For me, neither admission nor acceptance of being an alcoholic made much difference. I did both of these (admitted and accepted it) for many years, yet no change. For me, only action made that oh-so-wanted change: doing all the things to quit drinking and then to embrace recovery, change my activities, habits, etc. I would think we need to accept our condition first in order to initiate change actively... but I am not even sure. I've seen stories where people were still fighting inside, still planning to go back to the drinking lifestyle, but somehow staying abstinent... and the internal acceptance and change came on the go, later, at some point it just clicked. Wasn't my story, but I have seen examples for this.
I personally think we tend to sometimes put a little too much emphasis on the importance of admitting and accepting our alcoholism and then tend to get hooked on contemplating these while the outward parts of our lives still don't change much.
There are different approaches to change, though. Often people say we are what we think, so in order to initiate change, we need to change our thoughts. Then different ways of thinking will trigger behavioral change. Kinda the basis of CBT and things like that... for me this approach has never been very effective, perhaps because my thinking does not tend to be rigid... I don't usually have strong beliefs and can change my perspective and views relatively easily, where I often get stuck is the "acting" part. I think it's similar to fighting cravings... the purely cognitive "urge surfing" type techniques (just accept and view it) never really cut it for me well enough in the beginning when my cravings were very intense. What works is actively (physically) initiating change sometimes even when I don't want, sticking with it for a while, and the process will alter my thinking and feelings as a consequence. As you can see, this approach requires a pretty good level of decisiveness also (often deciding to do something against the internal current of my feelings) -- again, something that works for me and tends to help me. But as we always say, each of us need to find what works best for us
