“Unfortunately, I have some bad news.” I’m sitting with my sponsor inside the Panera where we’ve been meeting weekly for the past year, and I know exactly what she’s going to say.
“I’m not going to be able to be your sponsor anymore.” She tells me her job is giving her another class to teach, and with the extra workload she won’t be able to make time to meet regularly or offer as much support.
“I’m really sorry and I wish I could make it all work.” I tell her it’s alright and I understand. She hears her name called and goes to pick up her asiago cheese bagel, so for a moment I’m sitting there alone with my tea, processing the news.
This isn’t the first time a sponsor has broken up with me — it’s actually the third. Once again, capitalism is to blame; my first two sponsors also had to let me go because they were taking on more work. Now I’m starting the search for a new sponsor, my fourth in four years of sobriety.
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I first texted M on Halloween three years ago now, after she chaired a meeting I was at. I told her that I liked the discussion topic she brought up and wanted to know if she was available to sponsor. She was, and we met a few days later to talk about what I was looking for: someone who is warm and supportive, someone who’s knowledgeable about the program and has been sober longer than me, and someone who doesn’t foresee having to let me go anytime soon. Back then, two years wouldn’t have felt as short of a time as it does now.
I started meeting with M weekly at a local coffee shop, but when she moved further away we decided to start going to what she calls Panera’s because there was one halfway between us. In the time we were working together, we read through and discussed the first 164 pages of the Big Book and the first half of the 12 & 12. In the last few months of working together, we were reading A Woman’s Way Through the Twelve Steps. I was the one who picked that book for us, and we were enjoying it more than expected. We were both glad to find it wasn’t like this other women-centered sobriety book we had each read and disliked: Holly Whitaker’s Quit Like a Woman.
I’ve been feeling a combination of sadness and gratitude since the final time we met up in mid October. This is how I felt after my previous two sponsors let me go too. They have all seen me through so much shit (and put up with so much of my shit), and I felt very attached to each of them. They all had their unique approach to sponsoring me, and their own strengths and skills in offering support. With M specifically, I appreciated her thoughtful reflections on things I shared, her reminders for me to go easy on myself, and how she encouraged me to celebrate my wins, even if a situation didn’t turn out well. I also liked the fact that she thought I was funny. (It feels just about as good to make your sponsor laugh as it does your therapist, trust me.)
I can see they were each what I needed at the time. I’m wondering what, and who, I need now.
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Sponsorship is a unique kind of relationship that doesn’t really exist outside of recovery programs. A sponsor isn’t your therapist — although my first sponsor was a therapist — but they can offer guidance and an outside perspective in a way that’s often different from what a friend or family member might offer. Also, unlike therapists, they are free. I’ve had more than a few meetings with sponsors that felt more helpful than therapy sessions I paid for. There are also some things that I would tell a sponsor but not a therapist, like if I’m having those thoughts for example (you know the ones 😉).
A sponsor isn’t quite your friend either. You do have a more friendly and informal type of relationship with them, but in most cases you wouldn’t ask if your sponsor wants to just hang out or go to a movie. The connection and the conversations are more centered around you, too, instead of being more balanced like they (ideally!) would in a friendship. I often felt self-centered and inconsiderate for taking a seat and launching into a half-hour-long monologue about myself and all of my problems, but that’s kind of the point: your sponsor is there to support you in your recovery with what they’ve learned in theirs.
The only qualifications someone really has to be a sponsor are their willingness to and their experience in 12-step recovery. There isn’t a class you take or any formal milestone you need to achieve in the program before you’re allowed to start working with sponsees. You can just offer or be asked to be one, and then you are one.
I’ve shared deeply personal things with my sponsors as a part of working the steps: long-standing resentments and big fears for the fourth step, some shameful character defects for the sixth step, and ways I’ve hurt others, many of whom haven’t forgiven me, for the eighth step. This takes being much more honest and vulnerable than I’d normally feel comfortable being with someone who wasn’t sharing all the same in return.
Since last fall, I’ve been going to new meetings and looking out for folks who are available for sponsorship. I’m taking the advice some people give: to look for a sponsor, listen for one. As in, pay attention to what someone has to say about recovery, and seek out someone who says what you need to hear about sobriety, about the program, and maybe about life too.
It’s not a marriage, there isn’t a nonrefundable payment, and there’s no binding contract. Either the sponsor or the sponsee can end things at any time if it doesn’t feel like it’s working. But finding someone to support you in your recovery, someone you can rely on and entrust with things you might not share with anyone else, is no small decision. I’m sitting in these rooms with strangers, looking around from person to person and wondering who I could trust to potentially see me at my worst.
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In the time that I’ve been looking for a new sponsor, I’ve gotten several texts from sober fellows offering to introduce me to people who might be a good fit for me. It’s helpful, but I’d rather have people trying to set me up with folks romantically instead!
There’s something that this search has brought up for me, though, that I think is worth being truthful about.