They said, “Find a sponsor.” So I asked. Five times.
Five women, five no’s. Each one polite, each one with a reason; too busy, already sponsoring someone else, needing to focus on their own journey. I smiled and nodded, but with every rejection, something inside me cracked. At every table, I watched newcomers walk in and be instantly embraced, paired off, prayed over. But not me.
I was the witch in the room. The psychic. The pink-haired, neurospicy, polyamorous, nonconforming soul who’d already spent a lifetime being told I was too much, too strange, too spiritual in all the wrong ways. I came to recovery seeking healing, not approval. But even in rooms full of people rebuilding their lives, I felt like an outcast in a circle of outcasts.
The Twelve Steps are often described as a spiritual program. But whose spirituality are we talking about? The first time I mentioned my higher powers—plural—I was pulled aside and gently “corrected.” As if I’d made a typo in my soul. When I told them I hadn’t misspoken, the woman blinked at me like I’d spoken another language because I had.
Eventually, I found someone willing to sponsor me. I was honest about my spiritual path from the beginning, including the rituals, tarot, dreams, and guides. I thought maybe, just maybe, I could be all of myself here.
Two months later, she called to say she was leaving AA and quitting church. She didn’t know what she believed in anymore.
I hung up the phone and felt the final straw splinter in my chest. That conversation confirmed what I already knew: the Twelve Steps didn’t fit me. They never had.
The Spiritual Dissonance: A Witch at the Wrong Altar
The rooms got quiet whenever I spoke about ritual. Eyes darted or softened with politeness. No one interrupted, but no one reached out either. When I talked about pulling cards in the morning or hearing messages from my guides, I wasn’t met with curiosity, just caution.
And so I stopped sharing those parts.
I didn’t talk about the altar I had built in the corner of my room, layered with moonstone, rosemary, and ash. I didn’t explain how I anointed my body with oils before sitting in silence, or how I poured water for my ancestors and listened. I didn’t talk about the times I lit candles and whispered spells just to survive the night.
Even when no one explicitly told me to change, I could feel it in the way they held their breath. There was no invitation to join their church, no open arms into their circles. No, their silence was its own sermon.
It wasn’t about being different. It was about being invisible. And invisibility is its own kind of violence when you’ve spent your life trying to stay alive by being who you are.
I looked around those tables and saw women who had lost husbands, women who were mothers, women who were decades older. They had lived hard lives. But none of them were living mine. None of them were queer. None were polyamorous. None cast spells or honored the moon or listened to plants when they spoke.
I wanted so badly to belong. I tried. I sat through the prayers that didn’t speak to me, read the texts that erased me, and followed the format that left no room for Mystery.
Eventually, I realized something terrifying and liberating:
I wasn’t the problem.
The container was too small for my spirit.
Reclaiming the Sacred: Why I Created the 13 Steps
By the end of my first year in recovery, I had worked the full Twelve Steps. I did it thoroughly, honestly. I showed up. I gave the system every chance.
But something still felt incomplete.
It wasn’t that I rejected the framework; it was that I had already rewritten it without realizing it. Every time I was told to “pray,” I cast a circle instead. Every moral inventory became a ritual of shadow work. My Higher Power was not a bearded father in the sky; it was my ancestors, my guides, my own divinity pulsing in the bones of the earth. I followed their steps, yes, but I walked them as a witch. And that changed everything.
So I began writing.
Not because I was trying to rebel. But because I needed to reflect the path I had actually walked. One that honored psychic knowing, intuitive rhythm, lunar cycles, and emotional transmutation. One that didn’t ask me to be less magickal to be considered whole.
And I knew the number had to change.
Thirteen has always been sacred to witches. Thirteen moon cycles in a year. Thirteen witches in a coven. Thirteen as a symbol of divine feminine power, misunderstood and maligned. Ironically, in AA culture, “13th stepping” is a predatory term used to describe old-timers taking advantage of newcomers. That alone told me something was wrong. A sacred number twisted into something sinister, just like the witch.
So I reclaimed it.
The 13 Steps I created are not meant to correct the Twelve; they’re meant to expand beyond them. To offer another door. One that opens inward.
They are rooted in ritual, not religion. Shadow work, not shame. Magick, not moralism. They honor choice. Fluidity. Sovereignty.
They are the steps of a soul who will not give up recovery, but refuses to abandon her power to find it.
What Makes the 13-Step Path Different
This path isn’t just a different number. It’s a different frequency.
The 13 Steps of witch recovery are not a doctrine. They’re an invitation, a ritual map for the soul. There’s no pressure to work them in a certain way, no hierarchy, no “right sponsor” with the right answer. Witches know: transformation isn’t linear. Neither is healing.
This path honors that.
Each step opens a portal. Some people walk them through tarot. Others through journaling, spellwork, ancestor communication, or grief rituals under the full moon. You might sit with a step for a day or a decade. You might move backwards, sideways, in spirals. You might need silence. You might need screaming. All of it belongs here.
Accountability in the 13 Steps isn’t about public confession or performative guilt. It’s about being radically honest with yourself. With your soul. With the parts of you that survived and the parts that are still hurting. You don’t make amends out of obligation, you make amends when your heart has opened wide enough to hold the truth.
And service?
It’s not just about pouring coffee or chairing meetings. It’s about living a compassionate life. Protecting your energy. Praying in your own language. Holding someone’s hand at the edge of the Void and whispering, “You’re not too much. You’re magick.”
This path is lined with spells. With frequency work. With sacred tools like tarot, cauldrons, herbs, and ancestral altars. It teaches witches how to transmute low-vibrational energetics into higher ones, how to make medicine from their own shadow.
Because healing isn’t about fitting into a mold.
It’s about remembering who you were before the world tried to break your magick.
Reclaiming My Power and Helping Others Reclaim Theirs
Rewriting the steps wasn’t just a creative exercise. It was a reclamation of spiritual sovereignty.
For the first time in my recovery, I felt whole. Not edited. Not translated. Not tolerated.
Writing the 13 Steps helped me step fully into my power, not just as someone healing from addiction, but as a witch, a priestess, a psychic, a healer. It gave me the confidence to say: This is my way. And it is sacred.
Now, I tell others the same thing:
You don’t have to abandon your truth to recover.
You don’t have to squeeze your soul into someone else’s story.
If the old frameworks don’t fit, you are allowed to build your own.
The response has been breathtaking.
I’ve watched witches, young and old, queer and neurodivergent, fierce and fragile—step forward with tears in their eyes and say, “Thank you. I didn’t know there was a way for someone like me.”
Because we were never broken.
We were never too much.
We were just waiting for a path that could hold the fullness of who we are.
And now, one exists.
This Is the Future of Recovery
The 13 Steps aren’t just mine anymore. They belong to everyone who’s ever sat in a recovery room and felt spiritually invisible. To every witch who cast a protection spell before walking into a meeting. To every queer soul who translated “God” into something safer to get through the reading.
This is the future of recovery:
A path where magick is sacred.
Where spiritual sovereignty is protected.
Where queerness, neurodivergence, psychic gifts, and shadow work aren’t barriers to healing, they are the medicine.
When we make room for witches in recovery—real room, with altars and candles and tarot and ancestral wisdom—we aren’t diluting the spiritual power of recovery. We’re deepening it.
We are unshackling it from systems that erased us.
We are reclaiming the sacred rites of healing that have always lived in our bones.
And when we offer this kind of spiritually integrated, trauma-informed, esoteric-affirming path to healing, we don’t just change lives. We change the collective frequency of what’s possible.
Because when witches recover,
we don’t just heal.
We transform.
