My father was in AA, and I'm reasonably sure it saved his life, or at least lengthened it substantially. It was a major factor in getting him out of a spiral o

My father was in AA, and I'm reasonably sure it saved his life, or at least lengthened it substantially. It was a major factor in getting him out of a spiral of depression and business failure. For him, it put him in touch with a community that understood his depression (in a way that I, in particular, never did), and helped him work through that. Stopping drinking was ultimately almost incidental -- it was the initial goal, obviously, but that was only the beginning. He also said he saw a lot of people come in to the program because they felt like they needed to tick a box labelled "recovery". Some of them had been sent by the courts as a condition of getting visitation rights for their children, or by well-meaning marriage counselors, or to prove to themselves or others that recovery was impossible. Very few of those people stopped drinking and changed their lives. If ticking the box was their goal, then arguably it's a success by that metric, but by the program's own goals, of course it wasn't. From his point of view, AA is a tool, if you want to change your life, you can use the AA steps and community to do it, and your odds are fair, although of course there are no guarantees ever.