Just before Chuck S. got into recovery, he was in his early 20s, snorting drugs alone in his parents’ basement, totally isolated and cut off from friends and most family.
“I used up all my friends,” he said. “I had lost the ability to build a friendship.”
Chuck made it into treatment, and when he got out — like many addicts/alcoholics new to recovery — he felt really alone.
So Chuck found a sponsor and latched on for dear life.
“We were constantly together. Neither one of us had a job at the time, so we’d go to the gym together, we’d hang out at his apartment, we’d go eat together,” Chuck said.
Chuck said he and his sponsor let in a couple of other young guys and formed a clique. They’d go to meetings, and invite girls back to one of their apartments after to hang out.
“It turned into a very small, shitty fraternity,” he said.
Chuck got feedback from his sponsor, but by that point, they’d become so close that Chuck felt free to just discard advice he didn’t like and tell his sponsor, while laughing, to screw off.
Chuck relapsed. Repeatedly. And he would put it on his sponsor.
“I’m like, ‘Why isn’t he helping me? This recovery thing isn’t working.’
“The lines do get blurred,” he said. “It was hard for me to figure out what boundaries were getting crossed and what the boundaries were.”
Often times in meetings, we hear people say, “Sponsors are spiritual guides through the 12 steps — nothing less and nothing more.”
But often times, sponsors are so very much more.
Chuck came into recovery desperate to once again have friends his own age.
I came into recovery subconsciously looking for a dad: My father died of cancer when I was 8 years old. And, again subconsciously, I thought with my first sponsor that I finally had the father I so desperately missed all those years.
In short, we recovering addicts/alcoholics bring a lot of hurt into recovery. And that means we can bring waaaaayyyyy too many expectations of our sponsor with into recovery with us. I know I did. I put too much on my first sponsor.
So the question is: Should sponsors and sponsees be friends? Or is it cleaner and easier to keep a distance in the relationship?
There is no simple answer to this.
But most folks in recovery told me the best path is when sponsors and sponsees start with a little detachment and grow into friends. Work some steps together, go to meetings together, keep things just about recovery, at first.
And then, many folks with some time in recovery say it’s just plain inevitable that they become friends with their sponsors.
“He doesn’t need to be your friend. I think a sponsor’s main purpose is to support you through the steps,” says Darin of Donelson, who has five years sober.
“But I think for me, as a result of working with him and being honest with him, we have grown to become friends.”
Yeah, and we get pretty freakin’ honest in this recovery thing. Have you seen steps four and five, the ones where we make a “searching and fearless moral inventory” of ourselves? And then we share that inventory with our sponsor?
It’s almost impossible to not become close, become friends, with someone with whom we’re sharing our most intimate secrets and feelings.
“It’s inevitable,” says Scott A. of West Nashville, who has 16 years sober.
“Three people I’ve been working with a long time and we’re real close. I know more about these people than their wives do, their family members do,” Scott said. “They trust us more than anybody else in the rest of their life.
“My sponsor knows things about me that nobody in this world knows about me,” he said. “Trust breeds friendship.”
Rebecca S., 18, who has two years clean, says she’s able to both be friends with her sponsor and respect her sponsor and take her sponsor’s suggestions.
“She has five years sober and I want five years sober,” Rebecca said. “And I’d be willing to do whatever she wants me to do.”
And again, balance is important in that as well.
The other thing to keep in mind, Darin says, is to not put sponsors on a pedestal.
“My sponsor has made mistakes in the past and the present, just like me,” he said. “We’re human, we’re flesh. He’s just one drink away from a drunk like me.
“It’s just another bird sitting on a branch.”
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