In reply to Terminally Unique's post of today 6:16 p.m. This seems to be the essence of what is going on in AVRT. The beast with its primitive desire to drink seeking the help of the conscious part of the brain to put this into words- hence the addictive voice. The object is to isolate the beast (because it's not "you") and convince the "you", namely the conscious part of the brain, not to pay any attention to the beast, to ignore the beast so that over time the thing loses all vitality and withers away.
As for "success" and how that should be "defined". What I am hearing is that this depends on who is trying to define it. If a person wants to start out with a Big Plan it's best not to try, since the key is to reject the notion of a gradual "recovery" and replace it by a commitment to a Big Plan. But if "success" is being defined by someone who is watching this, or counseling someone with a Big Plan and that someone is asking himself or herself, "Am I having any "success" here with my patients, i.e. are they not drinking, is their Big Plan working?" then I think that we enter into the realm of statistics. The only credible ones I've found seem to point in the direction of diminishing risk after five years of not drinking.
W.