Lots of people (myself included) use the programme in the first few years to help them succeed better in friendships, relationships, with managing money, with getting educated and getting a job or a career, in short with achieving everything they think will make them happy.
Except.
It doesn't. Not really. Little sparks of joy and some comfortable self-forgetting but still acres of anxiety, frustration, disappoint, and, when you realised the gig is rigged, despair.
At seven years my life was light years ahead of where I was when I was new, but there were areas that were rotten on the inside, and there was a generalised disquiet.
The key line in AA's 'Big Book' is this: 'Is he not a victim of the delusion that he can wrest satisfaction and happiness out of this world if he only manages well?'
That doesn't mean I'm bad, dumb, or mean, but it does mean that I've been trying, as it were, to solve hunger by taping sandwiches to my legs. Even good things—relationships, service, wholesome work—will not deliver if I'm still at the centre of my universe, if I’ve still got an investment in the game.
There are two ways people seem to go. I almost went one way, double-backed, and went the right way. I left AA but ultimately because even more disillusioned, found my way back, relearned the language, and, between 10 years and 16 years gradually edged towards a solution. I didn’t slip on alcohol but it was close on substances.
Part of that journey between 10 and 16 involved going down rabbit-holes of analysing and investigating darkness through both spiritual and therapeutic routes. I learned a lot. Except how to turn the light on.
Ultimately, at around 15, I went back through the AA programme dotting the 'i's and crossing the 't's, catching all the things I'd missed (the inevitable failure of self and living life based on what I want, universal forgiveness through the withdrawal of all judgement, and catching all the amends I'd glossed over or swerved the first time, including childhood thefts, meannesses, and every single ex I could find). I woke up. Whole layers of problem I had been hacking at for years dissolved.
The answer was really surrendering to the AA programme, getting more involved at depth with AA (intensive work with other alcoholics in particular), detachment from my material life, and total reliance on the Higher Power, not on me, not on others, not on the world. There is no security there.
The seven-year itch is one itch. There are others. There was more growth and more detachment to come after 16 years. The process is ongoing. I'm pretty happy with how things have turned out