Using Sponsors & Reaching Out

Talking to sponsors, caring and supportive friends, a therapist, counselor, or other helping professionals, before you take that first compulsive bite is an important tool in relapse prevention. A recurring theme in Twelve Step groups is that we can do together what we could not do by ourselves. 

By going to meetings, using the telephone, and participating in recovery related events, we build a network of support. A network of supportive friends and caring individuals who know us well enough to give us honest feedback and constructive support. We begin to learn to trust. We learn that asking for feedback and support is a very good thing. It helps to have regular contact with other recovering people.

We don't limit reaching out only to our Twelve Step Fellowship. We can utilize our doctors, therapists, nutritionists, friends, family, churches, clergy, social clubs, and even non 12 step support groups. Developing comfortable working and or social relationships with these people, as appropriate, is a healthy part of taking care of ourselves. As we identify and list the various warning signs that tend to lead to a binge, we can learn to reach out and share our concerns and needs in a timely manner that may head off larger problems.

Learning to cope with our feelings in new and constructive ways is an important part of recovery. Many of us use to eat when certain feelings came up. By talking with other recovering people and our helping professionals about our feelings we can learn new ways to deal with them. We can begin to heal. We can get the support we need to identify and understand our feelings and express them in healthy positive ways.

Sponsors

Sponsors are OA members who have been making healthy food choices for some time and have practical personal experience with the Twelve Steps. They are willing to share their recovery experience with others and are committed to their own recovery. Sponsors can help guide us around some of the common stumbling blocks of early recovery and give us their perspective on working the Steps and other recovery issues. Sponsors are someone you trust and respect in the Fellowship who has experience and can often help to see a new solution to problems that could not be seen previously.

By working with other members of OA and sharing their experience, strength and hope, sponsors continually renew and reaffirm their own recovery. Sponsors share their program up to the level of their own experience. They do not demand that other's work the Steps or program exactly the same way they do. Instead they help us find our own solutions and develop our own personal plan for recovery by sharing their experience.