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Moving Forward After Relapse, Part Two · Emotional Sobriety: The Next Step in Recovery

• 0:00
  Speaker A: Foreign.
• 0:07
  Speaker B: Welcome to Emotional Sobriety, the next step in Recovery, with Dr. Alan Berger and Tom Rutledge. Tom's nutshell is rigorous honesty begins at home. Tom, what were you thinking when you wrote that?
• 0:21
  Speaker C: I wrote that one yesterday and just shows, you know, And I. Once I. Once I finish it, I just said, well, that's a good day's work. If we're not really observant and if we're not really open to people's feedback also, then we're. We're. We're likely not to have the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth about ourselves. So I just. It's just. Just a reminder. Don't forget to. Don't forget to check at home.
• 0:45
  Speaker D: I really see my sobriety and my emotional sobriety, my whole sobriety about being grounded in reality. And I think people that fall prey to drugs or other higher powers want certainty, want one truth. And the reality is the universe is governed by order and chaos, sort of a yin and a yang of both. And I've got a. Accept that at home. Right. I talk about how I speak pluralism, and in the back of my mind, I'm AA's compliance officer. That's not what GSO should be doing. You shouldn't be saying that in this meeting. Did you hear what that group is doing over there? They need this and not that. And we have no rules. Why am I trying to enforce them? You know?
• 1:47
  Speaker B: Well, see, I. I noticed this dialogue because you. Because you externalize. That dialogue that you have with yourself, Joe, all the time, is that that moderating voice is strong. The one that, you know, you know, the. The proselytizing, you know, I know everything voice, you know, because you're aware of how strong that one is. You know, you're always meeting it with the other side.
• 2:07
  Speaker D: Well, I. I want to. Right. To me, that is Emotional sobriety is to go. I don't agree with you at all. And I love you and appreciate you, and if I have curiosity and positive regard, I can learn from you. Right. You know, I have my preferences. I don't watch a sporting event and not care what the outcome is, or I wouldn't watch the sporting event. Right. I'd do something else. Right. Like, that's the whole truth for me, is I do have my preferences. You know, I'm just one. One vote, one voice, one person in a world that has a lot of variety to it.
• 2:50
  Speaker B: Yeah. I have the natural tendency to cast myself as the hero always. I think that's just built into me. And so, yeah, yeah. But I mean, the only times I think I've approached heroism is when I've been able to decouple that a little bit and just kind of look at things, look at myself and my actions in relation to this world that I'm trying to develop harmony with.
• 3:14
  Speaker A: And you know, one of the things that I've been so aware of is just over talking. I. I remember when I was in graduate school, we had this class. I can't remember what the. The program was, but it was a program on learning to be in relationship to another person. God, they had a name for it and they were using it a lot to teach therapists, beginning therapists, how to stay in rhythm with another person. It was very interesting. And one of the exercises was, is everybody you'd pair off in dyads, right? And then you'd over talk each other and just purposely do it. And it was a very interesting experiment because it really showed you how important. And you know, this is a musician show is a space between notes. And, you know, sometimes if I'm excited about something, I'll jump in and take away that space because I want to say something. But I realize that when you remove the space, you remove the music.
• 4:17
  Speaker C: Yeah. You know, Alan, one of the places I learned that was when I was doing all those radio interviews back in the 1900s, you know, back to this
• 4:26
  Speaker A: topic of rigorous honesty. It's, it's, it is something, you know, when I look back over my experience in recovery, which now as we were talking about days, God, it's over five decades, you know, it's like, wow, five decades. That seems ominous to me. It's like, wow. But what I realize is honesty for me has been so relative to my emotional maturity. See, so when I think I was being honest with myself at certain points, I was being honest as my emotional maturity and consciousness could support at the time. I'm convinced today that our level of emotional maturity creates our consciousness. Our consciousness is very much tied to our development, where we're at in our developmental process. We see that very clearly with Piaget's work with kids that are. When he was studying their cognitive development and how consciousness was so much influenced and really a reflection of that kid's cognitive development. And I think today my consciousness is a reflection of my emotional maturity or my emotional sobriety that says that, you know, for me, when I look back, stuff I thought I was really honest with myself about, there was some honesty to it, there was a partial truth to it. But today those truths are so much more profound. There's so, so much deeper and rooted in awareness and insight and wisdom versus some of the other ones were more superficial. Like, it took all. Like, I remember coming into program, it was all I could do to understand being powerless over alcohol. I mean, that was about it. The way I was dishonest with myself, how emotionally mature I was. That stuff was beyond my grasp in any way at that time. It started to change very slowly as the more time I started to accumulate. But it was. It. When I look back, my goodness, what a difference.
• 6:48
  Speaker C: Yeah. Well, how that changes is really interesting. And you can do it with. I'm. Just. Because something Patrick said, I'm thinking of doing it with. With hindsight when he said, I always like to cast myself as the hero. I mean, you're not the Lone Ranger with that one. And I, I was always the white hat as far as I could. But I look back with, with history, rather than beating myself up with history, looking back at times in my life when I cast myself as a white hat. And no, that hat would have been dingy gray at best, you know, and, but, but I, But I. What I know about that is that. And it helps me in talking to other people because I don't, you know, I don't see people. They're not lying to me. They're. They're. It go this nutshell. They're not being honest with themselves yet. And it's because they don't have that information. Because, I mean, I mean, because I really did see myself as that hero, you know, even though if I look at it now, I go, well, no, I was kind of the problem, you
• 7:49
  Speaker D: know, like you quote the source. And we know why you use the term rigorous honesty, because that's where it comes from. But can we talk about this word rigorous? What other honesty is there? Where did that word come from? That's a good point. We need maybe in early recovery, more binary sort of thinking it's right or it's wrong. The truth and not the truth. Right. But in emotional sobriety, as our sobriety progresses, it becomes more of a spectrum. Right. Sort of a range of things.
• 8:30
  Speaker C: Because you, because you say one more thing because you bring up a thing where, you know, we're talking to each other or, you know, and then you say, let me be honest with you. And then you immediately go like, what the hell have you been doing for the last decade? I mean, have you. Are we now starting to be honest? But it's because we, we. I think we do see it in gray.
• 8:50
  Speaker A: Yeah. So the definition of Rigorous is extremely thorough and clear. Yeah. Exhaustive.
• 8:58
  Speaker C: Yes.
• 8:58
  Speaker A: And accurate.
• 8:59
  Speaker B: Right. And getting clear. There's a lot of work to be done on that front in early sobriety and emotional sobriety, just, you know, figuring out how to tell what honest is. When you're looking at it, it's other.
• 9:12
  Speaker A: One of the later definitions is harsh and demanding figures. Right. This is a rigorous. The rigorous exercise routine. Right. A harsh and demanding routine. It's so interesting that when you start looking at the definition of things, another. Another meaning of. Of rigorous is strictly applied to or adhered to strictly.
• 9:35
  Speaker B: That sounds scary.
• 9:36
  Speaker A: Yeah. Doesn't it?
• 9:38
  Speaker D: Exactly. As written inflexibly.
• 9:41
  Speaker A: Inflexibly to inhering strictly or inflexibly to a belief, opinion or a way of doing something inflexibly. So, you know, it does raise the question about, you know, you know, is honesty. And this is a very interesting thing. I saw this one that in the 70s there was a very, very strong movement, especially in the field of recovery, especially certain approaches to drug addiction, to do these very harsh confrontations with people. Like in Synanon. Right. Daytop is another program intervention. Well, it was it. They call it, usually giving somebody a haircut is what they called it. Oh, Joe, they'd have a field day with you, buddy. Joe, they would really get. Boy, can you imagine you getting a haircut?
• 10:32
  Speaker B: So
• 10:35
  Speaker A: what happened is they just really. You're so selfish, self centered. And some people could take that in that were ready to face that about themselves. Other people decompensated under that kind of confrontation.
• 10:51
  Speaker C: Some people benefited from it. The guy who trained me in my first job as a group therapist, he was a little guy and he was tough as hell and he was funny as hell, but he would literally get out of his chair and jump up and down in front of people with his finger in their face. And these were pretty hardcore drunks and addicts and, and, and, but so some of them really appreciate it. But what back, back then they were trying to. They were training us all that way, you know, and so that's one of the places where I realized that ain't me. You know, it's like I'm not even credible if I'm trying to do it.
• 11:29
  Speaker A: So sometimes our mind is not ready to see the truth. That's right. You see, I think that that's the other thing, and that's what a skilled therapist understands, is that, you know, sometimes we have to inch our way towards that truth. Right. So that we develop, see, and this is. Becomes a very important topic when we when we think about rigorous honesty, can I support my honesty with myself now? What does that mean? To support means can I face this issue and stand in the face of that truth without turning against myself or blaming someone else? See, that's the challenge. Because if I can, if I can face it, and that's what we're talking about is in a level of acceptance, right? Which is facing a truth, standing in the face of that truth and allowing yourself to experience what it means to you. I think that's a great definition of acceptance. And if you. And not. There are times when I wasn't ready to face certain truths about myself because I didn't have the ability to support myself. You know, this came home to me when I did my internship at Fairfield Hills Hospital. I worked with the very, very severely disturbed people. Right? I mean, some of these people had spent better part of their life in a mental institution. And it was in Connecticut. These were state hospitals. Right. And what I saw was, is that these people did not have enough self esteem to face what was really going on with them. And it's funny, is that why we say in the program more will be revealed because as our self esteem grows, we can see things and be honest about things that we couldn't be before. Be honest with ourselves about the way I say it is. Only the best in us can see the worst in us. But that best in us is, is a, a gradual process to get to the point where I can really be that honest and see some really shitty behavior on my part so that I don't decompensate with that. And I've seen that happen. I think you did too, Tom. When someone gets.
• 13:47
  Speaker C: Absolutely. And thank God for my, I mean, I've complained about it the whole time, but thank God for my experiences in state hospitals. It's like, I mean, you just, you, you just really go to the depths of that stuff. But, but you. I want to go back to what you said a minute ago about the same thing. That goes for those of us that are therapists. But all. But this is also since, since in, in aa, we're helping each other. It applies to everybody. It's like, I know that I went through a place as a, as a helper that, that I've eventually identified as I was. I made the assumption that everybody either wanted to or needed to get to the same level of insight I had. You know, now keep in mind by me saying that now in, in, in 2026, I was limited in my insight. Okay. But, but I was. I, you know, But. But the truth is, I found myself pushing things onto people that. Exactly what you're saying, Alan. That now I can look and go like, they didn't need to hear this. They didn't. They didn't. And. And it isn't dishonesty because you're. What you just said is you couldn't. I couldn't see it from there.
• 14:56
  Speaker B: And maybe we could use this to segue.
• 14:59
  Speaker A: The.
• 15:00
  Speaker B: The level of truth that I was prepared to accept at a certain point of my life was I spent three years in therapy just struggling to get the lid of the box open on. I'm an alcoholic, and, you know, I'm powerless over that, and I need to deal with that before anything else can be addressed. And I was literally. I would show up to therapy every single week. Sometimes I'd show up loaded, sometimes I'd show up late, but week after week after week after week in denial of that. And my therapist patiently coaxing me, you know, doing everything she could do to get me to, you know, confront that fact. And, you know, for a while, I look back and started. As I started to get more and more sober, I had a lot of shame and just resentment and looking back at that guy like, what an idiot. You know, like, I just wasn't. Or, you know, look at how weak I was and. Or look at how stupid I was to just sit there and was I wasting my time? I wasn't getting anything, obviously. You know, I just wasn't prepared to see the truth. But it takes time for that to cook. I guess that's just what I learned is that, like, you know, I just could not see it or I was not. I did not have eyes to see it. But that's a process that takes. You know, it takes a while, and it takes a lot of attention, and hopefully you live long enough to be able to see certain truths.
• 16:22
  Speaker C: Well. Well, idiocy, like everything else, is relative. It's. It's like. It's like, you know, I often refer to myself as a recovering alcoholic and a recovering idiot. And, you know, but the truth is, it's like what you're describing is we can't really qualify. I don't define what you're describing as idiocy because you weren't there yet. You know, I think this is one of the things that. That we. That is kind of a trick that gets played in people with. In getting into recovery or therapy of any kind, is like, find the hidden picture. When you can't see it, you can't see it. You can't see it. But then when you see it, you cannot unsee it. And that's when you move up a level. It's like now, it doesn't mean I can't still be stupid and make mistakes. But it became harder and harder and harder for me to do that without knowing I was doing it.
• 17:15
  Speaker B: And thank God for that. Before we wrap up, we've got a little bit of time. Just wanted to speak to the side of the coin on relapse. That belongs to the loved ones of the relapser or the supporters of the one who relapsed. And last week we talked through that process of the reservation and the things that drive us to use again after we know that we can't. I suppose this brushes against Al Anon a little bit. You know, emotional sobriety and supporting and understanding relapse. Does anything come to mind for you guys about that?
• 18:02
  Speaker D: For me, I think people learn quicker in Al Anon about the universe just isn't guided by structure and you know, you know, order alone. There's also chaos in the way that I can't control everything about my addiction as an Al Anon, as someone who loves another person suffering with addiction, I can't. You know, you can't do A and B and be guaranteed C. You can do A and B because it's the right thing to do, but it isn't always going to be C. Every, every journey is individual. And when Tom was talking about the intervention period, the sort of tough love that also, whether that was order or chaos, it had an influence on more asset based psychology, more positive psychology. Well, what's going right for you? Let's focus on that as opposed to what's wrong with you? How are you deficient? All deficit based approaches to recovery. And you know, in the middle of addiction, you know, you can still find some like self will is no good, but we still need our will. Right? We just need to. A balance of these things. Right. You know, a person has some desire even though they're falling prey to another desire. Right. You know, they have a desire, you know, that in between place where we. Dr. Bob described it as desiring to have the desire to be sober. And we can work with people there and you know, and. And it'll progress in a. In a positive way, but we can't control that.
• 20:08
  Speaker C: Well, the other piece is. I just want to say this because this is. I think this is just a general. I get this out of all of this conversation and that is what is the. I wrote down what is the reason to identify everything we don't control. It's, it's, it's not to focus there, it's to say then now I can streamline my way of going through life, which I feel like I have to a certain degree where I really can get up every day and focus on the things I do control did I do. You know, my mind, my way of looking at things and my decision. And it's like that's another thing too, I mean, because it's, I mean I think we could all do that. Amazing how much, how much stuff I, and I can still do it, but my stuff in my life, I have just put lots of energy into trying to change that I never had any control over.
• 20:56
  Speaker B: And the essence of what we're getting at about relapse is that we do not control what that person does. You know, and we can fall into a trap if we start thinking that we can pull that lever or that we do have some direct bearing over whether or not that person picks up again or when they pick up, what happens to them. So it's more about influence than control maybe. Or you know, well, that loving, gentle
• 21:22
  Speaker C: presence with Al Anon. The fact is that because I had somebody in my office just the other day, we're talking about this, the idea that you're right, you cannot control that other person no matter how much you love them, how much you want to do that. But that is all this is the harder part. That is not a negative reflection on you. You know, none. I want join the club. None of us can control other people, places or circumstances. Well, we can. That's what I, we can influence, but we do not, we do not have control.
• 21:53
  Speaker A: See, I, I think that for that person that, you know, it, it varies right early on in recovery, you know, there's. The experience of a relapse in a family is going to be much more devastating. Not that it's not always devastating, but you know, as someone starts to grow along these lines, people do mature, which means they are more differentiated. And so later on there can be a lot of compassion about somebody relapsing and for that person to be met with a lot of love and concern because trust me, you know, one of the things we see with people that have got some time that go out their shame and self hate is so great that there's a high incidence of suicide. People don't come back from that. People hate themselves and they've lost so much face that they go ahead and take their lives because they just can't Face that, that reality as though somehow it's a reflection of who they're not, right? That somehow they've failed. You know, I just love Bill's attitude about it, man. It's so much more accepting. He says, God, if that happens, you know, let's not get caught up in terms of, you know, what's wrong with you, but what's needed, what do you need to do to have a better foundation what happened here? Let's try to understand it. So that's the approach and you know, it comes back to this thing of not taking it personally if somebody relapses. How could you do this to me? It's not about you, it's about them. And yes, it's going to have an impact on the family. Of course it is. Whenever a member in a family is in trouble or struggling, it's going to create a lot of concern and anxiety and things like that. But once again, the problem isn't the problem. The problem is how we meet it. And there's ways people can meet relapse that can, you know, can believe it or not, enhance that person's recovery and their chance of recovery. There's other ways where you can become a part of the problem.
• 24:03
  Speaker C: Well, you know, in that way, Alan, I've told, I've told one person in particular who was very, very far, many years into recovery, who relapsed, who had much of that total despair that you're talking about. And one of the things I could honestly say to him, it was at one point in the process was I said, you know, it's like I always believe it's better to have to learn from other people's near death experiences so I don't have to have my own. And I said, I just told him, I said, I have learned so much from watching you do this because I made this really clear to him. And I think any one of the four of us could do that. Like, I do not see myself as different from that. I do not see myself as not having that, that, that vulnerability. It's like, I mean, because I've seen too often where that we're, we're overconfidence there is what sets us up. So it's like I'm, you know, I can be sitting there talking somebody's relapse and go like, I'm not different from you. You know, I may be more fortunate today, but, but it's like, you know, you're, you're teaching, you're learning and you're teaching me.
• 25:07
  Speaker D: I was comparing The Great Britain AA Membership Survey to the AA survey for members in Canada, usa. And they ask, like we do, how long since your last drink? But they also ask, how long have you been on the recovery path? And they. Because those are both useful. Like someone who is only three months sober but has been around the rooms for 20 years, you know, has a lot of wisdom to offer that isn't lost. And I think that's a better way to sort of measure ourselves in terms of. Because, you know, seeing the self loathing people have when they come back because they feel they've betrayed themselves when you're
• 26:03
  Speaker A: right, it's not an Etch a Sketch recovery is not Etch a Sketch. You don't lose all that you've learned and stuff when you relapse. And so many people feel it, that that's, that, that's that level of maturity again that comes with this black and white thinking, this absolute thinking, I'm either okay or I'm not okay. And, and that's, you know, like you said, Joe, that when you start saying that we're all on a spectrum, it. And all the time that sometimes I'm a little more okay or I'm a little less okay, but it's not a black and white deal at all. You know, I love, I love Jerry Roll a jelly roll song. Right. I'm not okay.
• 26:42
  Speaker B: Not okay.
• 26:45
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 26:45
  Speaker B: And that's okay.
• 26:46
  Speaker A: That's. He's getting to that.
• 26:47
  Speaker D: You know, we were talking about how I noticed on my AA Grapevine app that I was 18, 000 days sober. But imagine if I had to measure how long I've been emotionally sober. Like that'd be hours.
• 27:03
  Speaker C: Not a stopwatch. Yeah.
• 27:07
  Speaker A: We've got to invent that watch that, you know, tells you how many steps you took and it reflects how much emotional sobriety you had to through the course of today.
• 27:17
  Speaker D: Yeah. Since your last righteous indignation.
• 27:22
  Speaker B: I'll be the first to get a sober watch. Yeah.
• 27:25
  Speaker C: There's a Kramer thing with on Seinfeld where he's trying to do something. He goes like, okay, starting now. You know, he's always screwing it up.
• 27:37
  Speaker A: 40 Publishing, which publishes my book, we're coining a new phrase. We're calling it Emotional Sobriety Assisted Recovery.
• 27:45
  Speaker B: I go to pretty much one meeting a week now. It's my men's stag and I really love it. And the birthdays I've been noticing the last few weeks, the ones taking their cake definitely spent a little time on their share talking about the dirty chips they've taken and about their relapse and kind of like some early, like, massive stumbles that they took. And just in like, talking to you guys this morning, it just really, like, occurred to me how important that is to like, the newer, new people in the room. Because I certainly looked at, especially in the early days, as the. At the ones taking their cakes, especially cakes for like 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, as like just this unimpeachable ideal. And like, I really looked up to those guys and stuff. But like, I think it really. To see those relapses and stumbles as like an essential part of the continuum, you know? You know, and. And not like letting. Taking that burden of shame, you know, from the people that are in that place, you know, I think is so helpful. I mean, you know, I have to imagine. I mean, it certainly meant a lot to me back then and still, you know, it was. Yeah. Relapse is part of recovery and it's not the end of the story. It's just all we get is a daily reprieve.
• 29:04
  Speaker D: Right.
• 29:04
  Speaker B: And anything else? Failures?
• 29:06
  Speaker A: No. You guys, a good show. Joe, thanks again for joining us. Sam,