The full answer will not fit in this margin, but I'll give it a rough go. And I hope you'll forgive the delay -- my condition makes both typing and coherent language more difficult than I'd like.

When people come into any twelve step program (AA is the senoir sibling in a large family), the first thing that happens is what the Oxford Group called "deflation". Stated simply, it's an acknowledgement that whatever it is you've been doing to solve the problem isn't working, and that your next big brainstorm is unlikely to be any more successful than the last couple hundred approaches. In HackerSpeak, you are a Blub programmer trying to write elegant Lisp in Brainfuck, and nothing you are likely to do will result in anything other than smoke and shredded paper erupting violently from your virtual Turing machine. In the twelve step world, the wording is "we admitted we were powerless over $interfering_agent, that our lives had become unmanageable." There are dozens of helpful slogans along the lines of "let go and let God", and the Serenity Prayer ("God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.") of which nobody seems to remember more than the first clause. A lot is made of the concepts of powerlessness, surrender and acceptance, and in the early going these concepts are paramount to success.

Unfortunately for too many people, there is a tendency to become stuck in that mode. The first step is clearly written in the past tense, and the Big Book (the Scripture for those so inclined) promises that we will find the power we need to win the battle with the substance and ourselves. The problem is that the learned helplessness, something that was only meant as a means to relax and trust the process, becomes permanent. The Point (with an intentional capital "P") is that we are not God, that this universe wasn't created for our individual pleasure, that it won't bend itself to suit our will and, to paraphrase Marcus Aurelius, things will work out pretty much the way they're supposed to if we stop trying to play with all of the knobs and dials on the machine. Many turn to a god, or a similar concept, and deem that their "higher power", and having something omnipotent that you can almost imagine to trust in when times are darkest can be extremely comforting. Staying in that mode for too long, though, leads people to pray for results that they should be working towards. I have no particular quarrel with prayer as such -- I'm an atheist, but not from the Orthodox sect of atheists -- but every worthwhile prayer I've ever seen in any religion has as its petition, "give me the courage and strength to do the things I need to do." Powerless people who will never be able to manage their own lives pray for divine intervention to produce results for them.

The value of life is in participation. I have been in far too many church basements and community centre attics over the years filled with people who "do the readings", pray and meditate until the cows come home, and rarely have more than this to say when they share: "I've been sober for more than twenty years now, and it seems that every day is a little worse than the one before. I have to learn to 'turn it over' completely, and let God do for me the things I can't do for myself." Far be it from me to stand between a person and his voluntary exile into misery, but I do my best to stop the spread of the dysphoria.

I'm rarely anybody's first sponsor -- I guess I seem too far removed from the problem for people to believe that I've ever been where they are. I have been the second or third sponsor to a whole lot of people, though, and unlearning that helplessness is Job One. To an addict or alcoholic, sobriety is a whole new chance at life, and if all you're getting out of sobriety is sobriety, you are cheating yourself horribly. We all tried sobriety at points along the way before trying the program, and it was a miserable enough experience that we eventually went back to self-medication. Real recovery is in discovering who you are, accepting that person in lieu of the persona you were hoping to wear, and living the hell out of the life that person was supposed to have.

Where was I? Oh, yeah -- my job has been to tell people that they have permission to act. To be unapologetically themselves. To try again tomorrow if they fail today. To understand that they will never achieve the ideals they've set for themselves -- they are merely human, after all -- but knowing that does not mean that striving for those ideals is futile. (And if you're hearing a build-up to a familiar song from The Man of La Mancha in the back of your mind, you're following me exactly.) That's the gist of it. That's who I discovered I am, and what I discovered I was meant to be doing now that everything else is slowly slipping away from my grip. It keeps me alive in more than a metabolic sense -- there ain't nothin' like watching cold, dead eyes begin to sparkle with life to dry a dampened spirit.