Sobriety asks of us many things that require us to adapt to a new way of living, and very few of them are easily acquired. Sobriety works against our natural impulses.
Though you may not recognize me now due to several difficult changes that came about through hard work, acceptance and a desire to live a better life, I wasn't technically a different person than who I was over three-and-a-half years ago when I got sober again.
What I was doing at that time, and partially on an unconscious level, was adapting to a sober life after destroying myself and adversely influencing the world around me, including other people. There was no reset button for me after I finally put down the drink. Some of us may fail to notice or take into account the reality that a willingness to do whatever is necessary in order to achieve sobriety itself is fundamentally rewarding in the long term, even though what we need to do to get sober is inevitably uncomfortable or even painful in the moment. And for many more moments afterwards. So we end up arguing over and criticizing different treatment methods, offering reasons (rationalizations) about what we cannot (will not) do to get sober or, perhaps worse, convince ourselves that we don't have a destructive relationship with alcohol.
You can't teach someone to become motivated internally to get sober, but it is something that can be learned. This is where personal responsibility, including the responsibility for making meaningful changes in our lives, comes in. There are few things in life that improve by virtue of our hoping for the best. And this is only one reason why support is so crucial in achieving sobriety. The rest of the world generally doesn't care that we got sober or what we put ourselves through in order to get there. But for those of us who've been there, sobriety is nothing short of a remarkable achievement, a lifestyle born of personal growth that, when things go well, tends to breed success as a human being.
In the end, I don't believe that I'm a fundamentally different person than I was in early sobriety or even while I was drinking. What I've managed to do (and what others who've achieved sobriety have done), is to change the context in which I live my life, and then adapt accordingly. The ability to adapt to a new way of living is an essential requirement for sobriety that is present before we change the context, even though we may not be fully aware of it. To deny this, I believe, is yet another rejection of our basic humanity.
All of this takes time and any number of personal resources. Learning to live a new life is no different than learning anything else that is new to us -- with the possible modifier that it comes with many more and difficult challenges than what we refer to as "learning" in the common use of that word. It doesn't happen overnight, and is often not at all pretty. It's the struggle, and learning from that struggle, that ultimately brings us to a much better place.