SAA Exeter Sponsorship

A sponsor is someone who has worked the steps and has found their own recovery journey has enough miles on the clock to help equip you with the experience, strength and hope that you need to undertake your own journey, they will guide you through the steps.

“A sponsor is a person in the fellowship who acts as a guide to working the program of SAA – a fellow addict we can rely upon for support. Ideally, a sponsor is abstinent from addictive sexual behaviour, has worked the steps, and can teach us what he or she has learned from working in the program. We can learn from a sponsor’s experience, struggles, successes, and mistakes. Our sponsor can help explain program fundamentals, such as how to define our sexual sobriety. Most importantly, sponsors guide us through the Twelve Steps.” (Sex Addicts Anonymous, p. 13)

Every newcomer to SAA Exeter is encouraged to get a sponsor as soon as they are ready. A temporary sponsor may be arranged until you get to know others in the group better. This will help you to get cracking and after a few meetings, you may find you relate to someone, the aim is to find someone who models the recovery you want to see in your life.

If a suitable sponsor is not available locally the wider community of SAA groups can help to provide a sponsor.

SAA Exeter & The 12 Steps

Working the steps with a sponsor is essential to recovery!

Below are some resources to help make this process easier to go through.

Talk to your sponsor about the specific work for each step as your sponsor may have other work or material that they want you to work through but this will give you some understanding of the level of reflection and consideration that goes into our step work.

It isn’t a race and we focus on the progress, not the perfection of our recovery.

Each step below is a link to a worksheet.

  1. We admitted we were powerless over addictive sexual behaviour – 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 God.
  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 God 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 doing 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 God, praying only for knowledge of God’s 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 other sex addicts and practice these principles in our lives.