My experience with sponsors

It took me a year and a half of trying and failing and trying again to finally achieve lasting sobriety.  In this time, I had an embarrassing number of sponsors.  In the context of 12-step programs, a sponsor is someone with at least a year of continuous sobriety that agrees to take a new member through the 12 steps.   Sometimes it’s easy to find a sponsor, and sometimes it takes asking around for a while before someone will agree to sponsor – it’s not an easy job.  Sponsors agree to be available for at least an hour a week for “step work,” but they also remain on call for emergencies.   Many new members also fail (i.e. relapse) on their first try, so it can also be a heart-wrenching experience to put a lot of work into someone and get emotionally attached only to see them wind up where they started. 

My very first 12-step meeting was one of the big ones in Seattle.  I was an absolute wreck, and sobbed all the way through my very first “share” at the meeting (see previous post about my first meeting for more details).   One thing about people who have achieved lasting sobriety is that most of us are willing to help others achieve the same thing.  Getting sober is a profound and life-changing experience, and most of us what to show other struggling people that a better life is possible.  So when the meeting ended, I was surrounded by many women offering their telephone numbers and offering to sponsor.  It was very overwhelming, since I only had a very vague idea about the recovery process and the role of a sponsor at that time.   I picked one of the women pretty much at random and thus began my first attempt at “working the steps.”  I am ashamed to say that I don’t even remember this kind person’s name.   She started out by having me call her every day, both to make sure I was sober, and also to get me into the habit of calling someone for help.   This first try at sobriety didn’t last long, as my miserable and hopeless situation was too much for me to handle.  I quickly slipped into a blackout for several weeks and never spoke to that first sponsor again. 

Fast forward a year (a year of absolute back-and-forth hell), and I was living in my second sober house.  My fiancée and I decided that we were too much of a wreck living together, so I moved out for one last chance of getting our shit together.  We staggered going to detox because we had pets to look after, and then I moved into a sober living house.  I had been in one previously that was depressing and awful, so I didn’t have high expectations, but this one was different.  Thank God.  This was one large piece of my sobriety journey finally falling into place: a place where I could take a judgment-free timeout and completely focus on my recovery while working and starting to build back some confidence.   Another large piece of my sobriety journey was finding and working with a sponsor that had also been as hopeless and close to drinking herself to death as I had.  I didn’t have to hold anything back, because everything I had done that I thought was unforgivably horrible she had done too.   I had lied, cheated, stolen, hurt people I loved, hurt random strangers, drank myself to the brink of death, gotten myself strapped to a psych bed, lost all my money, completely submarined my legal career and basically lived as a piece of shit for years.   It felt good to finally get all of these things out into the light of day and have someone not even bat an eye.  Most people outside of recovery would have written me off as a waste of life (which I admittedly was for a while), but brothers and sisters in recovery have the amazing ability to see past the addiction to the real person underneath.  So I began working the steps, in earnest this time, because God had blessed me with compelling reasons to get sober.  I wasn’t hopeless anymore, because I had met people in recovery who made me feel like a worthwhile human again.  I had also met a partner who was capable of seeing past the sickness to the real me and saw my true potential.  But he was also in recovery, and we were unable to stay on track while living together, so I moved out.  It was a true Hail Mary – one long shot to make a recovery relationship work.  The odds were against us. 

One of the reasons the steps take so long to get through (when done properly), is because they require a change in the way we view the world.  In my case, this required a complete overhaul.  My sponsor was good, because she was very kind, but she would also not hesitate to challenge my way of thinking.  I remember one session with her when I was whining about having to live in sober living and not out with my fiancée living my life.   Her response was “If you were not in sober living right now, you would fuck everything up.  Stop talking about what you deserve – if you got what you deserved you would be dead.”  That comment stung, but even back then I knew she was right.  For me, real recovery wasn’t as easy as just not drinking, it was about learning to live in the world without hiding or numbing myself.  It was about learning to address the parts of myself that caused me to be at such odds with the world.  The literature and the step work are designed to guide people through this, but a sponsor is key to keep us from cutting corners and to ensure that we do it properly.   

A concept that was key for me, and that my sponsor helped me learn, was the concept of ego.  Up until then, my interpretation of “ego” pertained to how highly I thought of myself, along the same line as conceit and arrogance.  However, with the help of my sponsor, I learned that ego is not how highly I thought of myself, but how often I think of myself.  How do I arrange in a hierarchy the needs of loved ones versus my own needs?  How much time do I spend thinking about what I need, what I want, what I deserve or don’t deserve, etc.?  And how much time do I spend worrying about what others think of me?  The answer was a LOT.  One of my favorite reasons for drinking was because I was miserable or inconvenienced in some way and needed to feel better.   I had a lot of work to do.  My sponsor helped me through that with kindness and the kind of bitter, biting sarcasm that was amusing while still delivering a painful but very needed message.   Sponsors are not just teachers; they are guides and spiritual advisors charged with the near-impossible task of helping a stranger overhaul their lives and way of thinking.   It really is truly amazing to think of everything they do, driven by love for other addicts and their own desire to stay sober.