.
I know that he spoke with people who had independently recovered, but he effectively learned to refine AVRT based on feedback from RR members and RR group coordinators. This refinement is actually documented in the Journal of Rational Recovery, and you literally see AVRT coming into shape over the course of about 10 years. He also received feedback from people who attended AVRT classes.
Rational Recovery: The New Cure for Substance Addiction alone was three years in the making, with an intermediary edition titled
The Final Fix.