A: You don't have to, but you may, and you can.
Q: Are there any ground rules?
A: There do not need to be, but here is some relevant experience:
Sponsorship is effective only if the person is willing and able to adopt the attitudes and actions of the programme. If someone objects to an attitude or action of the programme, it doesn't matter whether it's because they personally happen to disagree or because another advisor whom they trust has encouraged a different point of view. The programme offers a set menu, not a pick'n'mix or a buffet, and the results might will be 'nil' (as the Book says on page 58) if the whole philosophical structure is not accepted. If the premises for the action are not accepted, then the basis for the action is not accepted, and the whole practice of the programme is compromised. This is like engineering being contingent on an acceptance of the mathematical principles of mechanics.
Sponsorship is guidance in the acceptance of a system. If the system is being rejected, because a key element of that system is rejected, then there is no role for sponsorship to play. You do not need a tour guide if you are not interested in visiting the monument.
Two examples of programme propositions that have in the past produced conflict with the guidance provided by a sponsee's psychotherapist:
1. The programme notion that we are responsible for what we feel: we need not be upset by anything.
2. The programme notion that we should tolerate others and forgive them comprehensively, rather than seeking to regulate them.
I have had sponsees respond that they had learned from their therapist that their negative feelings were attributable to the actions of others. I have had sponsees respond that they were being encouraged to confront others with actions they objected to, to set boundaries in the form of directing others how to behave, and so on. Whether or not this was actually what the therapist said is irrelevant: it is the experience of the individual that matters. It does not help the individual to be placed in a position where they experience conflict because they are attempting to onboard two overlapping but incompatible systems or systems that are compatible but whose reconciliation is beyond the individual's skill. The result is accepting neither system entirely and confounding the objectives of both.
This is not to say that there is anything wrong with psychotherapy (in its manifold forms) or even that the programme is necessarily right. We do not say that the programme is right. We say it has worked for us, and it is on that pragmatic basis that we offer it to others. We are also not saying the individual should choose us. Maybe they really are best off going down the psychotherapeutic path and that psychotherapy plus meetings, fellowship, service, and the adoption of certain ideas of the programme is going to be sufficient in the short, medium, or even long term.
Another, related question has to do with psychiatric diagnoses:
Secondly, sometimes people tell me, as a sponsor, that they bear particular psychiatric diagnostic labels. Not being a professional in psychiatry, I can have no opinion on such matters, and such labels do not intrinsically cause a problem. However, a problem can indeed arise where the individual brandishes the label in order to reject the scope of the programme. I have had sponsees say that their depression or their anxiety is simply a medical condition akin to tuberculosis or sciatica and that any examination of underlying causes in the individual's own beliefs, thinking, and behaviour is first of all futile and secondly an intrusion into a medical question. I cannot know whether this is true for someone else, although I can report that, in my case, all of my own past symptoms that formed bases for psychiatric evaluations and diagnoses turned out to be attributable to beliefs, thinking, and behaviour that, with patience and labour, could indeed be changed by application of the programme. I thus offer the programme to others on this assumption. If someone rejects the assumption that their problems can effectively and satisfactorily be resolved using the programme, then what I have to offer in terms of my own experience is being rejected a priori.
[This last paragraph applies to the vast majority of people who present in AA with a diagnosis, where the diagnosis is not of psychosis, schizophrenia, or other disorders where the individual's connection with objective reality is fatally undermined or entirely severed, i.e. with the run-of-the mill anxieties, depressions, obsessions, compulsions, panics, and other disorders that do not call into question the individual's basic sanity. Out of the thousands of people I have talked to in AA, it is unusual to have the impression that the person one is talking to is fundamentally divorced from reality. The advice in such cases is simply to offer the programme, and either the person is willing or able to adopt the programme in principle and in practice or they are not. In such cases, however, I do not find the individual objecting in principle to the ideas or practices of the programme either on psychotherapeutic or on psychiatric grounds. Such individuals are often highly willing and entirely cooperative. Incidentally, the vast majority of cases of psychosis, paranoid delusions, etc. one encounters are in crystal meth addicts in the first few months of sobriety, and such people were invariably without any pre-existing psychotic disorder. Many such people do recover with time.]
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