Everyone is welcome. You can sit anywhere you’d like. The wooden chairs are arranged in a circle, so everyone can see one another. There is a particular chair in the circle at the front of the room. That’s where she’ll sit. The smell of freshly brewed coffee makes its way through the small, intimate space.
Lisa takes her place and awaits the entry of others. Some of them are familiar faces. She smiles. Smiles at those she knows, like Nick and Natalie, and even those she does not. It’s a pleasant smile, one that the kind, green-eyed woman with shoulder-length blonde hair has worn for years in this familiar setting. It’s important for everyone to feel comfortable. Maybe it’s their first time, or perhaps they usually attend different meetings. (To protect their privacy, Lisa and other AA members are referred to only by their first names.)
There is light chatter while everyone takes their seats, providing a gentle buzz throughout the room, a different buzz than the kind they all once craved. And then it’s time to begin.
“Good evening everyone,” Lisa says. “My name is Lisa, and I am an alcoholic. Welcome.”
As the chairperson for this Alcoholics Anonymous meeting — and there are always different chairpersons at any particular meeting based on who volunteers — she explains that AA is a fellowship of people who share their experiences, strength and hope as they take their sobriety journeys. There are no dues or fees, and the only requirement for membership is the desire to stop drinking.
“Are there any other alcoholics here other than myself?” Lisa asks. “Is this anyone’s first meeting, or first meeting back? If so, please stand and tell us your name and a little bit about yourself.”
This is how most AA meetings begin—at least until 2020. But when COVID-19 hit the U.S. last March, this tried and true format, which has been going strong since 1935, was shaken.
In-person meetings were abruptly canceled as panic of the virus persisted. Suddenly, those in recovery faced online Zoom meetings and phone meetings for the first time. The sitting side-by-side, close-knit kinship enjoyed by many on their sobriety journeys was halted, and they were left facing their disease at a distance, or alone.
“That isolation piece is a big deal for alcoholics,” Lisa said. “Alcoholics tend to isolate. When you think about the end of drinking, you’re drinking alone at home and kind of hiding it. When your alcoholism takes over, your world gets really small.”
Lisa emphasized the importance of unity in the program, as it is one of the three major purposes of the program, the others being recovery and service.
“I think when somebody is alone, they’re lonely,” Lisa said. “They go to these meetings for the fellowship. I would say all my friends are in AA. It’s not like a requirement, it’s just how it works out. That’s who you’re hanging out with.”
Last March, Dayry Hulkow, a primary therapist at Arete Recovery, which is a Delphi Behavioral Health Group facility, told Fox News that she had already seen an increase in relapses at her clinic. And that was just one month into the pandemic.
Lisa, 56, has fared better than some by not experiencing the worst of the effects that COVID-19 has had on recovery life. She has 25 years of sobriety and lives with her husband, Mark, who has been sober for 40 years. The couple met through AA and were married in 2015, a second marriage for each.
“Because he’s in recovery also, I’ve got somebody that I live with who’s in the program,” Lisa said. “I don’t feel it as strongly as someone who lives alone might. But of course I miss it, I miss going.”
It wasn’t Lisa’s fault, or at least that's how she rationalized it. Yes, her marriage was falling apart and her work was sub-par. What did her boss expect?
Drinking wasn’t the problem, it was the solution. She was drinking because everything and everyone else in her life was disappointing or stressful or unfulfilling.
Alcohol was a necessity she could not imagine going without, and she hadn’t since she was 15 when her family moved from Connecticut to Texas. It was after the move that her mother’s drinking steadily increased and her own began, with little time passing before it became a daily necessity.
There were moments of clarity, of course, where she realized the possibility of it being a problem. But the mind of an alcoholic has its way of making you forget about that. The need for a drink, or eight, weighing heavier than the idea of ever stopping.
One day in her 20s, her best friend sat down with her, giddy with excitement over something. “I’m pregnant!” the friend announced. A pregnancy, something most expectant mothers see as a source of joy, was frowned upon by Lisa.
“Why are you happy?” she asked. This is terrible news, she thought. “You’re not going to be able to drink for nine months!”
“I’m fine, I want a baby,” her friend said. “I think this is supposed to be a good thing. I think you’re supposed to say congratulations.”
Instead Lisa thought to herself, I don't want to have kids. I can’t go to happy hour if I have kids.
Lisa lived life with a drink in her hand. The memories she was able to recall were clouded in a boozy haze and blurred at the edges. Days spent trying to piece the previous night back together, replaying the jumbled, vodka-soaked clips over and over, but hardly ever being able to fully reassemble the evening.
She spent years going through life one blackout at a time. Dreading waking up. Dreading going to work in the morning. Spending entire days waiting for the moment she could go home and drink, take the edge off.
At her friend’s Christmas party, she had gotten so drunk that she fell into the Christmas tree, knocking it over in a crash. Most people would have apologized, but drunk Lisa only stood up and said, “What a stupid place to put a Christmas tree.”
There were all the nights she passed out from drinking, eventually leading to one of those moments of clarity, so she sat down with her first husband, Brad, and expressed that she might have a drinking problem. “I don’t think you have a problem with your drinking, I think you just have a problem with passing out,” he told her. “Just don’t pass out.”
Oh OK, I just won’t pass out anymore. How had Lisa not thought of that?
But when you’re an alcoholic, there’s no ‘stop’ button, Lisa said.
Her most significant moment of clarity came a few years later, when, sitting across from a friend at a restaurant for lunch, she asked a question.
“Have you ever drank so much that you don’t know what you did the night before?” Lisa didn’t consider that the question might be bizarre.
Her friend returned a strange look, tilting her head, the way a dog tilts its own when it hears a high-pitched sound. “No!” she said, alarmed.
“And I’m like ‘oh shit, I think I’ve crossed this line,” Lisa recalled. “A line, where other people were drinking, and I thought they were drinking as much as me, but they weren’t blacking out and they could stop.”
The thought of someone saying “you can’t drink anymore” was overwhelming, because that was the only thing that provided her any comfort. She began seeing a therapist around the same time, and the therapist pointed her in the direction of AA.
She told the therapist about her drinking and about her family’s history of alcoholism. Lisa knew her mother was an alcoholic. Growing up, her mother always had a cigarette in her mouth and a drink in her hand. Her mother was one of seven children, all of them alcoholics, and she was a combative and demeaning —a mean drunk.
“My mother wasn’t just mean to me, she was an equal-opportunity destroyer,” Lisa said. “When she was drunk, she was mad at everybody.”
But Lisa was different. When she was drinking, she was fun, even described as the life of each party she attended. She was that person. Until she wasn’t.
It was difficult at first for Lisa to understand that she could have the same disease as her mother, the one that caused her resentment toward her mother, as well as her father, who was not alcoholic but who Lisa thought should have saved her and her three siblings.
Following up on her therapist’s recommendation, Lisa decided to attend a meeting. She drove out to one meeting location and sat in the parking lot, scoping out the kinds of people who were going inside.
“In my mind, an alcoholic was the man under the bridge, the guy who lives at home and can’t keep a job, doesn’t have his life together,” she said. “I actually used to think it was men who were alcoholics.”
But eventually she stepped inside and began her sobriety journey. She was introduced to the kinship, the sense of community that is AA.
She hopped from group to group a few times, growing tired of the sense of monotony that is sometimes present.
“I have gone to groups where I thought the solution was really good, but I wasn’t feeling the fellowship, the people,” Lisa said. “And I want it all, I’m greedy. So I don’t want to sit in a meeting and then go ‘that was a great meeting’ and then leave and not really have any relationships with the people there. I want to have friends.”
She joined her current group more than seven years ago, immediately feeling a connection to the people. That kinship is what has kept her in this group. Changing groups until you find the right one is important, she said, and can open other doors as well.
“If I hadn’t ever changed groups, I never would have met my husband because he wasn’t at the group I was. So, I don’t think it’s by any accident that people change groups.”
“If you really don’t want to go to prison, you need to go to some AA meetings,” the attorney said.
This was not really what Nick wanted to hear, but he knew the lawyer was right. It was AA or prison. That’s what happens when you drive drunk and hurt someone like that. These were the consequences of an intoxication assault charge.
So, sitting there in the small room with his counsel, Nick made the decision. He would go to AA. He probably wouldn’t like it, but he had to go. He had to do what he needed to in order to avoid prison.
But the idea of attending AA terrified him. Just a bunch of 65-year-old men sitting around smoking cigarettes in a church basement. Nick couldn’t think of anything more boring and awful.
But then he went, and it wasn’t really like that. There weren’t just 65-year-olds sitting around. There were 40-year-olds, and even other 23-year-olds like Nick. And there were no cigarettes.
The fellowship was nice. The support helped. For awhile. But it wasn’t quite enough. Nearly two years went by before Nick couldn’t deny it anymore — the need.
So he drank. It was just supposed to be once, but it’s never just once. Once turned into a series of drunk days and nights, and before he knew it, he was back in a jail cell, alone and in need of a friend, anyone, who could help him pick up the pieces again.
“I was finally able to hear that AA was actually for people and what it can do, and so I kind of picked up the mantle,” Nick said. “I’ll be damned if it actually worked and I actually started being able to be sober and stay happy while doing it because that was the hard part. For me, not drinking was a death sentence.”
Now 32 and going back to school to finish his bachelor’s degree, Nick has been sober for seven years — since 2014 — and attends four to five meetings a week. He also attends meetings with Cocaine Anonymous, as cocaine was another substance Nick indulged.
Nick has been active in both groups for years and works to help as many people as he can on their sobriety journeys. However, that has become more difficult during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I was in and out of AA for two years because I didn’t want to hear it, but it’s those guys that track them down when someone walks out the door at a meeting and you follow them and say, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’” Nick said. “So we kind of lose that second attempt on a Zoom platform. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t work, but it’s definitely one of those things where we have to improvise how to help the next guy.”
Helping the next guy, as a sponsor or through service work, is a big piece of the puzzle for Nick, one of the aspects of AA he has latched onto the most strongly.
“I’m working with five guys right now,” Nick said. “One guy, I’m actually going through [12-step] work with, and the other four are just guys that I check in with regularly because they’ve got more years of sobriety.”
While the pandemic has complicated the act of taking on new sponsees, Nick has tried his best to do what he can.
“I’ve actually taken on two [sponsees] during the pandemic, and one of them went back out and he’s not doing so great,” Nick said. “But I try and call him every couple of weeks and see if at any point his life is bad enough he wants to reconsider.”
The other, Nick encouraged to first seek help at a rehabilitation center, and then, once he had made that step, Nick took him on as a sponsee.
“I actually meet with him on Tuesdays, and we sit in his backyard and just talk and read [The Big Book] together,” he said. "I’m not responsible for getting anybody sober, but I’m definitely responsible for showing up and showing what a member of Alcoholics Anonymous looks like, even if a pandemic is happening. I just try my best to understand that this is a real thing, and what can I do to make sure we’re both staying safe while we do it.”
Despite his service work during the pandemic, Nick said he thinks newcomers are still the most likely to suffer from the lack of in-person connections.
“It’s all I can think about, the newcomer, and what’s this like for them,” Nick said. “Thinking of it being more of a struggle for a newcomer makes it more of a struggle for me.”
Nick emphasized the loss of the in-person interactions that were the driving force behind his own sobriety. And not just the interactions at meetings.
“Having fun with friends in sobriety regularly is important and I don’t get to do it as much these days, but you just have to adapt,” Nick said. “ [The pandemic] has been a grind on everybody, whether you’re an alcoholic or not. It takes a toll when you can’t have the social interactions whether you’re a normal person or in AA, which is a very social program. It’s what it is. Two people interacting with one another is fundamental to the program.”
Even a year into the pandemic, it's strange not to sit side-by-side with her friends, talking about life. Helping each other.
Now it's primarily phone calls. A much less intimate way of communication, but better than nothing.
Lisa sponsors five women from her AA group, all at varying levels of sobriety and all of whom with different needs. Her role as a sponsor has also changed quite a bit over the last year.
“When it’s not COVID, I meet them in person, we always meet in-person,” she said. “So right now we do phone calls, which can be a half hour or whatever, where before, it might be ‘let’s meet at Starbucks and talk about what’s going on with your job.’ So there was definitely more time involved.”
Now, she might hear from some of her sponsees once or twice a week, and other times, nearly every day. She described it as a needs-based role.
The pandemic has also affected her involvement in the program. Service opportunities are fewer these days.
“With everything being closed, opportunity for service work is less,” she said. “The institutions, and rehab, and nursing homes where maybe someone’s alcoholic and needs a meeting taken to them, they’re all closed.”
Lisa still attends the same number of meetings per week, logging into Zoom almost every day. And she enjoys her interactions with those she sponsors, now completely over the phone, but still learning about and from their sobriety journeys.
“It’s good for me to be reminded what it was like when I first got sober, because you don’t want to forget,” Lisa said. “You don’t want to say, ‘I have 25 years so I don’t have to worry about drinking.’ Because as long as I’m alive, drinking is an option.”
AA is the foundation on which Lisa has built her current life, and she will keep going to meetings forever, regardless of location or delivery method, because of the importance they, and the people at them, have in her life.
“We have a saying in AA that you’re alcoholism is out in the driveway doing pushups,” Lisa said. “It’s waiting for you. There’s no cure for alcoholism. We do one day at a time. That’s why it’s important for me to stay in AA and do what I know works for me because I’m not cured. If something throws me off, rocks my foundation, I could be in a lot of trouble.”
Lisa often had to relay these sentiments to her mother, who would ask Lisa for years if she was still going to “those A and A classes,” as she called them.
“She called them classes,” Lisa said. “She would ask, ‘Don’t you know how to not drink by now?’”
Lisa had waited to even tell her parents she was in AA, and ended up coupling that information with the news of her divorce from her first husband. But out of the news came some of the only intimate conversations Lisa would ever have with her parents, especially regarding the alcoholism that ran rampant in her family.
Sitting down with her mother eight months into her sobriety, they had their first discussion about alcoholism.
“So, you’re in AA?” her mother asked. Lisa said yes. “Good for you,” her mother responded. “It’s too late for me. I’m too old.”
That was the only time Lisa said her mother acknowledged her own alcoholism, but she supported Lisa’s decision to make that change in her life.
Outside of her family and her friends in AA, Lisa mostly keeps the fact that she’s a recovering alcoholic to herself, which she said is cause for humor in AA.
“Everyone knew that we were drinking heavily, but it’s a secret that we’re sober now,” she said. “They knew me when I was falling into Christmas trees, but God forbid they should know that I’m getting help! We laugh a lot in AA.”
Natalie had been on Zoom all day. Work was just Zoom meeting after Zoom meeting. And then evenings were often stacked with Zoom meetings as well, but instead of her co-workers and superiors looking back at her on-screen, it was her AA family from far and wide. Her fellowship. The faces she had gotten to know so well before, and some new faces she had never seen.
The faces popped up as AA members from who knows where joined in. Natalie wasn’t really paying attention. Until she heard a familiar voice from the past.
“Oh my God, Natalie! Is that you?” the voice exclaimed. Confused and surprised, Natalie zeroed in on the face. She hadn’t seen him in years. Perhaps she’d thought she’d never see him again.
She had met Mark years before, when she lived in Virginia and was fresh in the program. That was all before she’d stepped away from AA briefly, used once and overdosed, spent those two weeks in the ICU and temporarily lost the use of her left arm. Now, he’d seen an invitation to a random meeting on an AA Facebook page to which he belonged and decided to hop online. By chance, the pair, who had started their sobriety journeys together nearly a decade earlier, were brought back together over Zoom.
And that wasn’t the only time it happened. Another day, Natalie joined a women’s AA meeting on Zoom, which featured a chain of sponsors and sponsees participating. By yet another random chance, Natalie saw another person who she had not in years, Betsy. They had attended their first AA meetings together.
It didn’t end there. A half-dozen times, Natalie found herself face-to-face with people who had been a part of her sobriety journey somewhere along the way, whether she lived in Virginia, Missouri or Texas.
“Making amends is a big part of AA,” Natalie said. “You wrong someone and then you make amends as part of our 12 steps. There were a couple women in Virginia that I owed an amends to and I ran into them on Zoom and was able to get their phone numbers and contact them and make that amends.”
For Natalie, Zoom was initially a welcome change of pace. The 31-year-old Virginia native was relieved she didn’t have to leave her home to attend meetings of any kind. Everything could be done from the comfort of her own apartment.
“I was on meetings all the time at the beginning because I was like, ‘Oh, how cool is this? This is the most connected I’ve ever been,’” Natalie said. “Initially, I was going to meetings in all these different states or seeing people I had originally gotten sober with. And I was going to meetings with people in different countries.”
But then with her work becoming an endless series of Zoom calls, she began to change her views on the small benefit the pandemic provided. It felt strange to be exhausted after a day of not even leaving her apartment.
The calls had been coming more often, the women she sponsors needing to hear her voice a bit more often. Her own calls to her own sponsor, Anne, had also increased. Everyone’s lives were in a strange place, everyone forced so quickly into isolation.
“I was lonely, I was craving seeing people again,” Natalie said. “At first, Zoom was great because I could see everyone but then it’s like, ‘Oh, I can’t touch anyone and look at other people’s faces in the room.’ So it definitely shifted and I don’t know at exactly what point it shifted.”
Natalie sponsors several other women in both AA and NA, or Narcotics Anonymous, of which she is also a member. She is now engaged to Nick, and both of them have been more willing to meet in person with fellow addicts in recovery.
“Some of the stuff we talk about in recovery is very emotionally charged and people can go through some very emotional stuff, so it was really a challenge for me to not physically console somebody,” Natalie said.
The loss of physicality has been especially hard in working with the women she sponsors, who Natalie has been sure to meet up with safely during the pandemic.
“People in general are not doing well mental health-wise,” Natalie said. “My sponsees have been reaching out more, they’ve been leaning on me more. They’ve definitely been calling more. They’ve been having more stuff going on in their lives. We’ve been doing more step work. We’re talking a lot more. Which is a good thing because I need them to call me to stay sober.”
Like Lisa and Nick, service is a core principle for Natalie, the same as it is for Lisa and Nick.
“We get what we have by giving it away,” Natalie said. “The more I help people, the more it helps me.”
The pandemic has challenged almost every aspect of life, forcing people to adapt to a new sense of normalcy. The AA community is no different.
It has changed the way AA reaches those in need of help, forcing them to get creative with the more indigent members of their community—those who can’t afford a computer or internet service.
For these people, a phone call may be the best that can be done for now.
It forced the unpopular decision to shut down in-person meetings, and once some in-person meetings were beginning to be brought back safely, some members remained upset because social distancing and mask wearing were enforced.
“There’s been a lot of controversy with these masks,” Lisa said. “It’s become very political and not very American, and I don’t think AA is excluded from that controversy, even though we’d like to think we were.”
It has forced the question of what role Zoom will play in future meetings. Some feel Zoom allows those who can’t physically attend a meeting to continue to work the program- those in hospitals and nursing homes, those who find it more convenient not to drive or getting out at night.
“We really think there’s going to be a strong presence on Zoom,” Lisa said. “We don’t think that’s going away.”
But not everyone is in agreement about the future of AA online. “Zoom is working, to a certain degree, but I think it has caused kind of a dampening of the power of what AA can do,” Nick said. “It’s just diminished some of the little nuances that really make it work.”
But no matter what the future holds, the AA community has proven itself stronger than the pandemic and the program has proven itself adaptable to change.
“If I get honest with myself, [if] I trust that everything’s going to work out, and I try to help out the next guy,” Nick said. “If I can do those three things to some effect, consistently, I can be comfortable with myself and stay sober.”