I dreamt that you were twisting through seven sons of gold and the gypsy was insisting

that his story must be told I came two in the morning but I took it as a warning that you might be a treasure.

I could touch but never hold.

Hello and welcome back to the Soberful podcast.

I'm Veronica Valley.

Today I am going to be answering a question that has been asked several times. And I wanted to do a whole

podcast on this because there's quite a lot to it. So the question is, do I need a sponsor to stay sober?

And I'm going to be talking about a couple of things. So first of all, the concept of a sponsor and the word sponsor is really

only applicable to 12-step programs. What I have found over the years is A.A. language has sometimes

kind of bled out into the wider kind of sober community.

And a lot of things get misunderstood and confused.

And I just want to try and clarify that today.

Now, this is just my opinion.

It's not AA's opinion.

It's not anyone else's opinion.

This is just my opinion.

So I'm going to be talking

specifically about sponsorship within the 12 steps. And then I'm going to be talking about the

idea of mentorship outside of the 12 steps. So if you think of sobriety, right, the people that

are sober, the sober community, all of the different methods of getting sober, of which

there are many pathways, if you think of it as a really, it's a really big tent, okay,

and the 12 steps are part of that. They're quite a significant part of it, but they're not all

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