I was fortunate to find a recovery program that worked for me when I started my substance use recovery. However, it didn't take long for me to figure out that "my" program didn't work for everyone.
Back then, if Twelve Step recovery didn't resonate for women, they couldn't usually find other supportive recovery options. I would get sad and worried about women whom I really came to love when they would start to distance themselves from the meetings that had stopped working for them.
When they "left" the program, they left with no information about where else they could heal, what else they could do to keep recovering. I'm happy to say that I know a lot of women who figured out how to recover on their own, even twenty-plus years ago.
But some women felt alienated by their experience in Twelve Step recovery and isolated outside of it, and some of them returned to using substances. I lost a lot of friends simply because they were never told that there were other options for them to recover.
We must be supported to find and follow individualized pathways and patchworks of recovery.