A sponsor (some groups call them a “support person”) is someone else in my 12-step recovery group who is more experienced in recovery, further along in the steps and sobriety, who I choose to help me in my recovery. Sponsors have more experience in recovery than I do and so this helps me to make quicker progress and not have to learn everything on my own by trial and error.
A sponsor is someone who I can call or text when I’m struggling or when I have a question about the steps or some other aspect of the program. Or someone who I call when I’m having a great day because it’s good to learn to connect with people instead of isolate.
After being in a group for a couple of weeks, I might be able to identify some people who I connect with better than others or who I can identify with better than others. I simply ask them after the meeting if they would be willing to be my sponsor. If they say no, that’s fine, keep looking. If they say yes, great!
I’ve received years of experience in a 1-minute phone call many times. Talking to a sponsor is like holding a short 12-step meeting with just two people in it who share their experience with each other. Sponsors don’t generally give advice, they share their experience. So if someone calls their sponsor asking about step 4, for example, the sponsor tells about how it was when they worked step 4 and what worked for them and what didn’t. If someone calls their sponsor and shares some difficulties they’re having, the sponsor can share similar difficulties and what they did to get through it. It’s all about experience exchange in a compressed format.
When I start sponsoring someone, I usually ask them to do a few things to get started if they’re new to 12-step programs:
- List your dailies.
- List your boundaries.
- What step are you on?
- What do you want out of recovery?
- Call daily. You can leave a voicemail if I don’t answer.
- Text any time you have a trigger to surrender it, or if it’s strong, call me.
I tell them to get that information and then we can talk about it the next day when they call.
There are a couple of different kinds of calls. I can call my sponsor when I’m triggered. In that kind of call, I am surrendering (letting go of) the image, the negative thought or feeling, etc., to God in the presence of another human being. I don’t know why this is more powerful than surrendering on my own, but it is. A lot more powerful. It also gets rid of the shame and isolation. Sometimes my sponsor will also surrender things he’s dealing with. A good question to ask after triggers or relapses is “What did you learn?” or “What boundary did you break?” This gets us thinking about adjusting boundaries and making progress in awareness and recovery instead of beating ourselves up.
It’s very important to remember that adjusting boundaries and focusing too much on triggers can take the focus away from the core of the program, which is working the steps. I’m my experience, I need to be actively working on both parts of my recovery in a delicate balance: boundaries and surrender to create a safe place, and working the steps to keep my focus centered on Christ and the steps and recovery. From the outside in, and the inside out.
Another kind of call I make to my sponsor is just a daily check-in. I usually do this on my drive home from work or some time that’s consistent each day. During these calls, I check-in about how I’m doing with regard to my dailies, boundaries, step work, triggers since the last call, and questions about recovery. It’s very important to form habits of connecting regularly and in the moment of triggers instead of isolating when things are good and slowly going downhill and losing connection and awareness.
Texting my sponsor also works. It’s not quite as powerful as a call, but sometimes it’s more convenient and can get me by until I can call later on. It’s definitely better than staying in isolation. Group chats with people in my meeting and other people I know who are in recovery are also a good place to surrender things or ask questions.
A sponsor is the person you will share your moral inventory (step 4) with as you work step 5. They are the best person to share with because they know how you feel and they are the person who will benefit from knowing the whole story.
It’s important to have a sponsor who you don’t know outside of the group. This goes along with the 12-step principle of anonymity. Having your wife, a relative, a friend, or a coworker as a sponsor can make it more difficult to be completely honest. For example, if I have a coworker as a sponsor, it might be tempting to not check in about having lustful thoughts about a coworker you both know. Having your wife as a sponsor might make it difficult to admit lustful thoughts about another relative or admit that I’ve done something outside my boundaries. It might lead to denial or just keep me in denial instead of getting me out of denial by being honest like I can be with someone who I don’t know outside the group. This is extremely important since denial is usually such a large part of addiction.
It’s also good to have phone numbers or ways to connect with other people in the group beyond just your sponsor. Hearing different points of view is always helpful and having someone to talk to when others aren’t available is good too. One warning though, I found myself disclosing only certain things to certain people in the group based on how I thought they’d react. So if I had done something specific, I’d call the guy who wouldn’t call me on my crap for it. I was compartmentalizing myself across multiple people in the group. That’s another reason why having a sponsor – a single person who gets to hear it all – helps me to stop splitting myself across people whether inside or outside of recovery circles.
I was single when I got into recovery. As such, I was willing to take phone calls late at night or whenever people needed to talk. When I got married and had kids, I had to cut back on the late night calls. Then I realized something over the years. When I would get a call late at night, I’d ask the person if they knew that they were headed in this direction at 9:00 pm that night and they always said, “yes.” Late night calls are sometimes a way to get rid of guilt after acting out instead of surrendering the right to act out earlier in the evening. Late night calls are also an indicator that boundaries are too close to the edge of the cliff, or that nighttime boundaries like no device use at night either don’t exist or aren’t strong enough. So it turns out that generally, late night calls are not necessary if proper boundaries and honesty are in place.
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