Good to see you back Jane.
I'll tell you a wee story. Many years ago I had a knock at the door of my flat, dead late at night. Some police and an old woman were there. They wanted to know if I had seen my neighbour - the old woman's son - recently. I hadn't. They were concerned and they kicked the door in. He was dead in bed. A man in his forties he had topped himself with brandy and barbituates.
Weeks later his mother came to see me and she told me why he killed himself. He was an alcoholic and in desperation to quit he had gone to his doc to get antabuse. Unbeknown to him, his doc gave him a placebo. The guy went some months without a drink, but one day he caved and he took one - no sickness, no vomitting, no rush to hospital. He realised he had been taking a placebo, and he killed himself. Why? He blamed the world for failing him.
Since I have started my recovery I have thought about this man. AA gives a way of understanding his mental state, and of course of recognising myself in it too. This man had expectations about how the world should be, and was pretty much always disappointed, until finally he took his own life in, in effect, a tantrum. That's the way I was, and can still sometimes be. What does AA teach me? That drinking alcohol is a symptom of my condition. That my condition is a mental, physical and emotional one (let's not use the word "spiritual" since it just confuses some people), and that one of the ways that my condition manifests itself is in having inappropriate expectations about what's going to happen in the world, and then having great big emotional responses when the world doesn't give me what I want. William Alexander describes it as being in a state where we are perpetually saying "I want, I want, I want......". He goes on to say that the root of the "I want" is - "I want the world to be my parent".
This is the beauty of AA to me. It gives me an explanation of my condition. It shows me how to change, and that change is possible. All this G*d stuff is just a red herring - or a pink unicorn. People are different. They take as much or as little of the G*d stuff as they want.
But change requires - change. If the change required - to become an AA dork - is one that you're not prepared to make, then that's obviously your decision. For motorcycling, scuba diving, dancing, drumming, degree-doing new business-running AA dorks like me, change was the best thing that could've happened.
AA is fundamentally right about one thing as far as I'm concerned.
Change or die. Even if it's only the lonely death, inside.