Thursday, November 01, 2007

Sponsorship

I think perhaps some of you, ok all of you because none of you are probably in the program, are a little confused about how sponsorship works. I can't ask any of my friends to be my sponsor. I can't ask anyone I know to be my sponsor. (At least not anyone I knew before the program.) I can't ask anyone I live with or am very close to.

Your sponsor is someone who is in the program. They are someone who has been in the program for several years and who has worked the steps and gone through all of this before. The purpose of a sponsor is to have someone to talk to about what you are going through and to bounce ideas off of.

Like I said before they can tell you what has worked for them but they are not supposed to tell you what to do or try to make decisions for you. They just listen and help where they can. When I pick a sponsor they will also help me work the steps. One of the steps is basically doing a self evaluation (Hey Jess... I was wrong on Friday... the self evaluation is step four!!) and then admitting the things you found during your self evaluation to another human being. (Your sponsor.)

So, about my friend. She was never even in the running for my sponsor. She knows that. I think she has a pretty good understanding of how that part of the program works. Our issue has nothing to do with her being my sponsor or me picking a sponsor. The only way the two are related is I was able to talk to someone in the program about my actions and whether I was acting in a certain way or not. I did not go to them for justification nor did they give me justification.

Justification is what I was looking for before I was in the program. Right now, I don't care who is wrong or who is right. It doesn't matter. The only thing I care about is whether I handled myself in an appropriate manner and whether I was polite and courteous to another person. Whether I agreed with them or not. Right or wrong has no relevance in my world right now. Right or wrong just causes stress.

1 comments:

Laura said...

I have another couple questions about AA and the sponsor thing. First, are Al-anon and AA the same thing? In your last post it sounded like they weren't, but I thought they were both just different ways of shortening the name "Alcoholics Anonymous." Is that incorrect?

Second, I am a little confused as to why you need a sponsor. I have never been part of AA or Al-Anon so I have no idea how it works, but I had always assumed that the sponsors were for alcholics/addicts to help them get through their addiction. That is obviously not your problem, you are not the addict, you are a family member of an addict. What purpose do the 12 steps in recovery from addiction serve for you, if you're not an addict to begin with? I'm genuinely curious. Maybe that'll help you come up with more NaBloPoMo content!