During my first year of sobriety, I dedicated most evenings to researching and developing my own personal recovery plan. Having completley surrendered myself to the AA program before and it not working, I knew I would need to tailor a recovery plan just for me. In this day and age there are thousands of resources from books to web sites and youtube videos all dedicated to addiction recovery and staying sober. I poured over these readily available resources to find the right recovery plan for me. Between that, work, and my work-out routine I didn’t have time to think about drinking. Now that you are not drinking, spend an hour every night working on your recovery plan. If you do go to AA and it’s working for you then by all means keep to that program. It doesn’t hurt to add on to your AA 12 steps with other tools that you find helpful in your recovery.
I didn’t just focus on researching sobriety, I also researched “success”, “grit”, and “gratitude”. You could research “achievment” or “reaching goals” or whatever else comes to your brain. You are smart and don’t need to be spoon-fed, so think for yourself. Your worst thinking may have brought you do this low point in your life, but your best thinking can start now and help you recover from addiction. As you research, write down what strikes you as relevant to your sobriety. Soon you will come up with your own formula. Then start implementing your new-found formula as your recovery plan.
Be open to new ideas as you research. At first I didn’t think I would use “gratitude” at all in my recovery and then it ended up being a key element in my plan. So don’t hesitate to try new things and if it works great, if not then throw it to the side for now and maybe come back to it later. You will learn and grow a lot by researching all the resources about achieving sobriety.