My Sponsorship Family

A sponsor is another alcoholic, further along in sobriety, who has already worked the Twelve Steps and now guides you through them. A sponsor is not a counselor, a therapist, or an authority figure — they are one drunk helping another stay sober, sharing their own experience so you do not have to figure it out alone.

You call them, you are honest with them, and you let them take you through the Big Book's program of recovery. My sponsor found me after my very first meeting, and I have been passing that same help along to other men ever since.

Your sobriety date is the date of your last drink — the first day of continuous, uninterrupted sobriety. It anchors everything that follows, and it is the day you count from.

In the table above, each name carries the month and year that person put the drink down. Mine is January 14, 2017.

Continuous sobriety is sobriety without a break — no relapse, no starting the count over. The years figure measures the unbroken stretch from the sobriety date forward.

“(Ongoing)” marks the men whose count is still running because they are alive and still sober today. The other figures are the final tally at the end of a life lived sober.

A sponsorship family is the unbroken line of sponsorship passed down from one alcoholic to the next, like a spiritual family tree. The list above is one such lineage: Bill W., AA's co-founder, at the root, and each name below sponsored — directly or through the chain — by the one above, down to me.

It is a reminder that no one in AA gets sober by willpower alone. Every person in the rooms is carried by everyone who came before them, and is expected, in turn, to carry the next person who walks in.