Introduction – Bruce M.
This post introduces a worksheet that Dr. Allen Berger uses in his book 12 Essential Insights For Emotional Sobriety. As you may know, Dr. Berger has over 50 years of sobriety and is a Gestalt therapist specializing in addiction and recovery. You can find other articles from Dr. Berger in the Emotional Sobriety section of the gugogs.org website. In addition to the worksheet itself which can be downloaded from this post, I’ve included a video from Dr. Berger that I believe does an excellent job of explaining this worksheet in detail. In the video, Dr. Berger references three key pieces of AA literature to help us frame the problem of changing our perspective that externals (people, places, and things) are ‘making us’ disturbed to the inside job of exploring how our expectations and demands (what Dr. Berger refers to as our unenforceable rules) are affecting us. The video explores how these expectations perhaps ‘manufacture misery’ (BB p.133) as we attach ourselves to outcomes we can’t control about people, places and things. I especially found his discussion about how our attachment to our outcomes make people into objects to control rather than subjects we ‘get to’ discover and seek to understand. It’s pretty revolutionary stuff that can have a huge impact on how you approach your 4th and 10th step work.
From the Twelve & Twelve in Step 10 on page 90, we are presented with this assertion:
It is a spiritual axiom that every time we are disturbed, no matter what the cause, there is something wrong with us.
From the classic 1958 Bill W Grapevine article, ‘The Next Frontier: Emotional Sobriety’ , Bill now over 20 years sober is discovering a truth about himself that he didn’t realize despite having written the Twelve & Twelve that even describes emotional sobriety.
Suddenly I realized what the matter was. My basic flaw had always been dependence — almost absolute dependence — on people or circumstances to supply me with prestige, security, and the like. Failing to get these things according to my perfectionist dreams and specifications, I had fought for them . And when defeat came , so did my depression…For my dependency meant demand — a demand for the possession and control of the people and the conditions surrounding me .
From the Twelve & Twelve in Step 4 on page 53:
But it is from our twisted relations with family, friends, and society at large that many of us suffered the most. We have been especially stupid and stubborn about them. The primary fact that we fail to recognize is our total inability to form a true partnership with another human being. Our egomania digs two disastrous pitfalls. Either we insist upon dominating the people we know, or we depend upon them far too much. If we lean too heavily on people, they will soon or later fail us, for they are human, too, and cannot possibly meet our incessant demands. In this way our insecurity grows and festers. When we habitually try to manipulate others to our own willful desires, our suffering becomes acute and constant. We have not once sought to be one in a family, to be a friend among friends, to be a worker among workers, to be a useful member of society. Always we tried to struggle to the top of the heap, or to hide underneath it. This self-centered behavior blocked a partnership relation with any one of those about us. Of true brotherhood we had small comprehension.
Dr. Berger also has a way of thinking about humility that is quite different. He describes it this way in as he expands on the Emotional Sobriety article that Bill W wrote in 1958. On page 43 and 44 of his book , Dr. Berger helps us understand humility with these paragraphs:
Many of us can define our addiction as being “addicted to more.” Bill articulated that our primary problem is that our natural instincts have become unbalanced. He elaborated on this notion when he said, “Never was there enough of what we thought we wanted” (Alcoholics Anonymous World Services 1981, 71). So, I believe that Bill used balance to refer to restraining our urge to seek ever more external sources of emotional solace. This means returning ourselves to a place where our emotions are in balance with other kinds of information in our lives (this might include information from our inner wisdom, the support of our fellows in AA and elsewhere, and our relationship with our Higher Power).
This is our dilemma: turning to a material solution for a spiritual problem. This will never work. No matter how much of “more” we get in our lives, at some point we will need to face the reality that we won’t find our solution outside ourselves. The solution is within us. This means at some point in our recovery we surrender our expectation that something or someone is coming along to make us okay.
Bill W. equated maturity and balance with humility when he said “real maturity and balance (which is to say, humility)” (1988, 236). That’s fascinating, isn’t it? What did he mean by humility in this context? Well, surrendering our expectations is where humility comes into emotional sobriety.
Having humility means that we realize we are not that important. I don’t mean this in a belittling or negative way. I mean that no one is here on earth to serve us or make us happy. Humility tells us that no one is coming (the subject of chapter 7). No material object and no special person outside us is going to make our lives better. To make our lives better, we must surrender our expectations and show up for ourselves. To get our lives unstuck, we must give up being passive and relinquish the belief that life should be generous or gracious or that some fairy godmother is going to come along turn a pumpkin into a carriage for us.
Humility disarms our attempt to insist that people and circumstances conform to our demands or invisible unenforceable rules. This will have a big impact on how we relate to other people. We have no business expecting others to live up to our expectations. When we demand that others live up to our expectations, we exclude them from the very relationship we’re attempting to have with them! The relationship becomes all about what we want, what we expect, what will make our world “right.”
Are you starting to see how humility, emotional maturity, and balance are connected? Why Bill W. carefully chose those three terms?
Perhaps now you can see that humility is the antidote to the poison of emotional dependency. Or, to state it another way, humility is the medicine that leads to emotional sobriety. We have to be humble in order to cast aside the childish belief that we’re at the center of the universe and that other people should conform to our expectations.
As Bill W. realized, we need to reorganize the way we think about ourselves, the world around us, and others. We need to humbly surrender our expectations and become better aligned with reality by seeing people for who they are rather than as a source of approval or disapproval
Emotional Sobriety Inventory Worksheet
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