Great responses. I +1 all of them. Great thread too.
Bigbook says alcoholism is a physical, mental, and spiritual malady. If I were around when they wrote the book I'd have convinced them to include "social" too
. The "spiritual" solution helped me to get healthy in the other 3 areas. I don't believe becoming healthy in any of the other 3 first, would have encompassed the rest as the spiritual did. Getting physically healthy would have been great, but I it wouldn't have helped me mentally, socially, or spiritually. And so on and so forth...
Getting mentally healthy seems as though it would have the same effect, yet many, such as myself weren't capable of that. Not by a longshot. Took a spiritual approach to help me to heal the mental part. Some here at SR do without the spiritual, and go at this from the mental angle. RR and AVRT seem to very much take that route.
IMO, even if taking another route our spirit nature needs healing, and I believe the only way we stay sober
and happy is by working at all 4 of the areas I stated above. Spiritual, by the way, doesn't have to include god in it's definition as far as I (and many others) are concerned. That's a whole nuther subject though.