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The Effect of Emotional Sobriety on Our Communication · Emotional Sobriety: The Next Step in Recovery

• 0:00
  Speaker A: Foreign. Welcome to Emotional Sobriety, the next step in Recovery, with Dr. Alan Berger and Tom Rutledge. We're communicating about communication and
• 0:17
  Speaker B: communicating about communication. And we are.
• 0:20
  Speaker A: Yeah, we've got a little verbal tennis match going on. So last week was we were talking about the effects of emotional dependency on our communication and kind of the corrosive effects of it. And if you haven't listened to that yet, we encourage you to go back and check it out. But this week, we're going to be talking about the effect of emotional sobriety on our communication, the amelior. I always try to say this word ameliorative effect of it. So, yeah. Alan, how does that strike you?
• 0:48
  Speaker B: Well, I'm just so excited about these two podcasts because this really helps us focus on some very practical ways of showing up differently in our relationships. You know, Dr. Harriet Lerner had a great line. She writes a lot of these books about the dance of anger, the dance of intimacy. And, you know, one of the things she talks about is that when we change our dance, then the relationship, our dance steps, then the relationship has to change. And if you don't change your dance steps, the relationship's going to remain the same. So if nothing changes, nothing changes. Well, this is clearly one way to change how you're dancing with your partner is the focus on cleaning up your communication. So what's the difference? Well, when we achieve a level of emotional sobriety, Patrick, our communication is now focused on sharing information. It's informative, not manipulative. I'm sharing what I'm sharing with you because I need to share it. And I'm saying it as much for me as I'm saying it for you. Like, if I say I don't want to be yielded anymore, I don't want to put up with that anymore. So I've got to figure out a way of how to deal with you when you start to get upset and yell at me.
• 2:20
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 2:20
  Speaker B: And I don't want to try to shut you down. If you need to yell, yell. But I don't want to. I don't want to stand around. I get too triggered by it. So what? So now I'm communicating to inform you about me and what I need to do in relationship to you because I don't want you to feel like I'm not interested in what you're feeling. I'm just not able to be available when you're that upset. And so I'll walk away for a while and I'll come back and check in in a Half an hour to see if you've been able to calm yourself down so we can talk. If not, and you still need to yell some more, just tell me. I'll come back a little later. So you see, what I'm doing is informing you about what I'm going to do. I'm not trying to say, you got to stop yelling at me if you want to talk. See, that would be manipulative. You know, you don't seem interested in me. You just want to scream and yell, and I'm not going to talk to you that way. You got to stop that for me to talk to you.
• 3:22
  Speaker A: You're keeping the ball on your own court.
• 3:24
  Speaker B: I am keeping the ball on my side of the court. I'm not trying to maneuver you into a place that I want you to be. Another way to say that, Patrick, you know when you say, I'm keeping the ball on my side of the court. So emotional sobriety is. Brings responsibility home to us. I learned to soothe myself. I learned to tolerate uncertainty. I learned to validate my own experience, that I don't need you to tell me. And to validate what I'm experiencing. I'm experiencing. I know what I'm experiencing, and I hold onto that. And not that I'm not open to feedback from you. I am. It's not that I'm just solid and rigid. I. I'm flexible in my position, but I'm also solid in it. Right. Because I'm not depending on you. I establish boundaries. I endure your disappointments with me, even though that may be hard. I was talking to a client the other day, and she was disappointed that I didn't get back to her in more of a timely manner. And then I found myself defending myself. And then halfway through the session, I said, look, let me first clean up my behavior. I'm sorry I disappointed you. I hate disappointing people I care about. And it's really hard for me to do. And I cleared the air for myself so I could be with her. Of course, she appreciated that a lot, that I could own that. That doesn't happen in her life. Right. Much people that she interacts with don't take care of responsibility that way. But I needed to do that. Not just because I want to be a good therapist. Yes, that's part of it, but it's a small part. I did it because it's the right thing to do. See, that's where communication becomes informative, not manipulative. And we're told that, see, when we're working step 10 nine, even 10. When I go to make amends to people, can I expect them to. To forgive me? No. Because if I communicate it to get forgiveness, what am I doing? I'm trying to manipulate you by what I share.
• 5:30
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 5:30
  Speaker B: See, we're learning this. That's why when Bill says if we practice the 12 steps in our daily lives, that we and those about us find emotional sobriety. The essence of this is in step number nine, when we are making amends because it's the right thing for us to do and not to get somebody else to do it. Or we are learning an important thing about what is healthy communication. It's informative, not manipulative.
• 6:02
  Speaker A: And then the positive consequences or effects of that behavior, they're just. They're byproducts of it, but they're not the reason for it.
• 6:11
  Speaker B: Yeah. So we ask ourselves, when we're in this state of mind of emotional sobriety, instead of the question being, who will make this feeling go away? You know, who can I turn to that's away from me? Right. Remember, no one's coming. Right. The question becomes, how can I support myself while I'm moving through this feeling?
• 6:32
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 6:32
  Speaker B: And the answer is, always add more self. Like I did the other day when I owned that. It's hard for me to disappoint someone I care about when I own that I became free and I could listen and be much more attentive in the session than other I was before sharing that.
• 6:52
  Speaker A: That's one of the worst things in the world for me, is disappointing people I care about.
• 6:56
  Speaker B: I hate it too, man. I do.
• 6:59
  Speaker A: But it's.
• 7:00
  Speaker B: I think it goes back to. Because, see, that's still where some of my emotional dependency is. My sense of self still depends on you liking me. And I don't want to disappoint you. I want you to like me. So then I'm a good boy.
• 7:13
  Speaker A: Well, right. Right. It's because. Because it's what. What am I? If I'm somebody that. That's disappointing to the people, if I'm seen as disappointing, then what does that say about me? It's
• 7:23
  Speaker B: terrible. Right.
• 7:24
  Speaker A: But it doesn't. See, there's no way to get through life. And I mean, there's no way to escape disappointing others. It's just at times. Right,
• 7:32
  Speaker B: right. So we go on to say that emotional maturity is not the absence of having any needs. It's not. It's the ability to carry our needs without making someone else responsible for them, without making them someone else's obligation to take care of
• 7:52
  Speaker A: right. And it's. And then, you know, we're going to reach out for support. And that is strongly advised. Right, but it's that reaching out for support and kind of, you know, taking the initiative to kind of like integrate the. That support into your own system. You know, that's, that's a different thing than just kind of like abdicating, you know, the responsibility to take that initiative.
• 8:16
  Speaker B: Exactly. See, what we say is the goal of self support is not to stop reaching out to others. Like, if I'm in trouble, I can reach out to you, but it is to stop losing myself when they cannot reach back. That if you say I'm not available, for me not to implode and say, oh my God, I'm screwed, and is to now try to figure out what I can do to support myself better. See, autonomous individuals. If we look at Dr. Nathaniel Brannan's work, he defines it very well. He says autonomous individuals understand that other individuals do not exist merely to satisfy our needs. Those people, those of us that have reached some emotional autonomy, have accepted the fact that no matter how much love and caring exists between people, we are each of us in the ultimate sense, responsible for ourselves, bringing responsibility home. I love that image, you know, so we become emotionally free and we're emotionally sober when reassurance is something we can appreciate rather than something we must obtain. I can appreciate when you reassure me, but I don't have to have it from you. The icing on the cake. It's not the cake, so to speak.
• 9:32
  Speaker A: I was thinking it's the cherry on top. It might
• 9:34
  Speaker B: be
• 9:34
  Speaker A: the
• 9:34
  Speaker B: cherry on top and sometimes I love eating the cherry, but if it's not available, I can still enjoy the cake.
• 9:40
  Speaker A: Our, like two to three year stretch where we were just getting walloped. Cancer was in the mix. There was relationship trouble. There was like all kinds of physical ailments, you know, and
• 9:50
  Speaker B: you've fallen off cliffs. My hip, my femur getting fractured in pt, my heart being broken. Your heart being broken. Tom having cancer, Roger having cancer. How would we do that, Patrick?
• 10:04
  Speaker A: I don't know. But I mean, I think it has something to do with what you're talking about, with, you know, a degree of emotional sobriety that enabled us to self support as well as the fellowship coming together. And, you know, we were helping out, each helping each other out quite a bit. But it was a harmony.
• 10:22
  Speaker B: We really were there and it. And it wasn't an obligation. We were there because we wanted to be, or I was there because I wanted to be. I Sense that was true for you. I sense it was true for Tom.
• 10:34
  Speaker A: Yeah, Yeah.
• 10:35
  Speaker B: I want to be there for you. I love you, man. I mean, there's no question about it. And I know you love me. And I feel that that connection from you. And that's what happens is, is love creates. I want to, not obligation. That's healthy love. Emotional dependency. Fused love, which we call immature love, is based on need. I am obligated to you. If I love you, I must do what you want me to do so that you love me. That creates a real tough position, man.
• 11:13
  Speaker C: Hindsight is the only insight. And just now that I'm thinking in those terms, just seeing examples of that all the time and examples of how often I stop myself in my tracks and other people do the same. When we're waiting around to understand a particular thing before we proceed, when in fact we're not going to actually have. We can come up with an understanding, but most likely it's not going to be the same understanding we have, you know, even two weeks from now.
• 11:44
  Speaker A: Now, what is emotional fluency?
• 11:46
  Speaker C: Well, the, the. The idea, I mean, it's, you know, it's obviously, you know, a sub subset of, of. Of emotional sobriety, but it's being able to communicate easily. And the emotional fluency that I focus on most is, is that intrapersonal emotional fluency that rather, because we. We get ourselves in so much of a mind, you know, with difficulties just facing, understanding, and dealing with our own emotions. So that's where I actually think we tend to be more emotionally fluent in our interpersonal lives than we are with ourselves in our intrapersonal lives. So, you know, and it has so much to do with just being and, and the thing, you know, one of our favorite things to do always is, is accepting. Just, you know, you don't. We don't have to make things different than they are. We just need to. To keep working as they show up, if that makes any sense.
• 12:40
  Speaker A: It does. And I've got the definition pulled up for fluency. Fluency refers to the smooth, natural and effortless flow of speech, reading or language use. Natural and effortless.
• 12:51
  Speaker C: Effortless.
• 12:51
  Speaker A: So you're not in contradiction of.
• 12:54
  Speaker C: Yeah, that's. That's the word that got me was effortless.
• 12:58
  Speaker A: Alan was talking first about the effect of emotional dependency on communication. So kind of like the distorting effect that our emotional dependency causes in the way that we, we, you know, communicate and then receive from other people. And then we're into. The second part now is the effect of emotional sobriety on that communication. What is emotionally sober communication? Like, what does it mean to communicate in a way that's emotionally sober and therefore fluent?
• 13:27
  Speaker C: The truth is, if we look at communication in our world, any healthy communication, too, is. Sometimes our communication is strategic in the sense that, you know, we don't have the same relationship we have with everybody. You know, you and I can talk to each other in a different way than we might somebody else that. That. That we know or, you know, and. And what I've learned to do is really be sure we take the judgment out of referring to some parts of communication as. As strategic. Which means. Which means it's a. It involves a left brain thinking. I'm thinking the about. Like, how. What's the best way to get this across to Patrick? How. How. What do I know about Patrick in a way that. That makes sense? We. We can do that. You know, most of us who grew up in dysfunctional, any of us who grew up in dysfunctional families didn't learn much about. Much about intimacy, but we learned about strategy, you know, and so we know about strategy at. At a dysfunctional level. And. And I want to be sure that what people understand that, you know, this is. This is like everything else we do, it's on a continuum. So it's not. It's not that, you know, I had a very strategic communication with my. With my mother or anybody in my family, but it was always about like, okay, I got to read. You know, this is where you got to read the room. You got to read the feelings. You got to read people's minds
• 14:56
  Speaker A: on a certain level, that was because you didn't feel safe, right? So you had to
• 14:59
  Speaker C: kind of actually, it was actually very effective communication when we were learning it, because it's. We needed to learn. We need. That's how we learn to survive. That's how we learn to get our needs met, you know, So I just want to be sure that it's. The longer I do this, the more I just look at places where we're in danger. I'm in danger, anybody's in danger. Moving conceptually into places that are all or none. Is this functional or dysfunctional? Is this. Is this, you know, is this the right way to communicate or the wrong way from that? Well, it's. It's. It. It's all subjective. I think one of those nutshells I sent you was. Was in it. Interesting to think that. That our only way of perceiving objective reality is subjectively. There is nothing else but subjective for us.
• 15:46
  Speaker A: I have difficulty. I mean, like you, I think, just, you know, asserting things unequivocally or like, you know, just, just, just making a call. Right on. Like, you know, this is what truth is. This is what reality is, you know, just because. Yeah. That, that subjective flow is just always so, like, apparent. Apparent to me.
• 16:06
  Speaker C: Yeah. And some people, some people, you know, if you're on the continuum, if you're talking to somebody who's pretty egotistical or narcissist on the narcissistic scale, those people tend to be very, very satisfied with the idea of just claiming this is what it is. And, and, and I think, you tell me if I'm not wrong about the fact that you and I probably fall into a similar category here. I, I still, I, I, I wish I was beyond this at this point, but I, I still overdo it. And when it comes to disclaiming things so that, that I'm acknowledging that this is my subjective thinking or that, you know, that. Or I'll tell you the best way to say it is my spot. My, my editor at HarperCollins, when I was writing Embracing Fear, he, he's, he said, he said, Tom, he said, you don't have to disclaim everything he said. He said, he said, you're, he said, we're writing a book here, so we have to generalize and we have to, we have to make some assumptions. He says, he says, I think. And he said this hilarious thing. He said, if it weren't for me, I think every one of your paragraphs in your book would begin with the following paragraph may or may not apply to you. You know, he says, you don't have to. It's good that you know that, that this is not true for everybody and you're not claiming to be the master of the. But, but the truth is we do need to kind of, if just for communication sake, we need to land on some things and talk about that and be sure. And what we want to be sure we're doing is I want, when I'm talking about, you know, this is what I think about, this anxiety or whatever I want to be in relationship with and which we, you and I are where you could say, like, well, that's not my experience. And I. Then what I do is I stop and go, okay, say more about that. The idea of sharing the way we share is we share our experience. Strength and hope is one of the most powerful principles I think there is in, in communication, when we're talking about the wounded, helping the wounded. We all measure things with ourselves as the standard of measure. You know, when, when, when I, when we, when we hear somebody be rude to something and we go, oh, my God, that's horrible. It's like, what do we really say? Oh, well, all I'm really saying is I wouldn't do that. That I wouldn't say that that way. And it's, and it's like so often what we don't want to do is get into the place where go like, like there's some kind of, you know, ultimate rule book somewhere that says you're not supposed to do that. It's like it really, it. We really are going to heal in, in this subjective arena. It's not going to, you know, they're really. I mean, I made the joke earlier about even our objective reality is subjectively perceived. It's like, that's really true. And I think we need to respect that. And it's also how we respect each other so that, that when you say something and we run into that in our business, when somebody says something that's different than what we say to other people. First of all, I think a lot, most of the time, if you look closer, we're saying the same thing. The other time is they're also just maybe we just may have a disagreement about how we go about doing that. And the other thing I've learned as a therapist is I may have a way that is beautiful. It works beautifully and is very effective. It may, it will not be the only way.
• 19:29
  Speaker A: You know, what comes up for me when I think about emotionally sober communication. And so I have to sort that into, like, what are conversations I've been able to have since I've been engaging in this practice that I was unable to have when I was, you know, let's say, more emotionally dependent. You know, recent example I've talked about a little bit on the show is I was able to instigate a breakup that I needed to have with somebody that I loved a lot. And it was, I, I. It was me getting honest about where I was in this relationship and kind of having an open communication about that and owning the results, you know, both the good and the bad. On the other side of that, I think I was incapable or less capable of doing that before I became aware of any of these principles.
• 20:20
  Speaker C: Am I representing myself accurately? Am I. Am I saying the truth? Am I being honest with you? Those are the main things what you just gave as an example of just really being aware and then grateful for the growth and the difference you can perceive in yourself. The idea that I can still includes information like, I still feel bad about this because I'm going to. It's like, you know, you know, who, who. Yeah, I mean, let's go find some people who, you know, if somebody likes being the person who is instigating an end of a relationship, I think they may have some different problems.
• 20:56
  Speaker A: What's the better way to move through an experience? You know, am I going to. Am I just going to. Am I kind of going to confront the reality I'm not happy in this dynamic, you know, and I need to bring that out and, you know, I need to talk about it with somebody that I really care about, or am I going to show up at the door every day with a smile on my face, you know, not really engaging with that reality where underneath I'm just. I'm just not happy. And I don't feel like I'm where I should be. And it's. Neither is pleasant, you know, but one is kind of a disingenuous and the other is just facing. Facing up.
• 21:33
  Speaker C: One of the things that I enjoy looking at is, is not when I'm in it, but just in terms of the understanding, communication, it's listening for the rules that. That just slip in there without us knowing it that are there just under the surface, which is like, I'm not happy in this relationship. Well, could, you know, we talked a little while ago. Do you think you could. Other changes you could make that would. That could make you happier? And it's like, yeah, I think so. Have you. Have you worked on some of that? Yes, I have tried to do some of that. Do you think it's still possible that maybe you could make it work? See, we live in a world. If the answer to that question is yes, then that means you can't leave. It's like, we don't. We. We don't. And I'm not talking about being frivolous and I'm not talking about being selfish. I'm talking about not forgetting that. There's also another question. There is. Given the history where you are right now, do you want to stay and see that we have so much guilt associated with doing what we want and because. Because we. We don't think of it as. I want to do this because this feels better. This feels more accurate to me, more right to me. When we think one. We think about what I want for Christmas, you know, I want. I want. I want to want to know. It's just your. Your. What you desire is part of your own intuition. And we need. We need to listen to that. It is part of our direction in life. And, and it is a place where we really challenge in our recovery to, to be on our own side. It's like, what do you want to do? That's. It's a really important question. It's not the only question.
• 23:11
  Speaker A: Exactly. And, you know, I take a little sip of doubt and regret every day, you know, on the other side of that, you know, like, there's no, there's nothing. My experience of life is that, you know, there's nothing neat and clean. Well,
• 23:24
  Speaker C: and, and
• 23:24
  Speaker A: decisions that lie in front of us.
• 23:26
  Speaker C: And, and what I would say is, you know, and this is a very subjective thing to say, and I'm not. I fit for you at all. But I'm going like, well, we. Okay, be grateful for that because. Because first sponsor in AA taught me this one from lots of different angles. Because you don't want to be somebody who doesn't have that. You don't want to have somebody who is just always. Even after you've made choices that you're always sure. You know, I just. There's just something wrong about being. There's something really wrong to me about being so sure about everything. It's like, you know, you could. I. I think from what we've talked about, you correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you feel solid about the decisions you've made in this and making this change in this relations, but the idea that, that there's, There's. There's still a committee back there in the, in the back room reviewing things, not, not used to be to beat you up, but now just to. Basically just to learn as we go forward, you know, and, and, and the question is, are you sure you're right about that? Well, the answer to that is always going to be no. How could I possibly be sure? I'll tell. I'll tell you.
• 24:35
  Speaker A: I'm as sure as I was able to be
• 24:37
  Speaker C: right. That's it. And talk to. Talk to me in a year or two and tell you the story about it. You know,
• 24:42
  Speaker A: I got the counsel of friends like you, and, you know, I really, I thought about it. I do therapy. I think it was the right call. But. Yeah, I don't know. I. I think too much to really let it sit too easy with me.
• 24:56
  Speaker C: Well, and again, if we, if we really want to get radical and think about things that if we, if we, if we, you know, and I'm not claiming any mastery over this, but if we actually learn to even. Not even think in terms of is this right or wrong? Is this, is this work? Is this okay? Am I okay? You know, and, and then you care about is she okay? You and I are recovering addicts, so we have no, there's no, there's no limit to a list of things we could say that we did wrong because that are very clear. It's like, like, no, no, there's no argument that that went wrong. But, but the, the. The clearer we become and the more. More ourselves we become, it's like those things are really not really the best way to ask us, like, how am I doing? I'm learning from this. I'm saying that it's like, you know, and if I asked you how she doing, you. I don't know much about that because I'm not much in touch. But. But I, but, you know, I know I feel good. I think she's taking care of herself. It's like, those are good answers, are little essay answers. They're not like, I'm fine. Good. And we never have that. I mean, you know, I mean, you know, I had some. I was talking about my first marriage to somebody the other day was. Which ended in 1983, and somebody said, you have. You have reg. Regrets about that. And I go, God, yeah, I have lots, Lots of regrets. Would you, you know, if you had the chance, would you go back and. And. And repair those? And I go, well, no, of course I wouldn't. Because. Because I, you know, that would change. That would change history. And we can't do that. But, but even I could. I wouldn't be here today. I wouldn't be sitting here with you talking like that. It's like, like I can still be. I can still say, oh no, I am. I have. I regret that I treated the. This and that person that way. Or I was this. This way in this situation. But it's just like part of. Part of self acceptance and self love is accepting, you know, not. Not rejecting parts of ourselves. Understanding. No, it's good for me to know that I have the, the. The. The potential to be. To not do not treat people well. You know, sometimes people hide Carl Jung curls. That's the shadow the person. We. We just. It's not so much bad things, but things that we reject about ourselves. It's like, like, no, I need to, you know, if we're talking about being mean to people and cruel to people, you know, you know anything about that, Tom, it's like, yeah, yeah, I grew up in a lot of that and I certainly absorbed that and and, and played that out in relationships, many relationships in my life. And so I don't need to be ashamed of that. I need to be aware of it.
• 27:28
  Speaker A: What do you call that? That, you know, because all I used to do, I feel like, is moon about how I wish things were different and if I could go back, I would change this or that. And then something happened over the course of my recovery where I started to see my current, my present reality as something that was hard won and that, yeah, all of like the pain and the, the joy of, you know, the
• 27:52
  Speaker C: no
• 27:53
  Speaker A: moments,
• 27:54
  Speaker C: you know,
• 27:54
  Speaker A: part of it. So what do you call that? I mean, because you did. You used to kind of spend time, all this time marinating and regretting.
• 28:01
  Speaker C: Well, I think it would be like the next time this, this is how I would do it, you know, rather than I should have done it then. It's like I didn't do that because I, and that was the gift of the language, actually. That's why my first wife and I left it at the end. We just, we, we just said, listen, because we do, we did love each other. And I said, let's, let's just let it go now and see, see each other in the next one. You know, I don't know if that's really true or not, but, but it, but it would, it gave us some peace to be able to say, to acknowledge that we didn't, we didn't feel finished with any of it and we didn't, we, we didn't, you know, that we did still love each other, but, but we weren't going to try to read. We're not going to try to change things. We can't. Which is the past.
• 28:46
  Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I think that's, I love that she's still a presence or that that relationship is still, you know, you always, it's, it's an important part of your development and you know, you wouldn't. For good and bad, you know, you wouldn't change anything about it.
• 29:01
  Speaker C: We need to approach life like it is, which is we don't go backwards. We can't change the past. I mean, this is a lot of what a lot of. To me, emotional sobriety is about. It's about changing how we interpret what is happening and what has happened. So, you know, when I think about, oh, you know, in this other time in the past, I was just such a. To you and I did so and so and so and so. Well, that may be true, but I'm going like from that. What I was learning was this and that. And I'm carrying it forward and I'm treating. Even if I don't know you anymore, I still want to treat other people that way. One of the things my. I don't know why I'm talking about my first marriage today, but. But one of the things I remember that my, my. My ex wife and I talked about in a car in a raining parking lot in KRoger Sometime about five years after we were divorced. And it's like. And we were both in some kind of program and she. And she and I decided, you know, we, and we both knew our, Our current partners, which was Deedee and her was Mark. And we, and we, we can't. We understood together. It was really. It was fun. It was like to realize the beneficiary of our amends, because amend doesn't mean to, to apologize. It means to change the beneficiary of her amends. And my amends are Mark and Dede. You know, we didn't get each other's. We didn't get the events from, from each other, but, but we, you know, it's the old pay it forward thing. It's like learn and keep. Keep moving forward. And that was a really, it was really. That's. That's a special conversation that I hold in my heart because, because it was us having an awareness that we both had. We both come out of that relationship with something, something positive, something powerful.