Sponsorship is a great thing.

I have long had a deep need for someone to appreciate my wisdom and intelligence. I’m really smart, and I’m a big showoff, and I like to get validation from the outside for the hard work I do on my insides.

There are a few ways lately where I get my wisdom acknowledged, and they are so, so, so gratifying. When I teach, my students think I’m the coolest awesomest teacher. That’s fun, and they learn things and grow in their writing, and I feel wise and wonderful.

I am not sure if it’s exactly better, but it’s at least as good when I am able to help the women I sponsor. I have a new woman now, and she is new in her program. Her husband has been clean for about the same amount of time as mine, and she found her own recovery when her husband found his. She is going through some similar feelings as I am, but she doesn’t have the undergirding of the 12 step experience I’ve had. It’s been wonderful getting to know her and being able to help her.

Sponsorship meets so many of my needs that can get a little unhealthy in the healthiest possible way. I want to be appreciated and be able to offer advice, but I often want to offer advice and force that appreciation where it isn’t welcome. This woman, however, calls me and asks me specifically what she should do, and I find that I have real useful answers.

Her husband has relapsed tonight, and she wants to go looking for him. She called me asking me to cosign her plan, and I let her know that I didn’t think it would be a very good idea. We talked for a little while, and we came up with an alternative plan. She’s going to pray first and ask for God to show her what she should do and give her the strength to do it. Next, she’s going to call a program friend of her husband’s who is also worried about him, and ask him to go try to find her husband at the bar where she thinks he is. If he’ll go, then she’ll follow him and pick up the car so that her husband doesn’t get into any wrecks. If he won’t, she’s going to do some more praying and reading in her literature and do the best she can to take good care of herself tonight. We talked through what she might do if he comes home and what she might do if he doesn’t, and she says she feels better for having a plan and finding some choices in her situation. I feel better for being able to help her, and I see where there are probably choices in my own life that I’m not able to recognize when I’m in the thick of my own fear and panic.

So I get to be very, very wise, and I get to be helpful in a genuine, non-selfish way. I have always thought of myself as a helpful person, but really when I am “helping” my husband, I am enabling him. I am manipulating him by showing him behaviors that I imagine will result in him behaving the way I want him to behave. It’s not true help or true kindness, or at least it isn’t always. Through working my program, I am learning the meaning of true service, true wisdom, and true love.