I saw the AA drill at second hand. Those people helped my mom pull out of the hole she'd dug, and she never did fall off the wagon after the day she finally called and they visited -- June 21, 1974. Her rock bottom was inability to do anything but sit on the couch, including go to work or do anything for us.

The old man tried AA and ran away in revulsion from the religious aspects to become the local PR flack for Madelyn Murray O'Hair's atheist group. Essentially he substituted addiction to atheist dogma for the booze. He tried to start an atheist recovery group called AARG but it never got much traction. He was pushed out of daily stupefying drinking by multiple DUIs, I think.

One guy at an AA speaker's meeting, friend of my mom's, said his rock bottom was waking up in a parking lot next to his car with his cheek frozen to the pavement. Everybody seems to have a different bottom point, and even in AA each person has an individual way of coping.

But one key to AA's success has been described* as the ability to externalize the struggle via that first step: Admit that we are powerless over alcohol. That seems to make it possible to find something external to be the source of strength, and that gets called 'god' -- one guy said his god was his mailbox, because it brought paychecks.** But the essential gain seems to be how people manage to quit doing the same thing expecting a different outcome. And the social network his huge for them, especially at the beginning.


*Ponderous academic essay that is nonetheless extremely interesting & practically useful, imo.
**Same guy also said he probably spent as much on Coca-Cola as he had on booze, but he'd never received a ticket for driving under the influence of Coca-Cola. (That's ob:P's note that quitting drinking can end up with weight gain due to substituting other compulsions for the drinking.)