Commonly, practitioners brief against recovery. This means that, whilst they grant that recovery brings about physical sobriety, they deny that it deals with the past, brings about fundamental change in the person or their personality, or is effective beyond the entry level of spiritual growth. The solution, we are told, is to adopt other spiritual practices, techniques from other domains, theories, practices, and there is usually reference to books, PhDs, research, and so on. I agree that other things can help: for me, however, they are bolt-ons, not substitutes or graduation level meals I eat having left behind the baby food of AA.
Invariably, the arguments are straw-man arguments, i.e. arguments that set up a facile and distorted view of recovery in order then to attack this straw man. The finger then points outside AA to other therapies and spiritualities that focus on the individual, the self, and the feeling of negative emotion as the true sign that one is getting somewhere: one is encouraged not to try to 'fix' the negative emotion; being 'well' is 'feeling it'. [NB I agree the emotion should not be fixed; yes, feel it; don't deny it; but if the feeling is coming from self-centered values, from delusion, from emotional immaturity, you sure as hell want to fix that.]
I'll give one example. I'm not going to cite the actual practitioner, because that would be unfair, but I will let this example stand for a range of narratives I have heard over the years.
The narrative goes like this: "Bobby was a Big Book fundamentalist, and after ten years of going to Big Book studies, underlining and analysing words, asking what the original authors meant, and discussing the Big Book, he still had unresolved feelings from the past, a sense of inadequacy, and was so unhappy he almost relapsed. He'd done lots of fourth steps but they had not worked."
This is a mischaracterisation in many ways. Firstly, if all a person does is read and study the Big Book, obviously nothing will happen. But that is not what AA suggests: the book itself suggests not studying the Steps but taking them. A sequence of bad fourth steps will indeed fail. But one good one will bring about great improvement, and each subsequent run will bring more progress. If something was not brought to the table, the problem lies with the individual not bringing it to the table: the problem is not the inadequacy of the table. Those briefing against AA usually miss the point that AA is about the abandonment of self and finding God. I've never heard anyone say something to the effect of, "Bobby used his fourth step to uncover all the ways his distorted values were making him a victim of others' behaviour, past and present, his fifth to clear out his past, his sixth through ninth to forgive and obtain the forgiveness of others, and the last three steps to establish a new life based on entirely different values, specifically helping others to transform their lives. But it didn't work." The thing that didn't work was always a shrunken rump of what AA offers, not the actual programme.
The solution then offered very rarely involves genuine maturing, diminution of the significance of self, taking up responsibilities in the world, developing a relationship of service with God, etc.: the solution almost invariably points backwards.
I am pleased to say that the programme does work, if one works it properly and continuously.
There is no problem that the application of spiritual principles has not gradually solved.