It feels simultaneously like 6 days and 50 years. A message for anyone who's new: I started doing 12 step work fully expecting it wasn't actually going to fix the problem. I figured I was just going to make sober friends and learn how to live with the gnawing urge to drink. I figured I needed to do the whole "get a sponsor and work the steps" thing just to get people off my back about it, and so I could be "part of the club." The only thing that actually got me to do it in earnest was being told by a young lady I'd met, that she wouldn't let me take her out to dinner until after I'd done certain steps. When I actually did those steps, I was completely dumbfounded when: A) I actually had a profound spiritual experience and lost my urge to drink (was relieved of the obsession) and B) When she told me something to the affect of "It's not you, it's me; I'm just not ready to date," I was able to process and deal with it without drinking (or even wanting to). That had always been one of my reasons to drink, but God had done something in me that changed that. In my experience: The physical addiction is just the tip of the iceberg. Once you've stopped, you start finding all the reasons you used it in the first place. There are a great many things we don't like to feel, and for the alcoholic, it's much easier to "numb out" than to face these things. We get really good at lying to ourselves to accomplish this. For me, the iceberg was mostly made of my (at the time) nihilism and atheism, and trying to reconcile those things with any sort of sense of fundamental justice. If the bad guys win, and I'm just going to get kicked around for being a good guy, then surely I was justified in "tipping the moral scales" here and there, to get the things I felt like I deserved. The tricky part is that my soul knew better. Wrong is wrong, even when it feels good, and right is right, even when it hurts. Therefore, I couldn't be at peace with myself, so I'd "numb that out" too. I found God before I landed in a 12 step program, but I wasn't able to actually "use" my faith until I had faced myself with honesty and humility, through working the steps with a sponsor. The 12 step format is basically a "philosopher's stone." It will allow you to turn yourself from something worthless into something priceless. That said; even people who really need it to survive often don't want it. And many who do actually want it, don't have the fortitude to go through with it. If you're "drinking against your will" and feel like there's no way out, let me tell you with 100% sincerity; God, through the 12 step program, saved my life and completely changed it for the better. Lead into Gold. Off the sauce; jews mad - Especially because Jesus did it. Here's to another year, you mad Hyperborean bastards.