There is a sleight of hand about staying sober, getting well, and forming a relationship with God.
It only works if you believe in it, 100%.
'I knew a man who said he didn't think he could get sober. So he didn't.'
From The Little White Bird, by J. M. Barrie:
Every living thing was shunning him. Poor little Peter Pan, he sat down and cried, and even then he did not know that, for a bird, he was sitting on his wrong part. It is a blessing that he did not know, for otherwise he would have lost faith in his power to fly, and the moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it. The reason birds can fly and we can't is simply that they have perfect faith, for to have faith is to have wings.
I was talking to someone earlier today about why, when I first did the Steps extremely thoroughly, crossing every t and dotting every i, I completed the laborious process in six weeks, which is extremely quick compared to most people, who dawdle substantially and dabble at it over months or years, and he said: Well, you've always had complete faith that the AA programme would work. You had just never found the correct formula up until then. Which was true: surrounded by a plethora of methods (and forms of avoidance), I do not blame myself for not adopting the straight Big Book method before, because I'd never met anyone who had used it and talked about it unambiguously in meetings, and it was not until I heard of such an approach on recordings from America that I decided to try it, because it was clearly the gold standard. But I had had absolute faith in AA for many years at a stretch before, and kept plugging away as best I could. And so I stayed sober. Inelegantly, but sober, because I took what action was shown by others, diligently, as holey as a Swiss cheese as their process was.
I absolutely refuse to indulge in cynicism about whether the programme works and delivers what it promises, and so I can fly. We do the programme once we trust. But it is trusting that brings sobriety to enable us to do the programme in the first place.