General introduction

Preliminary remarks

This website is a resource for anyone sponsoring or being sponsored within a Twelve-Step fellowship, such as Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). More information about AA can be found here.

A sponsor is someone who has taken the Twelve Steps. A sponsee is someone who wants to do the same and asks the sponsor to be a guide on what to do.

This website presents information on how I currently sponsor, based on what has worked and has not worked in the past, across several hundred people.

It will be updated as I learn more myself. If you find something useful and want to keep it, save it, copy it, or print it. This website is dynamic, so anything could change or disappear at any time.

My primary fellowship is Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), but I also use materials from other fellowships. With a little adaptation, I have found AA's Twelve Steps effective in treating lots of other difficulties.

This website is not a substitute for being sponsored or for sponsoring, nor for membership and engagement in a Twelve Step fellowship.

Many people simply sponsor others exactly the way they were sponsored. If you're happy to do that, go and do that. There are many reasons why that won't work for everyone:

• They've been sponsored by different people for different parts of the process
• They're no longer in touch with their original sponsor to ask questions
• There are no people locally who have experience in Big Book sponsorship
• They have a poor recollection and poor records of the process
• They've learned more since then and feel that the original approach was inadequate
• They're looking for a systematic, comprehensive approach
• They're looking for a Big Book-based approach
• They don't want to reinvent the wheel and figure out the Big Book from scratch
• They would like something already written down
• They would like something they can give their sponsees to read

If any of these apply to you, this website may help.

If you have never been through the Steps, you'll definitely need a sponsor to go through these Steps before you can take someone else through.

If you've been through the Steps one or more times, you may be able to brush up your programme using this website without a sponsor, but you'll need to find someone to share your Step Five with, and it's recommended that you run amends past someone else competent before you make them, as well. I speak from experience: I went through the programme as it is laid out in the Big Book based on AA tapes when I was many years sober, because there was no one locally with the knowledge and the skill to take someone through the programme exactly as I heard about it on tapes. I took Step Five with local AAs, and consulted them on tricky amends.

If you want personal help with this process because there are no local 'Big Bookers', contact me here.

You will certainly need a copy of the book Alcoholics Anonymous, referred to as the Big Book. Page references without any other indication are to the Big Book. This can be read and ordered here.

The various pages and articles are sometimes aimed at the sponsor, sometimes the sponsee, and sometimes both. It should be clear when you're reading who the material is for.

I have tried to strike a balance between simplicity and depth. For some, this website will be too complicated. That's fine: there are simpler guides available. For others, it will leave open many questions. For those, try this. There, you will find an (almost) endless range of materials and resources.

The Twelve Steps

Here are the Twelve Steps from page 59 of the Big Book:

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

These, however, are a summary: they are like recipes. The name of the dish does not tell you how to make it.

Where are the recipes for the Steps in the Big Book?

Preparing for the Steps: Preface and Forewords

Step One: The Doctor's Opinion up to and including page 44, first paragraph

Step Two: Chapter Four

Step Three: Chapter Five: Pages 58 to 60 to the (a), (b), and (c)

Step Three Requirement: Page 60 to near the bottom of page 62

Step Three Idea: The bottom of page 62 to the bottom of page 63

Step Four: The bottom of page 63 to page 71

Step Five: Pages 72 to 75

Step Six: Page 76, first paragraph

Step Seven: Page 76, second paragraph

Step Eight: Page 76, third paragraph

Step Nine: Pages 76 to 84

Step Ten: Pages 84 to 85

Step Eleven: Pages 85 to 88

Step Twelve: Chapters Seven to Eleven plus Dr Bob's Nightmare

How the Steps help

My understanding is this:

When I'm the centre and main objective of my life, I cut myself off from others and from the Higher Power. I'm left to my own devices. However, I cannot be self-reliant, because my mind will periodically throw up the desire to drink, use, or act out, and, because I am an alcoholic, the natural defence mechanism against self-destructive measures is faulty: it does not kick in every single time.

I therefore need to be reconnected to the Higher Power to provide that defence mechanism. Step One admits that this is the case; in Step Two I recognise that there is a process that can bring this about; in Step Three I commit to being at the service of the Higher Power at all times.

In principle, we could simply get on with that service, but there is a two-fold problem: we're attached to self and there is wreckage in the way.

Steps Four through Nine clear the wreckage. They catalogue the mechanisms and results of living life centred on self (Step Four), and this sincere 360-degree examination of self induces complete willingness to abandon self and opt to serve God instead (Step Six) and to implement that (Steps Seven and beyond). Step Eight further elaborates the harm I have done others, in order to prepare for amends, and Step Four (forgiveness element), Step Five (confession), and Step Nine (amends) remove the blocks, both internal and external, between me and others—to be connected with God, I need to be connected with the rest of humanity.

Step Twelve establishes that service of God: carrying the message of AA and being useful in all other domains. Steps Ten and Eleven provide the structure to make this possible: reporting for duty with God in the morning, getting my 'marching orders', getting on with the tasks at hand and maintaining conscious contact as I serve, then debriefing, debugging, and trouble-shooting to keep the service machine humming along nicely.

Living this way also produces a spectacular life of peace, harmony, and success, but that's the by-product, not the point. The point is this: when I am serving God, I will stay sober.