A.A. means attitude alteration.

I don't know how many times toward the end of my drinking and drugging that people told me I had a bad attitude.  I resented that although anytime I did think about it I was never really sure what was meant or what to do.

Today I know a few things.  I drank and drugged partially because I didn't like the way I thought and felt.  Of course eventually I didn't have a choice and I just drank because I needed to even though by then it didn't seem to help for long or work very well,  Drinking and drugging were the tools that I learned to change my internal life to my liking and to cope with situations in the external world.  Some people learned more constructive ways of dealing with these issues while I stopped growing.

The drink and the drugs turned on me eventually and I was brought to A.A.  In A.A. I was shown how to stop drinking and how to "stay stopped."  At first, however, when I stopped drinking I thought that stopping was enough and that I could be the same person I had been.  I thought I could continue to resent people who had more material things than myself.  I thought that I could continue to expect that people would always do things my way.  I thought I could continue to expect to take things from others without gving in return.  Living in reality without drugs or alcohol was too difficult with these attitudes.  It was not surprising that with my sick thinking life was so painful that I again picked up a drug then a drink.

As long as I continued to try and maintain the sick and distorted ways of thinking and feeling which characterized the newly sober me, I could not stay sober for long nor could I feel very good in sobriety.  When I tried to identify with the help of sober individuals, those aspects of myself that seemed distorted and I worked on changing them I began to get better.  A day at a time I'm still getting better.