SUGGESTIONS TO GO BUY –

Jan. 27, 2021 – While there’s no one-size-fits-all treatment strategy to address problematic drinking, many people turn to 12-step programs for peer support—most notably, Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). For Whitaker, the program, which was developed in 1935 and requires participants to admit a powerlessness over alcohol, has never resonated.

When Whitaker began exploring sobriety at age 32, she didn’t identify with the core concepts of the sobriety programs she encountered. So when she set out to design her own recovery program, she knew it had to address four major issues she perceived as problematic with programs like AA: the requirement to identify oneself as “an alcoholic,” the lack of integrated, holistic therapies, the mandated anonymity, and the lack of opportunity to develop agency or self-trust. “Even though I had brought myself to the point of being able to look at my addiction, I would then have to listen to other people because they knew better about what path I should take than I knew myself,” she says. “The impetus for building Tempest was because of the binary nature of [traditional treatment]. We blame certain people who can’t handle alcohol versus looking objectively at alcohol culture which has been exacerbated since the 1930s in response to prohibition, American capitalism, and the world we live in.”

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