I really appreciate your response and respect your experience. I'm very happy for people that have been able to make positive changes in their lives and I'm not suggesting anyone stop doing AA if it works for them.
It would be great if there was a sister organization to AA that was more of a group therapy session, without the spirituality and alcohol abstinence components. But maybe that wouldn't work, since there would be no rules and groups could diverge toward unhealthy behaviors.
There's one called Smart Recovery that is more along those lines. They put a lot of effort into keeping their practice in line with the state of the art of mainstream mental health and scientific practice around addiction, and are explicitly secular.
They're based around harm reduction, so no day-counting or rigid definition of sobriety like AA which honestly is wonderful and AA could (and does!) learn a lot from it. Alcoholics already carry a lot of shame, increasing it isn't helpful imo.
It doesn't have the reach or widespread cultural awareness that AA does but they still seem pretty common. I think AA is only really a good fit for people who are already religious or are open to becoming so. Otherwise I generally do suggest people try smart recovery first.
There's all kinds of stuff like that. They don't help. The only sober people at those types of things either use it as an adjunct to their 12 step program or aren't actually alcoholic.
It would be great if there was a sister organization to AA that was more of a group therapy session, without the spirituality and alcohol abstinence components. But maybe that wouldn't work, since there would be no rules and groups could diverge toward unhealthy behaviors.