new friends and a sponsor

At the heart of all 12 Step programs is relationship: first with a higher power and second with other people working the program.

Once school started and IOP ended, I could tell my daughter was feeling lonely. She is an extrovert and is energized by being around other people. Apparently my company was not enough :). I started getting a little worried because she was getting bored and restless.

One of the NA meetings that we attend is for alumni of the residential treatment program that my daughter was in. This is her favorite meeting because it is mainly teenagers, many of them the same age or even younger than my daughter. But even at that meeting, she mainly sat in the back row and didn't socialize with anyone. The other two meetings we go to are "Young People's meetings" but everyone else in the room is in their 20s and older. My 15 year old daughter was too intimidated to initiate conversation with any of those people, and quite frankly, as a mom, I was more than happy about that.

Then two weeks ago my daughter got a sponsor, a young woman I'll call M. The sponsor-sponsee relationship is really interesting. Basically, you sit in these meetings and if someone (who has been sober for a year or more) says something that touches you, then you ask them to be your sponsor. As far as I can tell, no one ever says no. You then call the sponsor everyday for the first 30 days. Usually this is a 5 minute conversation about how things are going, it may include a brief discussion of that day's devotional, but mainly it is about getting to know each other and providing support in those crucial, early days of sobriety.

They say in AA that an alcoholic can only hear another alcoholic. I would add to that that a teenage addict cannot hear her parents. In these past couple of weeks since we returned to "normal" life, we had a couple of major issues come up. It was such a wonderful relief to be able to say to my daughter, "Call your sponsor" rather than arguing and feeling like I was banging my head against a brick wall. And each time, after talking to M, she would calm down and be rational to the point that we could talk about whatever was upsetting her.

One of the things M told my daughter to do is, every time she goes to a meeting, she should get the phone numbers of two new people. At first this was an intimidating thought but once the barrier was broken - she made her first friend - a flood of clean and sober kids entered her life. Instead of having a lonely, sullen teenager on my hands, now it's about limiting the time she spends texting and deciding which social activities she will attend on the weekends. This is infinitely preferable to the former situation.

I continue to have, and I suppose will always have, a tiny fear about my daughter's safety and the possibility of relapse. As a parent, how can you NOT be worried when your kid's friends are all recovering addicts? But there is a new maturity about these relationships, an openness that I have never seen before, and this is very reassuring.