“Having had the experience yourself, you can give him much practical advice.” (Page 96, Big Book)
This is the long and the short of sponsorship in the Big
Book. Big topic, one line.
What is advice? Information about how to do the programme, plus
an assessment of the person’s situation and what might be done about it.
Why does it say nothing else? Perhaps because that’s it.
What it could but does not say draws the line very tight around the business of
advice.
How do you choose one?
If one has never completed the first nine steps, pretty much
anyone who has will be a suitable sponsor, provided there is baseline
competence plus a degree of compatibility. This run through the steps is about
the nuts and bolts. Someone pretty free timewise, with not too many sponsees, a
little way ahead, is ideal.
Local is better. In rural areas or places with little or
shoddy AA, a geographically remote sponsor is often necessary.
Someone one knows already is better than a stranger. This
avoids wasting time with people who turn out to be mismatches. Someone whose
sharing one is familiar with is as much a stranger as someone one has never
met. Sharing is not intimacy. I remember meeting someone at an AA conference
who I thought, from their sharing, was, say, a hippopotamus. After talking to
him one to one, I realised he was, in his interactions with me, a maze, a set
of knives, a crenelated wall. The person on public display is not the person one
interacts with one to one. How one chemical reacts, if at all, with other chemicals
depends on the other chemical. This is why ten different people have ten
different view of the same person. No one experiences the person: each
experiences a particular reaction, each contributing their own part to that
reaction. Lithium in contact with water produces hydrogen, explosively; in
contract with nitrogen, dark-red, solid lithium nitride. You wouldn’t guess
either by looking at it. It looks like aluminium, which does not react either
with water or nitrogen.
No need to get someone decades ahead. Most people, whatever
they think, will not have the stomach for that until much later. Don’t try drinking
from a fire hydrant unless you’ve had plenty of practice. Wait till there’s
literally nothing else for it before asking such a person, and, even then,
brace yourself.
There are exceptions to this: hard nuts to crack will
sometimes need a sponsor with greater experience. Even then, a little goes a
long way. I’m still reeling from one comment in 1993 and another in 2001.
Once the steps have been completed, and the person is
sponsoring lots of others and doing lots of service, a switch can sometimes be
necessary to ensure that there is a body of personal experience available to
help handle this. This increases the chances that a remote sponsor will be
necessary.
What sponsorship is not about is forming a special
relationship with a person, finding a father figure, outsourcing one’s
decision-making, hoping something about the person will rub off, seeking to
impress others, being part of a lineage, a network, or a private members’ club,
wanting to hang out with someone you find interesting or funny, or seeking
attention, intimacy, validation, or indeed anything other than knowledge and
experience. Sow those desires and reap bitterness.
Having a relationship with a sponsor is not having a relationship with the person. It’s having a relationship with the sponsorship avatar, which bears a family resemblance to the person but is not the person. The sponsor as Magic Eight Ball. The sponsor as vending machine. I made the mistake of thinking I was forming a relationship with the person, and when it became apparent I was no further ahead with the person after years of sponsorship, I was a little shaken. I remember, twenty years ago, a sponsor saying, ‘You know we’re not friends, don’t you?’ The sponsor is the almost invisible hand on the tiller, not someone else on deck.