Im not sure but ....
 

Whenever I go to AA meetings it makes me want to drink. WTF is up with that? I have been in SLE's treatment etc. Best ones in the country, BFC, Hazelton. I think the business model needs an upgrade. Relapse . Am I beyond hope?

If meetings make you want to drink, don't go to meetings. No one is beyond hope, but one has to stop pouring it down one's throat for hope to become apparent. The physical reality is that you have to do something to get intoxicated. You have to drink. You don't have to do any particular thing to stay sober. If you never take the action to drink, then you will stay sober. It is really that simple. Not so easy for us, but that simple.

I have seen people who seem to attempt to get sober by use of distraction and avoidance. This can be helpful at times but certainly not in every situation. I don't know if you do this, but if so it may be worth a closer look.

Jbird,
i went to Lifering meetings, and for the first few months, they almost always "made me" want to drink. it was disconcerting, to say the least.
i figured out that it was the hour-long concentrated focus on hearing and talking about drinking that did it....in my "outside-of-meetings-life" even at the beginning there were little breathing spaces from that concentration.

but i just kept going, because i firmly believed that looking at the things that "make me want to drink" is of benefit to me and that "i want to drink" in no way means i will. and i was convinced that the problem wasn't in the meeting making me want to drink, but somewhere in how i reacted to the meeting.
has been a long time since i've had that reaction to a meeting.

I had that experience too. Many times after a meeting I just wanted to get drunk or wasted. It helped me to figure out what was going on there, which aspects of the meeting were getting under my skin.

The answers surprised me, they weren't as "obvious" as being around people talking about drinking, they were things that unveiled thought and mood patterns within myself.

When I moved to a place where there were no meetings, I admit, I didn't miss them. I still used the 12 steps and I have remained sober.