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Living in the Pause · Emotional Sobriety: The Next Step in Recovery

• 0:07
  Speaker A: Welcome to Emotional the Next step in recovery with Dr. Alan Berger and Tom Rutledge. I wanted to talk about one of your nutshells, Tom. Challenge your low self esteem and surprise yourself and then you put in parenthesis. I did. Tell us what you think about the nutshell. And then also how did you surprise yourself? By challenging your low self esteem.
• 0:27
  Speaker B: Of course, unless you take chances, unless you push, push back, you're never going to find out.
• 0:33
  Speaker A: Well, there's something like at its foundation you recognize that your self hatred wasn't doing anything for you and it wasn't doing anything for the world. Right?
• 0:42
  Speaker B: So there's some impetus, there's not a basis for it. It's like, you know, that's one of the things we get when we spend enough time with each other is to me one of the, one of the great things that helps with spending time with other people who can identify with some of these ridiculously self deprecating beliefs is, is like, you know, it's easy when, if, and I don't care if they're having it now or if they're telling me about what it was like eight years ago, but it's like when you're talking about it, I'm sitting there looking at you without, without even really doing much thinking and just thinking, well that's not true for you, you know, and just, just like other people are likely to be doing it for me. So I think the idea we normalize some of the ridiculous crap that we, that we've come to believe because they've just been programmed in there from various sources. And yeah, I think, I think definitely it becomes, it becomes, it becomes a more doable thing to challenge those things in connection with, with, with our support with each other. It's like I don't feel, I don't feel embarrassed about, you know, it's like, like I guess there would have been a time about that but even when you read that and, and I'm thinking about, you know, being stuck in my low self esteem, I'm going, I'm sitting there talking with, with you two guys. I'm going like I'm trying to, trying to remember it but, but I can honestly say there would have been a time in the past where I would have been embarrassed by acknowledging that but.
• 2:11
  Speaker A: Embarrassed, embarrassed by acknowledging your low self
• 2:14
  Speaker B: esteem to that level. Everybody hadn't done exactly what I've done or fel NFL, but everybody's got their version of it.
• 2:23
  Speaker A: If it's not low self esteem, then it's that aggrandizement you know, being right sized is all about preventing yourself from either minimizing yourself to the, to an atom or, you know, being totally arrogant and you know, over your skis in that way.
• 2:40
  Speaker B: Well, and if you think about it, that's how we got where we are now. We stopped just accepting the, you know, the default position in our day to day lives in our practice of recovery. Yeah, if our, if my job, if I'm job on earth in this human life is to learn something every day, pretty close. It's pretty close to impossible for me to not be able to accomplish that. And the other thing is, and this is the humor part, but it's also true when I up a lot, there's lots of material. I mean, if I fuck up a lot, then, then it's going to be harder for me to say there's nothing there for me to learn because there's always something to be learned. But to me, the idea that where we, where self esteem comes from changes from what I accomplish or how I, how I, you know, my, in my head, how I stand up next to you or Joe is like, those are, those are, those are ridiculous measures. It's like, like, well, what I accomplish has to do with how do I feel about my intention, how do I feel about my effort.
• 3:44
  Speaker A: Okay. Even if instead of only if.
• 3:46
  Speaker B: Yeah, it's like, yeah, it's, we're not, it's, it's a total. Now this, this is probably way off this, so this nutshell, but it's like think about it. I mean, tell me what you guys think. It's like we don't measure things anyway or any way. Like we used to measure things about just self measuring and how we're doing. It's like, and when we do, we're probably slipping back a little bit.
• 4:10
  Speaker A: You don't live your life with the expectation that you're going to be able to hit a gallop and stay there at all times. You know, it's going to be like, that's a.
• 4:20
  Speaker B: Of course, Alan talks about that all the time. But, but the idea is if, if, if I'm, if I want to learn to walk again, then what's a success? Well, it depends on where I am
• 4:28
  Speaker A: before the recovery days and the emotional sobriety days. Like I was in such disharmony with myself and with the rest, with the world around me. And so I think a metric of success, much more for me these days is just finding a way to be, to be right with who I am, you know, comfortable in my own skin. As close as to that as I can get and to just, you know, not be abusive or disrespectful to the people I care about and the kind of society that houses me.
• 5:01
  Speaker B: That's a, that's, that's a huge one. Patrick, is that the idea that, that we, you know, what is the measure of self esteem? Like, it's, it's. We're so. I think we are so geared in our culture to focus toward accomplishment or professional this or that. But it's like, one of the things that I have learned from the. Some of the best people I've been around in the last many years is, you know, one of the best places I want to measure my success in any given day is how I treat other people. I've just gone through and after seven months, kind of resolved this glitch thing I had with my, my insurance, with, with Medicare, and, And for seven months, I was, I was every week I was on the phone several, several times, sometimes meeting in person with these people. And I am historically a. I was historically a very impatient man who just, almost just loved to get angry at people. Just had. It was. But it's like, without even paying attention to it, I told Dee Dee just a short time ago, I said, you know, I've. Over the, over the years, I've been patient. I've been patient sometimes, and I've been proud of myself for that. But I said, I. I think that what I've gotten from this is I think I am patient. I see. I think I'm. And it seems to be bearing out. I said, I'm a. I think I'm a patient person now. And it's like, that's a, That's a drastic change. It's like. And I love it. And. Because what I, What I learned from talking to all these people is that every. I don't. I lost count of how many people I talked to or met with. Every single one of them was competent, they cared, they wanted to help me, and they worked in a bureaucracy, and a bureaucracy cannot not make a decision. And therefore, every time I got the help I needed and the understanding I needed and the guidance I needed, it still didn't work. Not because of them or me, but because bureaucracies don't make decisions.
• 7:02
  Speaker A: That'd be one of the most shocking things from your experience with that, Tom, is when you refer to the benevolence of the people over the phone in Tennessee giving social services. I would not have expected that.
• 7:17
  Speaker B: Yeah. Oh, my God. And first of all, I'M so grateful that I don't have that job. It's like, yeah, there you go. The people, these people have to deal with every single day when they're. I promise you, everybody they're talking to is not patient and all of that. I talked to one person who. She was kind of rough, kind of rough in a way, And. But I did something I teach people, other people do all the time. She. She was the one person that she. She didn't seem very happy to be talking to me. And I just. And I. And I lied to her. I said, listen, I just need to say I've been doing this for so, so many months. And I said, you're the first person I've talked to that I really get. I really feel like you're listening to me. That wasn't true. That was the opposite of the truth. But I wasn't doing it to bull. Bullshit her manipulator. I gave her a compliment, and she did what I had been led, I had learned to do. She stepped into it, right?
• 8:13
  Speaker A: It encouraged her towards.
• 8:15
  Speaker B: She wasn't upset with me. She was having a bad day, you know, so. So what I've learned is I give. I give her something to be of service if I can, and it's okay. If she didn't, I would have been all right. But it's like. It's like she became very helpful and very kind to me after that. And it's like, I'm sure she didn't even know she went through the transition. She was just having a rough time. And so anyway, so guess what? We're learning to think of other people. There's a measure how much today. Rather forget about all the clients I'm going to see or how I think I'm going to do on the podcast. Just bumping into people. How, How. How am I treating these people? That stuff counts.
• 8:54
  Speaker A: Sometimes it's all I have, and that's. But I'm grateful for that.
• 8:59
  Speaker B: I don't know how the. I don't know how the universe works, but I have a feeling when we. If we die and there's that life review, those are. Those are the things that are going to.
• 9:06
  Speaker A: That's what really matters.
• 9:07
  Speaker B: I don't think it's going to be like, you know, you did, you did. You did a hell of a job on the podcast that day. You said some very clever things. I don't think that's what's going to happen.
• 9:16
  Speaker A: Tom, you talked to me for almost an hour, just helping me with. When I was just Agonizing over my breakup. And I'll never forget that. That was just very. I. It was a really tough corner of my life that I didn't know how to get around. And your presence really helped me. So that's just, you know, and I'm sure you do that ten times a day. So that's.
• 9:39
  Speaker B: No, but that's. I tell you what, that's the good thing to be reminded of is that you're right. It is my presence. It's like. Like, that's another thing I can do as a professional or I can do as a friend. I can go. I can sit there, go. I don't know. How would I do, you know, what can take that apart? It's like, it's, you know, everything from just talking to people to actually research that's been done. When clients talk about what matters in therapy, it doesn't matter that we. That we're great at therapy. It matters that we give a. That we care, you know? You know, I had a client one time, I just. She. I had her make bullet points about what she took away from the therapy sessions. And I always. And I did it, too. And I always had different things I thought did this. But. But. But I remember the one time that she just said, oh, yeah, I told you about whatever, this and this, this and this. And it was really scary for me to tell you that. And you didn't judge me. And I'm going like, you guys know that I didn't do anything. I just sat there. There was no temptation to judge, but it's like she needed somebody to be there. And that's what you're talking about.
• 10:48
  Speaker A: Joe, you had the bright idea to compare and contrast emotional sobriety and some of the principles we talk about in regards to that with cognitive behavioral therapy. It was developed in the 60s by Aaron Beck. And there's a degree of self monitoring that happens with cbt. There's living in the pause.
• 11:09
  Speaker B: The bigger problem in all this is that we do this stuff. We have these assumptions, we have these. These programs, and we're not aware of them. You know, in other words, it's cons. It's unconscious incompetence. You know, we're not aware. But see the idea of moving to conscious incompetence or. And whether you want to call it incompetence or not. But when I become conscious of the fact that we. We start having these conversations, it gets kind of. Kind of sketchy in our minds because we. We can. We can get ourselves tangled up, but it's so it is progress to say I, I think I'm, I'm suspecting that part of the reason I'm having a hard time with this is because I've got this belief lodged in my head that I'm not enough, you know?
• 11:54
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 11:54
  Speaker B: And he's like, well, what about yourself? That is your emotional sobriety. That's where you are in the process. You're in a play that everybody else thinks they know. And then you're improvising. You're not, you're not saying what everybody expects you're going to say. Because, because, you know, in, in the early days of my life, my young adult, like, it's pretty easy to predict how I was going to respond to things nowadays. It's like, not so much or it is, I guess, as I've gotten different. But, and I'm. And I don't mean this to be harmful to people or hurtful to people, but. But I kind of enjoy messing with people's minds. And I'm pretty sure that of the three of us, at least one of us, Joe enjoys that too.
• 12:36
  Speaker C: Well, the whole idea of me trying to read people's minds is thinking again, another false assumption that I'm supposed to know that if I care about them, I do know what they're thinking, I do know what they mean by what they're saying. And the truth is, I have to say, help me out with this. I'm not quite sure, you know, what do you mean by what you're saying? Because I want to make sure I'm following. I want to honor what you're saying and not jump to conclusions. And that means admitting my fallibility, which I guess is what I would. What anyone with poor self esteem is going to do. Right. You have to hide the infallibility, the fallibility.
• 13:27
  Speaker B: But you, but the other thing that this is, maybe I'm, I'm just kind of free floating here about this, but it's, I like to be on the, on the, in the group that basically is doing my best to behaviorally insist on say what you mean and mean what you say. It's like I had a wonderful therapy teacher from years, years ago in Atlanta, that simple thing. But when, when somebody seemed upset with her, she would simply say, even if it was like the example she gave me, even if it was like a clerk in a store she just met, you know, she would say, are you angry with me? I mean, that's a showstopper. It's like, like, and, and, and I, and I started practicing that and not without it. You can't deal with attitude. But it transforms everything. Because. Because it's just like this woman I was telling you about with Social Security. Once you ask that, you know, what you get is people going like, oh, no, no, no, no, I'm sorry, I'm having a tough day, or what, Bond with them, you know, and have their day be better. Your day's better, that kind of stuff. But. But I've also done that. I remember a client of a group that said at the end of the. I knew she was really upset with me, and on the way out, she. I said. I said, are you. Are you mad at me? And she goes, no. And. And I. I go, you know, it's a pretty obvious something. But I. What I do. I said, you seem like you are. So would you, you know, I said, would you tell me if you were mad at me? Silence. Of course. And it's like. And I said, well, if I. If you are mad at me anytime, you can tell me. And that was the end of the conversation. And. And nobody had ever taught me how to leave something like that in somebody else's lap. I didn't do anything to her. I just didn't do what? Like, you're telling Joe that we learned to say, this is my responsibility now that she's having this experience in front of me, and I know what it is, but she won't tell me. It's like, instead, it was just. And it's. And I teach people this all the time. And one of the things I always want to emphasize for anybody who's listening to this is like, you do it with a slightest bit of attitude, and you're not doing it. It's like, you do. You do it. You do it directly, neutrally, with kindness. Like, you don't. Like, okay, well, if you are mad, I mean, you know, you know, it's like that's, that's. That's just us doing the same thing. We're not. We're not. We're not being honest with our communication, but it's so much better if we can just talk about this stuff. And even if somebody else and this woman stayed in the group, I'll use a good example, because we got better. She got better. We got better communicating about this stuff because. Because she learned. She. I think. I don't know how. What her process was, but I think what she did is she picked up on the fact that if she wanted me to know something, she was going to need to tell me because I was apparently too dumb. To know.
• 16:24
  Speaker A: You know, one thing that strikes me as being very similar to emotional sobriety is that it's all about focusing on your, yourself and your responses and rather than trying to control what anybody else is doing. It's all, all roads go through the self.
• 16:40
  Speaker B: My wife calls it positive selfishness and she says it's self, self focused because the word selfish has such a bad rap. It's like, like she's, she defines positive selfishness as self focus only does not harm other, other people, but it actually benefits other people. If I'm living my life from the inside out and considering me in relation to you, then, then, then I'm, then I'm. When I'm, I'm being a better person to you as well as to myself. It's very different than we grew up in.
• 17:09
  Speaker C: The Bill Sheberg book 30 Things Practical Advice for Living. Well, one of his chapters is it's always a communication problem.
• 17:21
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 17:22
  Speaker C: And, you know, often, you know, like what you described, like, if I was the clerk, you said, are you mad at me? You know, can't talk about that right now. Right. You know, like we have, It's a communication problem. And sometimes just the invitation from you to say, like, you can be mad at me, just tell me if you are, is fine. But sometimes we have to make an appointment to talk about it. You know, maybe we can go into this a little more later. What's a good time for you? Right. Like maybe not while there's a lineup of people here and everyone's complaining because whatever you're. We're out of bread. Right. Whatever it is. Right.
• 18:07
  Speaker B: Well, the other thing you're saying, Joe, is the, the idea though, that we also want to understand that it's not don't measure things in the all or none way we're letting go of these measurements. It's like the idea that if, if when I have that, that conversation with the person and, and she says, no, I'm not mad at you, and I say, are you sure? You seem mad. No, I'm not mad at you. You know, would you tell me if, if you were? And then she doesn't say anything, that communication is there. I had it. She had it. And I, and, and we're fine. I mean, we're going to be fine is what I'm thinking. We walk away. Go like, good, we did this. She, you know, she, she's walking away. You know, not destroyed. I'm not destroyed. And it's like, we'll get back to this, like what you're saying. It's like, we don't have to do it all at once.
• 18:51
  Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. That's another chapter in 30 things. The conversation before the conversation. Like. Like, I'm. I've got some real strong feelings about this, and I don't want to say the wrong thing, but I want to talk to you about it. How about, you know, tomorrow while we're driving or 20 minutes from now or whatever else.
• 19:13
  Speaker B: Don't. Don't do it in a car. Do not get caught in a car with somebody. I reckon people go, like, we're gonna talk about it on the way to Florida. No, you're not. It's like,
• 19:26
  Speaker C: I bet you.
• 19:26
  Speaker A: I bet you've helped some people avert disaster that way, Tom.
• 19:29
  Speaker B: Yeah, just very much so. It's like, like. No, no, you gotta be careful about where you choose these things. Yeah.
• 19:36
  Speaker C: Spoke.
• 19:36
  Speaker A: Spoken like somebody who's been stuck in a car.
• 19:39
  Speaker B: Somebody. Actually, I think there are probably more people because of my style of being so damn verbose and having so many opinions. It's like, I would imagine more people have had that experience with me than I have had with them. So more. More amends to consider now that we leave that as we leave this one today.
• 19:59
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 20:00
  Speaker C: More words, more potential damage.
• 20:03
  Speaker B: You certainly are just part of the team. I just want you to. I think you know that, but I want you to know that I. Yeah,
• 20:08
  Speaker C: I definitely feel it, like, sort of always available and, you know, I'm not indispensable. I love. I love just listening to the podcast. That's fun. Also, I love.
• 20:21
  Speaker A: I got an email from a listener yesterday about one of the quotes that Alan had, and I knew that it was a snafu that I'd made in the kind of like the show notes or whatever, but just attributing it correctly to. But it was a really good quote, and it's just great to hear from him. He said he loves the show and he just wants to. He really liked that quote and he wanted to find out who said it, but just those little reminders of, you know, the kind of broader emotional sobriety community. I feel like it's not just us, you know, it's us and then everybody who's with us listening.
• 20:56
  Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. It's a real side guys moment. Emotional sobriety.
• 21:01
  Speaker B: My first spot. I probably said this a zillion times on here, but my. My first sponsor said this in relation to marriage because it was a time I was, you know, having that. If you've been in relationships, you know, that urgent thing that I got to get you to understand this now. You know, we got to straighten this out now. Which is, which is really a sign that says you should go to bed is saying, people say what they say. Don't get a bit angry and go like that. I would lose a lot of sleep that way. It's like I, I'm angry quite often, but it's, it's what my sponsors just said one time. It just, I always remember it with any, any relationship. But he said marriage is just one long ass conversation. In that case, it was, it was Dee Dee and I would get to a place where I would. I don't know if she had that kind of urgency, but I just had to hold on. And this, this was my fist, you know, I got, I got to get this apart and cross down. It's like the truth is if you're in a relationship, you're going to stay in the relationship. Whatever the relationship is, you don't have to do it now. And then the other thing is we might have, we might talk about this as a subject, by the way, is like one of the great insights that I've had that have made a world of difference in my life and I had it during the COVID thing in a powerful way is we don't have to be understood.
• 22:14
  Speaker A: Yeah. You know, that's been a big one for me.
• 22:17
  Speaker B: Not have to be understood. I lived with that desperate need for to be understood by probably anybody. But when somebody presented that to me and they didn't have any, that was the end of the sentence. It wasn't. We don't have to be understood completely. We don't have to be understood by everyone. It's like this person just said. And it was. And it still wows me. No, we don't have to be understood. Yeah.
• 22:42
  Speaker A: We don't have to make ourselves so big. You know, it's. Yeah. And there's, it's a lot easier of a way to get through life.
• 22:49
  Speaker B: Yeah, it's nice.
• 22:50
  Speaker A: I mean, not a lot. Nothing's easy.
• 22:52
  Speaker B: That preference versus demand thing, it's like, it's nice when you understand. I think most of the time you guys understand me. And, and if I need. And if I feel like I need more, I could ask for more. It's not a life or death thing.
• 23:03
  Speaker C: That was a great callback to the preferences. Right. You know, like, like, like, I don't need to be understand. I prefer to be understand.
• 23:13
  Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
• 23:14
  Speaker C: But, you know, it's not this great principle that, you know, if you don't understand me, then that would be an un.
• 23:21
  Speaker B: Enforceable rule.
• 23:22
  Speaker C: Right.
• 23:22
  Speaker B: You know, I mean, you know, and it probably goes back longer before that because there's no, there's nothing new under the sun. But it's like where I. Where I remember that was in the 70s with the, with the book by Ken Kai's called the Handbook to Higher Consciousness. It's like, is a beautiful book. Long before we had the jargon of addiction or codependency and stuff like that. And. But it was, it was about all of this stuff. It was certainly a book about emotional sobriety.
• 23:48
  Speaker C: I thought when I got that book, it'd be a real good idea to find higher consciousness to read it upstairs.
• 24:13
  Speaker B: Sam.