I cannot tell you how many times I rejected the solution. I used to have problems in the area of work. My sponsor repeatedly suggested doing hours and hours of meditation. I thought he was a little bit simple and that he did not understand. I had a spiritual awakening in great part because of meditation (along with the other Steps), and the problems with work went away.
There are several different ways of rejecting the solution. The most obvious way is to insist that one's unhappiness is not one's own fault but in fact the fault of factors bigger than any of us. I will therefore insist vigorously on the inevitability of misery. I might be a bit more evolved, and resort to 'acceptance' as a blanket solution to all my problems, which, of course, will not do, either. The Serenity Prayer suggests acceptance as one solution but not the only solution. It also suggests courage, change, wisdom, and discernment.
Even the programme itself can be misread and misused to this baleful end. Step One says I am powerless over alcohol. It does not say I am powerless over people, places, and things. Sure, there are certain people, places, and things I am powerless over, and there are certain ways in which I am thus powerless. But there is plenty of power available. I can keep the door locked. This prevents people from coming into my flat unbidden. I can tidy my flat. That's a place. And I can cook dinner. Dinner ingredients are things.
The marvellous thing about saying, in a blanket way, I am powerless over people, places, and things is that it removes responsibility for exercising the power I do have. Instead, I can bask in pseudo-spirituality inactivity and mental laziness: I do not have to discern what I have power over and what I do not; I do not have to discern what God's will is for me; I just lie back, 'let go, and let God'. Meanwhile, nothing changes.
An even more insidious way of rejecting help, from my position of disturbance and dysfunction, is to insist on what I think the path ahead is or should be. Almost invariably, the path either will not work at all, or massively sells me short. That's why I'm in a pickle in the first place. My way has not worked.
I'm convinced I need a piece of tinsel, an angel, or a string of fairy lights. What I desperately need is a Christmas tree, fully trimmed. But I have no tree, nor am even aware of what one is. I just pick up on one of the features of the Christmas tree, go after it like a bloodhound, and try to fix myself just with that. Of course, sitting there snarled up in a string of fairy lights is a far cry from beholding a splendidly decked Christmas tree. If anyone suggests that the problem is not the fairy lights but the lack of tree, I start quoting the literature about fairy lights, not realising that I'm taking the literature out of context.
Good examples of such 'fairy lights', i.e. individually useful programme tools or topics that are dead in the water without having a barn-storming spiritual experience that reveals the illusory nature of the material world and allows me to operate in it without being tangled up in it emotionally are: self-care, boundaries, feeling or processing emotions, reasoning it out, ANY of the slogans, meetings, fellowship, sharing, daily readers, 'studying' the literature. These are good things, but they're the trimmings, not the tree.
Of course, we come back to the fundamental error behind, 'yes, BUT': Step Two suggests that the solution is a restoration to sanity, so a problem to which the programme is the solution is axiomatically insanity. What value is the insane person's perception of what the solution might be? The solution must necessarily be presented by someone who is not insane. In other words, someone else.
Sometimes there is great objection to the 'authority' of a sponsor, or the 'hierarchy' of sponsorship, or the sponsor's stipulation of a timeframe for completing the Twelve Steps. Instead, people talk about the wonderful freedom of 'going at your own pace', about the equality of sponsor and sponsee, or reject the whole notion of sponsorship proper. I even heard someone say recently how 'beautiful' it was that we can go at our own pace and that no one can tell us otherwise. When I see people dawdling with the Steps or failing to complete them and then suffering for far longer than is necessary, I do not find this beautiful: this should be cause for sorrow. Unavoidable suffering is regrettable. Avoidable suffering is insufferable.
Now, of course, the sponsor and sponsee are equal in value as human beings and are equal in their deserving respect, and in many other ways. The sponsor is not morally above the sponsee. There is no hierarchy in the ordinary sense. But the sponsor is definitely further ahead. This means they know things the sponsee does not know; they have had experiences the sponsee has not had; and, crucially, if they are emotionally uninvolved in the sponsee and have learned detachment, they can spot and call out errors and blind spots of which the sponsee is unaware. No one can see the back of his own head without a mirror or a friend, which are really the same thing.
So, the objections to the authoritarian approach have some merit and substance, but they risk throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I do willingly submit to the superior knowledge, experience, and insight of my sponsor, not because he is higher than me but because he is further along than me. The gap is horizontal, not vertical. Recovery starts when I am willing to get well someone else's way, and my job is simply to listen and follow direction. If I take all of the actions as prescribed but the results are unsatisfactory, no harm will flow from the experience, I will have learned something anyway, and I can always ask someone else to take me forward from there.
The motto: don't assess an experience I have not had: act, have the experience, then assess.