Living Life On Life’s Terms – Emotional Sobriety Video/Transcript By Allen Berger

As many of you know, Allen Berger is a leader in Emotional Sobriety. His book 12 Essential Insights For Emotional Sobriety is featured prominently in the Emotional Sobriety section of the gugogs.org website. He is a Gestalt therapist with over 50 years of sobriety. I found this video very helpful on a topic I believe all of us can accept as one with opportunities for further growth. The video is about 45 minutes long. – Bruce M.

Transcript Of The Video

That’s what is causing this all about me syndrome. We haven’t progressed beyond the, it’s all about me stage of our personal development. This is a normal stage of development. Everybody goes through it. Some psychologists call it the narcissistic stage of development. If you are around a two year old, everything is about that two year old. If you’re on a 3 year old, everything is about them. A 4 year old. It’s all about them. They see the world is there to meet their needs. Now, that shouldn’t be a big surprise to us. You’ve got to remember that when we came into existence in this world, everything was given to us. Everything was taken care of for us. Our mother provided us with oxygen, with nourishment. She provided us with 24 hour security. I mean, she was there attending to all of our needs. We didn’t have to do anything to support ourselves. And that happened for the first nine months of our life. When we’re born, we take the first step physically towards self support, which is we start to learn to breathe. Right? We have to take a breath. One step inbilical cord is cut. Now my life is depending on my participation. I have to inhale and exhale. Have to take oxygen in and blow off that carbon dioxide. Right? That’s my job. I have to do that ’cause my body is dependent on that oxygenation. in order to continue to exist. Now, mother provides me with nourishment, but I have to participate in taking an ur nourishment. It is no longer a given to me through the umbilical cord. I have to swallow. So now, first two things that are starting to happen in our life is our participation to learn how to be self supporting. That’s instinctual. That happens automatically for you. That is wired into your biology. 

The problem is the emotional ability to support yourself is not. It is something that has to be acquired, even though there’s a force in you that will move you in that direction, but it is not instinctual like that. It’s not like we just breathe because our nervous system is wired to make us breathe. We’re wired to grow us in that direction, but we’re not wired to know what that means and how to do it. Because it’s much more complex than breathing. It’s much more complex than walking. It’s much more complex than eating. 

So in order to transcend this narcissistic stage of development, we need to be frustrated. I’ll say that again. Frustration is an incredibly important part of our development. It’s by giving the appropriate amount of frustration in your wife that you learn to take a start to take care of yourself. Now, the trend in America, at least, is to give children everything they want. It’s ridiculous. And if they don’t get it, they throw a fit, and they manipulate their parents until their parents came in by being annoying, and caustic, and, and just, you know, little terrors, right? Little terrorists until they get their way. Well, I’ll never forget, I was in Denmark. I was, uh, my mentor was Dr. Kempler, and, uh, he was a pioneer in family therapy, and I was, uh, being, uh, trained by him, and I was part of his international training staff, and I’d go to, to Denmark once a year, and I’d spend a month there, training a Danish therapist on how to, to do this, like, what’s called experiential stolt experiential family therapy. And I’ll never forget, my little girl, my daughter, Maddie, was there, and Walt had his legs up between two chairs, and Maddie wanted to go through. And Matty comes up, says, move your legs. He goes, no. She goes, move your legs. He goes no. You can do something else to get around. You don’t have to go through me. He wouldn’t give in to her little narcissistic demand that she could do whatever she wanted, and everybody was gonna cooperate with her. At the time, it made me stop and think, My God, how many times do we give into that? How many times do we reinforce that attitude? Because we think it’s so cute how they’re behaving, and we don’t realize is that we’re creating monsters. It’s unbelievable. You can turn into monster, trust me. It does happen. It does happen.

By not understanding the importance of frustration, we set ourselves up to not know how to deal with it in the future. And not to, we don’t really understand, fully embrace the importance of this later on in life. So we keep on going through life, thinking everybody’s going to move their legs for us. And when it doesn’t happen, we don’t know what to do with it, because we don’t understand the importance of meeting that frustration and figuring out how to take care of ourselves in a way that’s not dependent on somebody going along with our demand. So, frustration, processed in a therapeutic way, can help us move beyond, it’s all about me syndrome. So I am giving each and every one of you permission to frustrate the hell out of your partner after this talk today. Do not give them my name or phone number, because I don’t want to get a thousand calls. And I want you to blame it on me. You gotta take responsibility if you go choose to do this. 

But trust me, what I am saying is, is that frustration is important in our life. We don’t need to give our partner everything they want from us. They don’t need to give us everything we want from them, for us to have a great relationship. What we need to do is learn how to deal with this frustration in a good way that doesn’t alienate us from other people. But helps us state, but that we stay connected during that frustration. during a difficulty. Unfortunately, frustration has gotten a bad rap in our culture, and I forget a lot of other cultures. You know, our culture is obsessed with immediate relief, satisfaction, or gratification. I want things to be different now, right? Yeah, if you just buy it. That, that, that certain piece of exercise equipment in one week’s time, you’ll look like Arnold Schwarzenegger. If you take this one pill, you can go to sleep and lose 20 pounds in a week. You know, if you read this one book, it’s gonna be the answer to all of your problems in your life. I mean, that’s the nonsense we get. That’s what we’re bombarded with all of the time. Well, it’s crazy. 

We want what we want, and when we want it, and this reflects the essence of our emotional immaturity. This is the problem. And it’s not because we’re bad. We’re just stuck. Our development is delayed. We never grew beyond this stage in our lives. 

So when we talk about it, it’s time to grow up. That’s what this is about. Recovery is a people growing process. It grows you towards self support. Frustration is an important part of that growing. and being able to embrace it in our lives and welcome it instead of fighting it and objecting to it. 

Listen to what Victor Frankl  learned while he was in the Nazi concentration camp. He says, What was really needed was a… He talking what was needed in terms of the mental health of these men in these Nazi death camps, right? And these concentration camps. How could they survive from a psychological, spiritual point of view? Obviously, some of their bodies could not just handle the abuse. and the malnourishment and stuff that they suffered. But listen to what was needed from a psychological point of view. He says, What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude towards life. We had to learn ourselves, and furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men. Sounds like an AA meeting, doesn’t it? We had to learn ourselves and teach others, right? Step 12, right? He says, we had to learn ourselves, and furthermore, we had to teach and experiment that it did not really matter what we expected from life. But rather what life expected from us. Do you see the shift in consciousness that’s taking place here? Right, is going from putting our expectation that life should conform to our ideas, to know my job is to refine the best response to whatever task, whatever experience, my life is setting in front of me. Or that I’ve created in my life. It did not matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead, to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life. Daily and hourly, our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. My God, isn’t that the message that we get in recovery? Right action and right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer, to the challenges and frustrations that were being given, and to fulfill the task which it constantly sets for each individual. That’s what Frankl discovered. I call that emotional sobriety. And look, he was discovering this right around the same time that Bill was looking at this stuff in his own life. You see, that, when there’s a real truth, many people start talking about it from their different perspectives. You know, if you’ve been around me at any time, you hear me talk about all these master psychotherapists that are talking about the same thing. They were all putting your finger on the same phenomenon… that it’s our responsibility to figure out how to deal with what’s going on with us. We have to claim the experience we’re having in our life, not let the experience claim us. That’s what emotional sobriety is all about. So physical sobriety began with admission and our lives had become unmanageable, and in this omission, open up a new future for us. In the same way, accepting that we need to live life on life terms opens the door to emotional sobriety. We now start to pay attention to what we need to do to make life work. to give up our idea that life is just gonna work for us. This is the way that Dr. Brandon describes it, and you’ll see it’s the essence of the same thing. He goes, That psychological well being, and effective functioning, entails the ability to be aware of the facts, and the requirements of external reality, what’s happening around us, without sacrificing an awareness of our experience, our inner experience, and to be aware of our inner experience without sacrificing awareness of the facts, and the requirements of external reality. So we go back, build, find emotional sobriety, as real maturity and balance. Well, the balance is a balance between your awareness of yourself and others or your environments. And that awareness has to be integrated if you’re gonna have effective functioning. You cannot effectively deal with a situation if you are a fall out of one side of the bed, just awareness of self, and not the situation, or awareness of the situation, not yourself. You’re not gonna be able to take care of yourself. You have to integrate an awareness of both.