Multiple Speakers: Longtime Women in AAMultiple Speakers: Longtime Women in AA
Sober Cast: An (unofficial) Alcoholics Anonymous Podcast AA
Several longtime sober women share their experiences with anxiety, heavy drinking, relapse, treatment and returning to AA. Their stories focus on daily action, connection and service as the foundation for long-term sobriety and healing within families.
1:03:06•6 Sept 2026
Longtime Women in AA Share Decades of Sobriety, Slips and Second Chances
Episode Overview
- Alcohol can feel like the perfect solution to fear and anxiety, but over time it strips away health, identity and opportunities.
- Leaving AA meetings and the basic actions of the programme often leads back to drinking, regardless of how long someone has been sober.
- Staying close to a sponsor, attending meetings regularly and using AA tools daily helps keep people "happy, joyous and free."
- Family relationships, including with children lost through addiction or adoption, can begin to heal through ongoing sobriety.
- Even in remote areas or busy lives, connection with other alcoholics by phone, letters or small groups is crucial to staying sober.
“"Celebrate every moment that you're sober… remember, that's the reason that you're here."”
Curious about how others manage their sobriety over the long haul? This AA speaker meeting brings together several longtime sober women from Campbell River, BC, sharing decades of experience with alcohol, fear, slips, and spiritual growth. Fran opens with quiet honesty about growing up as a "little scared rabbit" in a fearful family, finding alcohol as the perfect medication for her anxiety, and becoming a high-functioning professional drunk.
Her story shows how something that once felt like the only solution eventually stripped away her personality, health, and career. Her turning point comes with medical crisis and a stay in the "rubber room", where she’s forced to face just how far alcohol has taken her.
Today, she talks about sobriety as a second chance to pursue courage, honesty, and emotional growth, reminding everyone to "celebrate every moment that you're sober." Marguerite’s path is messier and painfully relatable if you've relapsed. She describes getting "happy, joyous and free" more than once, leaving AA because she didn’t like what people were saying, and ending up in psychiatric hospitals, shock treatments, and long-term treatment centres.
Her story highlights how walking away from meetings and the basics can cost everything, and how sticking close to a sponsor, staying active, and using the programme daily helped rebuild family relationships, including reconnecting with a daughter she’d placed for adoption.
Angie and Yvonne add more long-term perspective: slips after years sober, waking up to the need to give AA away, and what it’s like to be a "loner" member in remote logging and fishing communities, using letters and phone calls to stay connected. If you’re wondering whether AA can still work after relapse, distance, fear, or age, this raw and often funny line-up of women might be exactly what you need to hear today.
What part of their story sounds most like yours?
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