Alcoholics Anonymous Provides Online Meetings, Recovery

June 7, 2020 - San Antonio

By Brigid Cooley - Staff Intern, San Antonio Sentinel

Editor’s Note: Due to the anonymity which the group Alcoholics Anonymous provides, the names of our subjects have been changed for the context of this story. 

The Covid-19 pandemic has potential to worsen stress for those recovering from addiction. As social distancing became the “new normal”, regular community meetings were canceled leaving some individuals without access to help.

For Sean and Olivia Smith, the cancellation of their group meetings proved to be a personal concern.

“My wife and I are both in recovery,” Sean said. “We’ve both been sober - she’s been sober for coming up on 11 years and I’ve been sober for 24 years, so we’re pretty established in our program, but we’re both alcoholics.” 

When in-person groups went on hiatus because of the pandemic, the couple decided to begin nightly virtual meetings via Zoom. 

“At the start of all this, right around spring break, it looked like there was going to be a need to do something,” said Sean. “It was totally her (Olivia’s) idea. She said we oughta just do a Zoom meeting.”

Online meetings are certainly not a new phenomenon within the AA program. In fact, the program continues to provide diverse resources to participants, such as using virtual platforms to provide ASL meetings for individuals seeking recovery. 

For Sean, however, many online meetings require technical knowledge and are less personal. 

“Older people, and I include myself in that...have an enormous amount of shame about not understanding all the digital devices and how to use it,” he said.

To curb this, Sean and Olivia spent extra time educating some participants on how to access the new meetings.

“There were a lot of people that really wanted this meeting. It was typically people that were higher risk, so it was a lot of older people that were not as computer or internet fluent. So we would spend that 30 minutes before the meeting kind of working out the bugs, helping them figure out how to get their equipment,” Sean said. 

Adhering to the AA tradition of groups avoiding designated leadership, Sean and Olivia made sure to allow all meeting attendees opportunities to share their experiences. 

“In the AA traditions, you don’t really want to have any one person or one small group of people, really no one is supposed to be running things and so we really reached out to a lot of folks where we would just open things up and they would run the meeting,” Sean said. “What really works in AA is when people come and say here’s how it was, here’s what happened and here’s what it’s like now and you see, all of a sudden, all of the similarities. There’s a huge amount of bonding with that.”   

Although not his preferred meeting format, Sean said the convenience of attending a meeting from within his home is something that he will always be interested in.

“I found it so easy to go to a meeting and not have to go drive somewhere or get dressed special or something like that,” Sean said. “To me, it’s not ever gonna replace live meetings, but I’m always going to seek that out.”

During the height of social distancing, Sean’s group held Zoom meetings every night at 8 p.m. As restrictions on gatherings loosen, they will continue to meet virtually every Monday night.  

Sean said the pandemic negatively disrupted people’s lives and could exacerbate substance abuse, addiction and alcoholism problems.

“New people seeking out AA did not stop,” he said. “A lot of new people sought us out on Zoom.”

Individuals seeking out AA can find a list of local in-person and virtual meetings at https://www.aasanantonio.org/meetings/zipcode. 

Brigid Cooley is the editor-in-chief of The Mesquite, a student publication of Texas A&M - San Antonio. E-mail her at reporter@sasentinel.com.