“Here was something at work in a human heart which had done the impossible. My ideas about miracles were drastically revised right then. Never mind the musty past; here sat a miracle directly across the kitchen table. He shouted great tidings.”
–Bill Wilson page 11 of the Big Book, when he desperately wanted to drink but saw that his drinking pal Ebby Thatcher had been raised from the dead and made into a glowing sober man with “something in his eyes” that demonstrated that he was inexplicably different. And the movement which has changed the world was born.
***
“Deaths caused by drinking rose during the pandemic, spiking 25 percent in 2020 over the previous year. But the deaths — which have topped 140,000 nationwide — have been rising for decades in every state.” –NYT today
This is separate and apart from the exponential increase in opiate/fentanyl deaths which also increased dramatically to over 100k per year during the pandemic.
Drug and alcohol addiction and death is a national epidemic that reach crisis level during COVID. They didn’t close the liquor stores because they didn’t want all those drunks to die of withdrawal.
I know first-hand. I have been sober since December 28, 1996. Twenty-five years. I work with alcoholics every day as a friend and often sponsor. I don’t get paid. I do it to keep sober myself and enlarge my spiritual condition. Helping alcoholics is the most important thing in my life. Here is a story about what happened during the pandemic that flies in the face of all those horrible stats.
In March 2020 I was living on Beacon Hill in Boston. The NBA had just been cancelled. The world was shutting down. A group of us had been meeting in downtown Boston for years every weekday at noon for an AA meeting. Suddenly that, and all other in person meetings of any kind, were impossible.
One of my buddies in AA is particularly savvy when it comes to technology. He suggested that a few of us get on a zoom call to meet up and informally share our experience, strength, and hope. Those first zoom meetings included less than a dozen people and only occurred on weekdays at noon.
But very quickly it became apparent how dramatic the impact of the pandemic was going to be with literally no end in sight. My tech savvy friend was ahead of the curve on that. So, we started to get a bit more organized. He and I worked on a “script” by which to run the meeting. There were four of us working on this by now. We started batting around ideas for a name for this newly formed group. “Never Alone Again Group” was suggested and agreed to since we were, in fact, all alone in our houses at that point and desperately needed the support of other sober drunks.
We started to meet twice a day and the numbers of attendees gradually grew. My tech savvy founder friend put up a website. We were all literally hanging around with nothing else to do but work on this project and talk to each other on zoom. Someone asked, “What are you guys doing in the morning?” We all admitted absolutely nothing. We agreed to add a third meeting. Within 10 days of starting, we were meeting 21 times a week, every day at 8:30 (no need to get up early and go to work during a pandemic), noon, 7:30 pm 7 days a week.
An “open discussion” meeting in AA generally involves one person to run the meeting and one main speaker to “tell their story” to which all others participating then respond to sometimes around a particular topic. This meant we had start recruiting fellow sober AAs to speak at our meeting. And figure out who would host each meeting. For the first few months a single person hosted each of the three time slots seven days a week! We were doubtless helped in our efforts because the evening host was particularly skillful. She had the voice and put-together look of a newscaster that put even the edgiest of newcomers at ease.
From the very start, the founders of the meeting agreed we should focus on the “newcomer”—people coming to our meeting desperate to find help in getting sober. We set aside time at the very start of the meeting for each person under 90 days sober to introduce themselves to the group and give their day count. Pretty quickly we decided to have a male and female newcomer liaison at each meeting (in AA men are encouraged to stay with men and women with women). The liaisons would introduce themselves at the start of the meeting and field private messages from newcomers while the meeting was going on. Then we eventually designated the first fifteen minutes after the meeting for newcomers to ask the liaisons their questions.
While we were putting all this in place, an insane thing started to happen. Our little group of a dozen was soon twenty five, and then fifty, and then a hundred, and then a hundred and fifty, and then on the morning and evening meetings which were more heavily attended we regularly started getting more than two hundred people. Sometimes two hundred and fifty. And occasionally three hundred. This is 21 times a week!
At the start of the meeting, we would also give anyone new the meeting the opportunity to introduce themselves. We started to have newcomers from Australia, New Zealand, England, Ireland, South America, literally from every corner of the globe.
We would never shut the meeting down if people wanted to hang out after it was over. While the pandemic raged, NAAG (Never Alone Again Group) became the social club for sober alcoholics to be with one another. There were often people still on the meeting talking well past midnight into the wee hours of the morning. They often focused on trying to help those that were still struggling. Any number of times encouraging them to go find all the alcohol in their home and pour it down the drain while everyone else on zoom cheered their brains out.
Friday nights turned into a particularly rowdy meeting. It was designated as completely devoted to newcomers. The main speaker, someone with long term sobriety, addressed the newcomers specifically. Only newcomers were allowed to speak. And then at the end of the meeting we gave out virtual chips for different lengths of sobriety with the whole virtual room going literally bananas. People started dressing up in outrageous outfits for the newcomer chip night on Fridays. It became a particularly uplifting, fun, and inspirational event for all involved.
Then an even crazier thing started to happen on NAAG. Large numbers of drunks who came to our meeting still drunk never having been to an in-person AA meeting started getting sobriety. One month, two months, three months, six months, one year!!! And the only AA they knew was NAAG.
Without really realizing it, we had provided those in the grips of drug and alcohol addictive combined with the isolation of the pandemic with a way out. Three meeting a day, twenty-one meetings a week. They just had to make it a few hours until the next meeting. And if they got lonely, they could just hang out in the after meeting. Immediate support network and sober friends.
In terms of the huge numbers, we had the advantage of being very organized very early on in the pandemic when other meetings were just sorting out the new medium. Word spread around the globe that one group had cracked the nut on how to run a virtual meeting and make it equally as compelling as face-to-face meetings. In terms of newcomers, zoom has one huge advantage. It allows a drunk to sample AA with no downside risk. They don’t have to work up the courage to go into a live meeting and be seen. They could log onto NAAG and lurk in the back with their video off without saying their name and observe until they worked up the courage to come out of the dark and ask the newcomer liaison a question and ultimately join the group and really try to put the drink down.
Our literature makes clear that very often addicts and alcoholics are above average human beings with all sorts of talents. That was clearly on display at NAAG all along. We had a three-hour talent show on New Year’s Eve right up to midnight so everyone could celebrate together on zoom. We have had at least two different NAAG plays with much rehearsing and hilarity before and during the performances. We had elaborate first and then second meeting anniversaries marking twelve and twenty-four months since the group’s founding. Those events attracted huge crowds of sober drunks who felt affinity for our group and gratitude for how much NAAG had helped them and the love they felt for their fellow NAAG members.
Spin-off groups even formed to fill in the gaps in the day and allow for smaller group discussions (More Will Be Revealed).
Particularly early in the pandemic roving bands (of largely teenaged boys) tried to disrupt zoom calls of all kinds where large groups congregated with obscene video and racist slurs. We came up with a very efficient method of dealing with these disturbances which also likely increased our popularity.
Now thirty-plus months in with the world back to normal, NAAG continues to prosper with one hundred and fifty or more people on each meeting. Drunks have gotten used to the convenience of zoom. NAAG friends who are geographically desperate are not about to give each other up. We have had our first NAAG baby. Everything has gotten even more organized with different service positions, rotation of duties, and the introduction of new meeting formats. But the draw is still the same. Sobriety.
The disease of alcoholism wants us alone and dead. If you are drinking alone with the shades drawn thinking there is no way out, everything in this writing is intended to prove to you that it doesn’t have to be that way. We have a solution. You can live a life free of alcohol. There are so many people just like you. I was just like you. Please come with us. Let us love you until you can love yourself.
My focus these days is to work on this issue one human being at a time. Let me know if I can be of help to you or a loved one.
I used to be CFO of a big company. I used to run a venture capital firm. None of that made me happy. I never really knew what God put me on this planet to do. I have finally gotten clear that my calling in life is stay sober and help another alcoholic. Period. If you are in trouble with booze or drugs, my focus is on you.
***
NAAG’s website is: https://sites.google.com/view/neveralonegroup/home
Our zoom login is: Meeting ID: 867 819 3071 Password: neveralone
We meet 7 days per week / 3 times per day.
8:30am, Noon & 7:30pm EST
For a general listing of all meetings worldwide go to https://www.aa.org/
If you or someone you know needs help my email is [email protected].
Check out the Sunday Night Speakers Series:
Sundays 8-9 pm EST | November 2022- January 2-23 | Men only | Zoom info: Meeting ID: 968 759 7534 Passcode: Tom
***
This Post is republished on Medium.
—
Photo credit: iStock