A good way that helped and continues to help me maintain grateful, contented and peaceful sobriety is by accepting that I am the problem. This manages to keep myself in check and realise that if I start slacking in my recovery then the old alkie ways and traits are likely to start flooding back. By knowing this means that I can live in certain ways and practice certain core principles and behaviours towards myself and others to keep myself in 'balance' and thus grateful to be a recovering alcoholic.
Having said that I also suffered from a massive drink problem. In that alcohol directly caused most of my troubles. I only ever wished to drink and could realistically only ever drink until blackout. This was the case from my first drinking experiences at 14 years old. So in that respect my body is physically made like an alcoholic. I also could drink ridiculous quantities of alcohol.
However there are also certain 'issues' that I also had which I also self-medicated with alcohol. Incidentally these started around the time when I started binge drinking regularly. Not related per se but undoubably the heavy drinking helped me block it out, so I never dealt with them properly. Until now as part of my recovery.
So it's a bit of both but it certainly helps me keep my "self-will" in check so to speak by knowing and accepting that I am the problem. I no longer have a drink problem now that I don't drink. But I have to work on myself and do my recovery stuff every single day or I would eventually have my drinking problem back again.
Peace