I was required to do meetings by the court and I already knew it wasn't for me, but gave it a shot. It helped a bit like a safety net as I was finding my sobriety sea legs.
I wouldn't let the higher power thing hold you back, unless it's a group who's really into that aspect. From most of my experience it's easily nothing but a symbolic or figurative aspect designed to make sense of any and everything that's unexplainable or hard to grasp, the blind faith in the unknown is a soothing elixir for people who have always used an elixir to make sense of life's highs and lows.
I've been in maybe a dozen different rooms( that's what the different groups are called) and it's crazy how different they are, and how similar as well.
One group there was something off, all these mostly older men, very guarded, a silent elephant in the room. Really odd, I felt hostility just this darkness. I'm about 70% as sure as I could be after about five meetings, these guys were either child molesters or just generally sexually predators. I knew the one guy had that history, and there was a comraderie or deeper understanding implied amongst a few of the others in that regard.
Suddenly I didn't feel so dirty after all, and that cann be real tough to come by for a lifelong drunk who just got sober.
You just have to find your people.
I don't go to any meetings and hardly ever found a group for me when I did, but to this day, I know they're there and that alone has helped me lighten up toward problems that at the time seemed insurmountable, just knowing there's a place I can be, if only for an hour, if things get too bad.
I wish you all luck and wisdom.
I came here tonight because I hate winter, second only to Christmas, which I also love, on the day itself beautiful but the rest of it, the 35mph offshores, chapped burning skin from wind burn all the time indoors in the dark, it's all dragging me through the wood chipper over here. Fucccc.
Pretty sure I'm gonna go surfing when the front passes later today. That's another thing, the one surf buddy I have left is falling out of the rotation. I have been surfing alone, which is fine if not safe, but really I don't have anyone the share it with. No one to text and be like, "I think 12:30 is the call, downtown, I'll holler when I'm leaving..."
"I got fuggin walloped and washed through back to back and never recovered, but I got a couple and throw kine shaka to Neptune"
That sort of thing.
Just the nonsense, and another set of eyes.
Keep your friends stocked.