Is the programme individualised?

No. You can relax. There's one programme (to rule them all, if you'll pardon the joke). It's written in the Big Book. It's exactly the same whoever you are, however long you've been in recovery, whatever your problem (with tiny adaptations in Step One, and that's it).

If we all have individual programmes, that means we need to make up our solution. We need to take what's in the Big Book, add some things, take away some things, and change some others, according to our own judgement. We need to take what we 'want' and leave the rest.

Ever tried that? Ever tried to make up your own programme? Ever taken the programme and adjusted it to your liking? What were the results? Especially in the long term?

Our lives are different, fine. The will of God communicated to us in Step Eleven is going to vary. What you write on your Step Four is going to be a bit different to what others write. There are things the programme is silent on, e.g. your precise conception of God and which religious denomination you join. But this does not mean that the programme varies. These aspect lie outside the programme.

Imagine a meal where the recipe for the main dish is invariant, but you can serve whatever side you want with it. The side is part of the meal but not the dish. Choosing different sides does not mean that the dish is different, but it does mean that the meal is different.

Telling newcomers that everyone's got their own path with an individualised programme does have a tiny bit of truth in the above sense that the meal is different, but this is a subtlety that, frankly, most people struggle to understand, and the prevalent view in recovery is that we all make it up as we go along, fitting the programme to suit ourselves, and, as I said above, taking what we want and leaving the rest, because the programme is only 'suggested'.

This is not only 'doctrinally' questionable; we're messing with whether people actually survive their alcoholism.

I'm going to try to be clearer with myself and with others in my life that all I have to do is apply the programme exactly as it's laid out and I'll be fine. I've yanked myself back to that middle ground over the last few days and it immediately (in < 24 hours) solved a minor 'existential crisis' that could easily take a person on a wild goose chase.

It's simple. Let's keep it that way!