BUT - what I would say I've found helpful about AA is letting go of the madness, the constant battles with myself, the struggle. I prefer the science behind CBT and SMART Recovery principles etc, however, if I'm feeling wobbly, I find going to a meeting for an hour (however weird) - helps. It's an hour where I can listen to other people who totally get it. And hearing other people's successes gives me a huge boost. It's not all doom and gloom and "rock bottom" etc. And I'm not alone in wanting NOT to drink alcohol. And meetings are everywhere - and people in AA are everywhere - so there is support available 24/7.
Popping out of lurkdom to say I agree with this statement by Elf 100%! I got sober through AA two years ago (after years of failed attempts to moderate on my own) and to me the core of AA is listening to other people's stories and knowing that I'm not alone. I still go to about three meetings a week as I find they have a hugely relaxing effect. I suffer badly from anxiety and I usually find the tension draining out of me over the course of the meeting. Whereas I used to have to use alcohol to relieve the tension.
I'm very anti-religious and anti-dogma (I grew up in a fundamentalist church in the US and once I 'escaped' I never looked back). I'm also an academic. So the notion of a creed in AA did put me right off. However, I was desperate enough to try it and for me, it worked. I found the so-called creed quite flexible in practice. I don't have a higher power apart from the benefit I get from going to meetings as I see it, the meetings help me access the better, saner part of myself that I couldn't get consistent access to before. So GOD = 'Group of Drunks' but not in the sense that I'm going to do whatever people in the group tell me just in the sense that I pick and choose from what they say in order to help me lead my own life alcohol-free.
As for powerlessness/submission, I hate those notions too (physical abuse was a feature of my religious childhood). However, I now understand powerlessness in a very specific sense: it means realising that I can't control everyone and everything in my life, and that I'm not responsible for everyone else's unhappiness and everything that goes wrong. In that sense, powerlessness is actually quite freeing. For instance: a traffic jam makes me late for work, my five-year-old has a tantrum and won't eat his breakfast, etc., etc. Instead of freaking out and wanting to drink over these things (which I often did before), I acknowledge that I can't control them and just try to keep going and retain a modicum of sanity. 'Life on life's terms' they say in AA. I focus on the things I CAN control and try to look after myself and be kind to myself, the way I would to a stressed-out friend.
There's a book called A Woman's Way Through the Twelve Steps which is a kind of feminist version of AA. AA was founded by religious white men in middle America in the 1930s, and yes, elements of it are sexist! So this book helped me rethink AA and become comfortable with reshaping its ethos into a tool that worked for me.
Some of the meetings I go to are also NA meetings even though alcohol is the only 'drug' I've ever used. The NA literature is more secular and less old-fashioned than the AA literature. NA focuses not on the substance itself but on the patterns of addiction (and TBH I have addictive behaviours in lots of different areas of my life: eating/spending/working, what-have-you).
Maybe the AA meetings in my town are unusually tolerant, I don't know, but I'm by no means the only 'skeptic' who attends them. Off the top of my head I can think of a woman who is secretary of an AA meeting and freely confesses that she hates the Big Book (ha! I'm no fan of it myself), another man who is secretary of an AA meeting that meets in a local liver ward and freely confesses that he has never made it past Step One but has been sober for decades (whatever works for him!) and so on.
Sorry this has become really long but I think AA can help people if you see it primarily as a group of human beings sharing their struggles with one another. For me it became a kind of non-virtual version of the Bus. With the main difference being that AAers have mostly all come to the conclusion that sobriety (not moderation) is the only thing that works for THEM (I emphasise 'them' as people are different!).
There is no easy way to get sober and I can understand that AA doesn't work for everyone, but I love love love being sober and I don't think I could have got there without AA. Good luck to you on your journey, Elf -- and all the other inspiring babes! xx