How, as an adult, do I live?
My job is to decide what to do by noting and assessing the facts of a situation and my obligations (both moral and practical), carefully considering the situation, applying the programme (steps, traditions, and concepts) to the material, along with my knowledge, experience, research, prayer, and meditation, exploiting all of the considerable resources available, both within and outside recovery, and discussing the matter with the people involved in the situation itself.
None of this is my sponsor’s job.
Of course, a sponsor or other spiritual advisor can provide guidance on practical matters, but their duty kicks in only once I have exhausted my resources and efforts and come up against a brick wall of uncertainty. The sponsor is not someone I should be attempting to outsource any of my responsibilities to.
If I do come up against a brick wall of uncertainty after exhausting my resources, the job is to succinctly present what, precisely, my uncertainty is. Then and only then do I seek input. But I do not plan this in advance or I start to rely on the sponsor to ‘catch anything I have missed’, and that licenses me to be lazy or sloppy.
Sponsorship should not be used as a system for infantilising the individual and outsourcing the responsibility for their life to another person under the guise of spiritual humility. Sponsors are not dial-a-Ted-Talk or proxy parents. They’re libraries, but self-service libraries. You have to know what you’re looking for and where to find it. I do not present raw situations to a sponsor as though they are not only the library but the librarian whose job it is to figure out what I need and go and rummage for it or to simply systematically present everything the library has to offer in the hope that something will hit the invisible mark.
The tendency of the sponsee to want to shirk responsibility and of the sponsor to want to shoulder it must be worked against by both.
Only then can the two have an adult relationship.