If you are facing an addiction, you are facing something that is ruining your ability to life your life, and will probably kill you, slowly and painfully, eventually. And may well land you in prison along the way.
It's as serious a problem as there is. Like having terminal cancer, only worse for anyone that cares about you.
And the recovery prognosis is not in the addict's favor. For alcohol addiction only 1 out of every 32 alcoholics ever even seek help, and only half of them will stay sober past the first year. (AA stats) For drug addicts the positive prognosis is only about half that good. And 12 step recovery programs have the best recovery numbers of any of the various addiction recovery methods and organizations. I don't know the stats for the other 12 step programs, like GA, OA, SA, or CA, off hand, though (gambling, over-eating, sex, and co-dependence addictions).
Different processes will work better for different people, but when facing such an intractable and devastating illness, it makes sense to accept and use all the help one can get access to. I am coming up on 30 years sober after 20 years as an active alcoholic. My own recovery involved twice weekly meetings with a good psychologist, once weekly meetings with a Bible discussion group that was focused on interpretation, not proselytizing, and a minimum of 3 AA meetings a week, working through the steps with a sponsor. This all worked for me, but I "hit bottom" hard and was willing to do whatever it took to save what was left of my life. I stayed in AA for 8 years, and eventually sponsored many other people. And the thing I learned from that was that the key to recovery is to surrender completely to the process. Just give up and do what you're told by those who are trying to help you, and keep doing it. I have seen a lot of hard core drunks and drug addicts recover their lives and their sanity and go on to live well and fully. But I have also seem some die in their addictions. I make no judgments and pass no blame. It's a very difficult disease to overcome. So I encouraged people to take any help they could get.