I found this 5 minute slice of a recent YouTube from Allen Berger very helpful. You can listen and follow the complete transcript of his short talk below.
This past Wednesday we read the story ‘Acceptance Was The Answer’. Buried in that story is a very important idea that is not generally recognized as a key takeaway from this classic story. This key takeaway is a great way to connect to this talk from Dr. Berger.
In the last paragraph on page 413 of the Big Book, the author, Dr. Paul O., makes this powerful observation about how he was trying to fix an inside problem with an outside solution. He says:
“In the hospital I hung on to the idea I’d had most of of my life that if I could just control the external environment, the internal environment would then become comfortable.”
This ‘old idea’ has a lot to do with why so many of us find ourselves to be control/outcome junkies even though we’re not drinking or using. Here are a few articles on the website that get into this more deeply:
Should I Move From A Manager To A Wise Navigator Of My Life
Desire For Control & Denial Of Spiritual
Growing Into,Not Out Of ,The Steps
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 where I’ve also added this article. A couple of articles from Dr. Berger may also be useful supplements here:
Surrender & Emotional Sobriety
Breaking The Bonds Of Perfectionism
Perfectionism – Seeing & Responding With Emotional Sobriety
– Bruce M
Emotional Sobriety Growing Toward Our Fullest Potential Talk
Emotional Sobriety Growing Toward Our Fullest Potential Transcript
Let’s get into the emotional sobriety nutshell wisdom of the night.
So emotional sobriety is not just about waking up. It’s really about growing up.
You see, we can wake up and see what’s going on, but never grow up unless we really start to apply some of these principles to our experiences.
And that’s what’s so important about it.
I think that the thing that AA has really done very well as a psychologist, it’s both integrated a behavioral approach to helping us get better, as well as a psychological approach.
And it’s integrated both of those things no.
So it’s not just about learning and understanding these things, but it’s about taking that and having new experiences in our life.
So recovery needs to be experiential. It cannot just be a thought. It has to be something that we live.
That’s why Bill emphasized so strongly, practice these principles in all our affairs.
I mean, it’s to bring that consciousness into our life all the time.
So tonight we’re going to be talking about continuing the discussion of the intimate self.
And the way we’re talking about this is that maturing, right, growing up is a process of growing towards one’s fullest potential.
Well, what is our fullest potential?
We have the ability to transcend environmental support, needing what we can think of that as our emotional dependency.
And we can become self-supporting.
We can learn to stand on our own two feet.
That doesn’t mean we don’t need anyone or we don’t need a relationship with a higher power or we don’t need other people in the program. It just means that I am responsible for getting my needs met.
If I project that responsibility on my environment, then I’m emotionally dependent and I’m looking to my environment to make me okay instead of trying to find a way to act on my own behalf.
So this is what Dr. Greenwald says.
He says, the lack of intimacy with ourselves leads to what he calls psychic detours.
I like that term, right?
Taking the wrong path, right?
Our behavior is then out of harmony with our most important needs. We use our time, energy, and resources in ways that lack the meaningfulness we can experience only when our behavior is integrated with the mainstream of our evolving needs.
Now, at first glance, we may not understand, but what he is advocating here is to live our life fully.
You see, emotional sobriety is not about becoming happy. It’s about becoming alive and being able to live life with an intensity, being able to allow yourself to feel the pain of your disappointment or to allow yourself to feel joy of something happening that you feel good about. It’s to be able to embrace all of your experience and to appreciate and value every different one so that we get away from thinking I just need to be like this to be okay. Being okay means I am open to experiencing my life as it is.
It’s so powerful.
He goes, the more we fight a need and the more we interrupt ourselves, meaning deny our needs or minimize them, the stronger the needs grow.
In so doing, we are saying no to ourself and increasing our state of tension.
We become increasingly self poisoning.
See, emotional sobriety is learning how to be self nourishing, right?
The accumulating pressure will inevitably force its way out as the impasse continues.
It will be increasingly expressed in distressing symptoms, body messages reflecting the deprivation that results when we refuse to flow with ourself, with our true self.
You see, there is an organismic wisdom inside of you. If you listen to it, it will direct you to where you need to go and what you need to do to be okay. It’s when we want to take control and manage ourselves that we run into trouble. It’s when we surrender to ourselves in a way that is when life is going to work.
He goes on to say some detours are inevitable in discovering what is most meaningful to us.
This is what we say all the time, making a mistake doesn’t mean you’re a mistake.
Making a mistake is part of what we need to do in order to continue to grow and mature along these lines.
He says no one has such intimate contact with his inner self that he always knows what he needs or how to respond to those needs.
It is a toxic attitude to expect that whatever we do should turn out well. That’s nonsense, that’s perfectionism.
Detours making mistakes are inevitable and offer valuable discoveries from which a person can learn what doesn’t fit his ways of being.
Emotional sobriety is about discovering new possibilities. It’s about discovering a new relationship with ourselves and with our experience in life.