Lawyer and AA Sponsor?

It has been just over a year since I started writing this blog.  One of my first postings wasWhy Can't My Lawyer Be More Like My Therapist.  Today, my post is Why Is My Lawyer Acting Like My AA Sponsor?  They are surprisingly similar.  Your therapist wants you to take responsibility for your own actions, to own the consequences that flow from what you do.  While you're gathering the strength, your therapist provides you with support you need.  An AA sponsor does a lot of the same.  They help you move through the 12 steps, and as you take responsibility for your past and present actions, they provide the support you need to do the steps and stay sober.  Like the therapist, the AA sponsor doesn't let you engage in magical thinking, doesn't let you kid yourself about the severity of your addiction and the hold alcohol has on your life.  You need your sponsor, just like your therapist, and just like your lawyer.  Because they hold you accountable, however, they're not always popular, and they're not always easy to have around.  When you need them most is when you like them least.

Let's talk about the 12 steps for a minute.  You may or may not know them, and if you don't, here they are:

The 12 Steps

• Step 1 - We admitted we were powerless over our addiction - that our lives had become unmanageable
• Step 2 - Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity
• Step 3 - Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God
• Step 4 - Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves
• Step 5 - Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs
• Step 6 - Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character
• Step 7 - Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings
• Step 8 - Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all
• Step 9 - Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others
• Step 10 - Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it
• Step 11 - Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God's will for us and the power to carry that out
• Step 12 - Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs

 I don't know whether you believe in G-d or a higher being, and really, for this purpose, it doesn't matter.  What the 12 steps does is take you back to the beginning - realizing that you don't know everything, and actually, probably don't know as much about anything than you think.  From there, you question your belief system, search your soul, analyze your life, and in the cold light of day, assess what you have done well and poorly, and make amends.  Even though the steps stress what you have done wrong, they also direct you to focus on what you have done right.  You rebuild your life, step by step, with the help of your sponsor and other members of the AA community.  This is hard work, and some people can't do it, some people can and most who try succeed and fail before they succeed again.  Here in the Trenches, we try to help our clients do the same thing.  The problem is that clients want us to solve their problems, even though they have the only key, and then they blame us when their lives don't change post divorce.  Divorce, like admitting an addiction, can be life changing.  The key is how hard you want to work to change, not how hard those around you toil on your behalf.  At the end of the day, it all comes back to you.