Faith Never Asked What Step Are You Working — She Asked What Step Are You Living Today — Mary and Cecelia

About This Speaker Tape

This is Part 2 of a sponsorship workshop held at Central in 2011, featuring two main speakers: Mary P. and Cecilia. Mary shares her 18-year journey through five different sponsors, starting from her early sobriety in a San Diego recovery home where the director Faith worked the first step with her over a steak dinner at the Red Fox Room. She describes her criteria for choosing sponsors evolving from superficial similarities (age, smoking) to what matters: a sponsor who has a sponsor, works the steps, and sponsors others. Her most transformative relationship was with Billy, a 70-year-old woman nothing like her on paper, who became her sponsor for four years until a stroke and eventual death ended their work together.

Mary speaks candidly about her current struggle feeling like a failure because a sponsee has stalled on the fourth step. She describes the tension between pushing and backing off, ultimately choosing to say "when you're ready, I'm here" and stepping back for two months. The workshop audience asks practical questions about cross-addiction sponsorship, same-sex sponsorship norms, when someone is ready to sponsor, and reasons to end a sponsorship relationship. Mary handles each with honesty, noting she once let go of a sponsee whose drug of choice was not alcohol, and that she has ended relationships when sponsees refused to take suggestions.

Cecilia then takes the floor with her story of getting sober November 28, 1990, spending seven months doing everything wrong — one meeting a week, no sponsor, no program — until her boyfriend handed her a bottle of Dewars and told her he liked her better drunk. She describes the moment of clarity where repetition from meetings saved her: she knew she had been restored to sanity because she could remember where she slept and where her money went. She called a stranger named Grace whose number she found in her untouched 12 and 12, and Grace has been her sponsor ever since. Cecilia traces the history of spiritual sponsorship through Bill Wilson and Father Dowling's first meeting in 1940, connecting it to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, and describes her own spiritual sponsor Patty who could unfold any resentment toward a higher power like a paper shredder until nothing was left but confetti.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Cecilia introduces Mary P. to speak about the sponsor-sponsee relationship
• 2:30 Mary describes her criteria list for choosing a sponsor and how she wanted someone her age who smoked
• 6:00 Mary's first step over steak dinner at the Red Fox Room with Faith, the recovery home director
• 9:00 A friend drags Mary into the kitchen to meet Billy, a 70-year-old woman who becomes her sponsor for four years
• 13:00 Late-night panic call to Billy about something left off her fourth step — Billy laughs and says is that it
• 18:00 Billy's depression and near-ending of the sponsorship — she needed the relationship as much as Mary did
• 24:00 Audience Q&A on pacing through the steps, cross-addiction sponsorship, and firing a sponsee
• 35:00 Cecilia shares her story: seven months of dry sobriety shattered by a boyfriend handing her a bottle of Dewars
• 42:00 Cecilia traces Bill Wilson and Father Dowling's first meeting in 1940 as the origin of spiritual sponsorship
• 50:00 How Dr. Bob sponsored newcomers — read the book, answer questions, take the steps in four hours on a hard pine floor