J'ai commencé à parrainer lorsque j'étais sobre depuis presque 18 mois et que je travaillais sur la sixième étape. J'étais hésitant car il n'y avait, et il n'y a toujours, aucune directive officielle sur la façon de parrainer, mais mon parrain m'a dit qu'il était temps pour moi de m'engager.
For the last four years I have been serving women who have decided to change their lives with the help of the Twelve Steps. During this time, I started working Steps with more than 30 women.
I surrender in a place where I least expected it—sponsorship. I thought that, working on principle, under the guidance of the Twelve Steps and Traditions, I was safe from my character defects.
I began sponsoring when I was almost 18 months’ sober and was working on Step Six. I was hesitant because there was, and there remains, no formal guidance on how to sponsor, but my mentor told me it was time for me to step up to the plate.
Through recovery, I have experienced several negative to positive change experiences. Below are some of them. First Experience: From the very first day when I joined SA and attended my first face to face meeting, I was surprised that I am surrounded by 25 men.
When I first arrived in SA, I asked a man who had several years of sobriety to be my sponsor. A few months later, when I was ready to start Step 4, I discovered that he had never worked the Steps.
My name is Catherine and my sobriety date is 31 March, 2021. Since I was a very young child, I have used my imagination to escape from reality. At a very early point that I can’t remember the impetus for, I began to be fascinated by and create narratives around corporal punishment.
My name is Marty. I am a very grateful child of God and a recovering sexaholic/alcoholic, two things about myself that it took years and a fall from grace for me to accept. I am writing this from my kitchen and, as I look out the door, I do not see any razor-wire fences - a view I had for 25 years because of my abuse of prepubescent girls as a Catholic priest.
Until about four years ago, I was living in a country in Africa with my wife. We had gone there to set up a humanitarian project to help widows, orphans and children. We'd been married for a bit over 38 years at that time. The stress of setting up a project from scratch, put an awful strain on our marriage.
For over twenty-seven years Ray S., aka “Tucson Ray,” was the genuine, formative force for SA prison ministry (SACFC). He wrote the sponsor-by-mail approach that is still in use, and started the prison meetings. He created the protocol for how to approach prison officials. Ray S. died June 17, 2018 at age 87. We are forever indebted to him for blazing the trail in SA service.
