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LaFemme:
As you may know, I'm not an atheist or agnostic but I'm also not a churchgoer, having found that church services often leave me feeling quite uncomfortable. So I guess you could say that I'm a loner. But I also found, after forty years of trying to quit on my own that I simply could not make it stick. It was only when I got into a group that I had some success. it happened to be an AA agnostics group. I had a lot of misgivings about AA and found it very difficult to attend conventional meetings. And I must say that today after 22 years of recovery, I rarely go even to an agnostics meeting.
So what I can say is that I didn't manage to get sustained recovery until I got into a group. I'm lucky that I found one that seemed to be O.K. for me. Maybe other folks can get long term sobriety on their own, that is without joining a group. Just because I couldn't doesn't mean that it can't be done. But if someone were to ask, I'd say, "Since it's such a very dangerous and serious illness, and since the stakes are so high, maybe its best to be on the safe side and try some kind of a group, if not AA then something else. It doesn't have to be God related, It can be Recovering Dog Lovers, Horse Lovers, Cat Lovers. Just so it's a group. It doesn't have to be spiritual, but some folks say that if it is this can help."

W.