It's important to pay attention to that stuff and be aware of what your triggers are. For example, I'm fine hanging out in bars very occasionally because I didn't really do that all that often- I preferred drinking by myself at home or at a park. But I know that if I bought a 40 for someone, it'd hit far closer to home because I did that shit all the time.
I did a lot of AA meetings (was required by my outpatient program to get disability) but never did any of the steps, never tried to get a sponsor and generally didn't make too many connections (was friends with a few people in the outpatient program though). It helped that I wasn't raised with any religion so didn't recoil at all the references to god and stuff like that.
But in general, AA seems like a perfect example of a "take what works, leave the rest" type of resource. And they've got a lot of insightful sayings- one of which that comes to mind after reading your post is something like "No matter how much sobriety time you've got, your addiction is right outside doing pushups just waiting for you to relapse".
And yeah, drinking was pretty financial ruinous for me as well. I usually drank cheap beer but would often spend as little money on food as possible to have more booze money, which also resulted in my diet totally going to shit. For me there's really no comparison between booze and weed except maybe the desire to "check out"- with drinking I literally didn't care about anything else. In a strange way, it was almost liberating. But it was mostly pathetic as ####
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