Inclusion on this list does not constitute endorsement. Readers are strongly encouraged to evaluate whether any given resource is likely to help with their particular concern and what it may require of them.

Twelve-Step Recovery

There’s a whole galaxy of recovery fellowships more or less patterned after Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) which developed a twelve step model for members to follow in stopping compulsive drinking. It’s common as well for twelve-step fellowships to adopt some version of the twelve traditions of AA, a guide to how the fellowship conducts itself and members interact with one another. While most twelve-step fellowships profess neutrality on favoring one or another religion, they are spiritually oriented, teaching that healing from whatever disorder is a gift from God or whatever a member calls the Higher Power.

Our list is hardly complete. We’ve mostly listed organizations that seem fairly closely related to or directly engaging in recovery from compulsive financial underachievement or underearning.

• Underearners Anonymous
• Codependents Anonymous
• Debtors Anonymous
• A Starting Place for Other 12-Step Flavors

Secular Recovery

While there may indeed be organizations of this sort of which we don’t know, the ones we’ve turned up so far seem primarily aimed at treatment of alcohol and other substance abuse addictions. This website is an invitation, if other recovering underearners so desire, to add one to support underearning recovery.

• Addictive Voice Recognition Technique® which succeeded Rational Recovery
• Lifering®
• Smart Recovery®
• Women for Sobriety®

High-Control Groups and Situations of Control

There are three purposes for listing these links. First, an underlying reason for some people’s financial underachievement may be a past or present association with a high control group (like a religious cult) or a narcissistic controlling individual. Second, recovery groups themselves are experienced by some members as such high control groups; listing these links here is about increasing the likelihood that any association formed through this website cause no such harm. And third, while we’re in active underearning, we can have increased susceptibility to being conned into such a situation, particularly among commercial high-control groups including multi-level or network marketing organizations.

• Freedom of Mind Resource Center. Host of a model for identifying controlling organizations based on behavior control, information control, thought control, and emotional control (BITE) as well as much more insight into cult dynamics.
• Rachel Bernstein. Fiercely caring. This therapist specializing in recovery from cults and other situations of control has been stalked and harassed by members of the Church of Scientology for treating people leaving that organization. Don’t miss her podcast series, IndoctriNation. (Full disclosure: founder of Dream-Energizing Earning Partners donates to this podcast.)
• Generaton Cult, a podcast about people who were reared in cults.
• Lalich Center on Cults and Coercion. As of January, 2023, currently undergoing a transition from an LLC to a non-profit. Resource for people who’ve survived cults, high control groups, or interpersonal relationships with malignant narcissists, for people who are concerned about a loved one’s involvement in such situations, and for professionals who serve such people. (Full disclosure: founder of Dream-Energizing Earning Partners participates in one of this center’s support groups.)