The service given is because of who a person is on the inside. In the third stage, a person is not acting out of an external value system that defines what is right, or a need for external approval, but out of his or her own character. This type of service work, the experience of activities selflessly undertaken, is what deepens and refines character. This is the stage in which the character work gets done that builds the personalities of people that we all admire like Gandhi or Mother Theresa. In the field of addiction treatment, a cognitive approach has little efficacy.
Chemical addiction is in part a disease of the brain.
People who think about not wanting to drink as a way to get better just become more and more obsessed with drinking. Treatment for alcoholism is not based on thinking your way out of the problem but on taking action to experience a new pattern of living. In fact for the normal, healthy adult, the process of emotional maturation is also primarily one of growth through action, through experience. We don't think about what it is like to experience the death of a parent, and grow emotionally by having thought about that experience, rather we get real emotional growth by living through the experience of the parent's death. One of the greatest attributes of Alcoholics Anonymous is that its founders recognized the connection between service work and the rebuilding of a mature and healthy personality structure.