What's Shameful About Alcohol Addiction?

Or, does it matter? These folks have decided that anonymity is primary, despite the fact that you'll "know" your fellow alcoholics quite personally over time, should you decide to keep coming back.  Of course, you also need to come to grips with your own reality, in a sense, to enter such a meeting, because you have to identify yourself as an alcoholic.  In this sense, your primary identity is obfuscated not by anonymity but by alcoholism; that, in essence, the drink is bigger than you.  You have to realize this to get to another plateau: that you are powerless against alcohol, so that you may, in turn, supplant your powerlessness against alcohol with subservience to a higher power. Mary Karr did it in Lit, and she did so persuasively (at least to me).  Others can do it too, but you have to swallow your own inability to be conceptually flexible about your identity.  Not an easy task.