I struggled with AA / NA as well. Mostly because of the 'higher power' stuff (I'm an atheist) but also this notion that you are powerless to your addiction and without the AA / NA group you are apparantly on the road to jails, institutions, and death (that is in their blurb). Sigh.

Took me a long while... I found this book by this guy on 'rational recovery' which is a kind of a CBT / agnostic version of the 12 step program. He had altered them considerably... But still...

In the end... I figured that dealing with my addiction was about moving forward in life towards things that I want rather than associating with people SOLELY because we were supposed to have the same problems. Those only held me back. Especially the 'disease' talk and the 'you are powerless over your addiction and then along comes God' stuff that I found really hard to palate.

I know AA / NA works great for some people. There are a number of people who don't really benefit from it, however. It simply isn't true that those people who don't benefit are on the road to 'jails, institutions, and death' as there are other varieties of therapy (including group therapy) and other programes out there.

One thing I found hard was the slogans. Some people seemed to live their life repeating slogans from the AA 'bible'.

Reminds me of some people who live their life repeating slogans from their bible...

Reminds me of the skills trainers and what they were teaching us in DBT too... Slogans from the skills manual... Viewing and classifying everything you do in your life into the diary skills cards...

Helps people cope for a time... But after a while the slogans can seem kinda empty. Simplifies things considerably for a time but after a while... Life provides more diversity than any of those classification systems...

For me anyway. Hang in there.