Become a Sponsor
A sponsor is a person in the program who serves as our guide as we work the Twelve Steps of COSA. This is someone with whom we can share our story more fully, and who shares her or his own experience, strength, and hope as we undertake our recovery journey.About Sponsorship
When we come to our first COSA meetings, most of us find a reprieve from our pain, loneliness, and trauma—a place where we are finally understood and supported. In the loving company of our fellow COSAs, we can finally breathe again, discovering that we are not alone.
As time passes, we notice that many of our fellow COSAs have found peace and healing. Seeing these results, we long to move toward our own progress. In order to learn how to do that, we look to the guidance of a sponsor.
A sponsor is a person in the program who serves as our guide as we work the Twelve Steps of COSA. This is someone with whom we can share our story more fully, and who shares her or his own experience, strength, and hope as we undertake our recovery journey.
Some are drawn to a specific person where others take more time to find a sponsor. No matter what path leads to a sponsor, we find the benefits of this close relationship to be a great help in working the Steps.
A sponsor is often the first person we turn to when recovery becomes difficult or our path unclear. Sponsors listen with loving acceptance to our challenges, and listen with love and acceptance, offer guidance as needed, and share our own experience, strength, and hope. They are the ones with whom we carefully plan our amends. They are accountability partners for our emotional sobriety, and provide safe and loving support as we navigate our recovery.
Eventually, our sponsors encourage us to pass on the gift we have been given by becoming sponsors ourselves. As we pick up the mantle, the gifts of the program multiply, and our own recovery deepens. Guiding our sponsees through the Steps provides us greater insight into our own Step work. We may even hear ourselves saying to a sponsee the exact thing we need to hear in a certain moment.
Sponsorship challenges us to continue to grow: assisting someone else helps us learn to look at ourselves in greater depth, and at times our sponsees share with us insights and lessons that are new to us. We demonstrate through our own actions how to live the Steps. In being of service in this way, we strengthen our own recovery.
It is important to remember that the journeys of our sponsees are their own to walk: we can show the way but not walk it for them. Their challenges are not ours to fix, nor their growth ours to claim.