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Demands Versus Preferences · 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. Where are you at?
• 0:16
  Speaker B: Well, Prince Edward county is in a rural area outside of Toronto, and it's on the north shore of Lake Ontario, just north of Rochester, New York, if that helps.
• 0:28
  Speaker A: Yeah, it does. That's where Xavier's Academy and X Men is, I think. Okay, so I've got a brilliant nutshell. I'm not going to hold anything back. Back on the word brilliant from Tom Rutledge. If you measure your well being according to how others treat you, you are choosing a life over which you have no control. This is voluntary victimization. What an alliterative. Yeah. Term. Voluntary victimization.
• 0:53
  Speaker B: Say it again.
• 0:54
  Speaker A: Okay. One more time or as many times as you want. If you measure your well being according to how others treat you, you are choosing a life over which you have no control. This is voluntary victimization. That goes to the heart of emotional sobriety, doesn't it?
• 1:08
  Speaker B: Well, one of the. Yeah. Taking it personally and, you know, being. I used to say when I talked, describing my late days of addiction as I desperately needed your approval, and I was willing to do anything to get it. And today I prefer being approved of than not, but I'm not willing to do anything to get it now. My values come first. And I would rather be disliked and adhere to my values than sell out just for a pat in the head.
• 1:46
  Speaker C: We don't have to change what we want. We just. We just have to stop stomping our feet and demanding it.
• 1:52
  Speaker B: Preferences is one of my favorite words these days because often I'm embroiled in, like, a committee discussion or something and someone's got their hair on fire thinking that it's the principle of it. And it's not a principle, it's a preference. I don't want the font that way. It shouldn't be that way. That's the wrong way. Right. You know, it's a. And if I can see it as my preference or their preference, you know, it's really right. Sizes it and otherwise. Yeah, yeah.
• 2:28
  Speaker D: You know, I was reflecting on your. On a nutshell wisdom for today. Lately, I've been really doing a lot of thinking about and starting to write about this reflected sense of self that you guys are describing. And it's very interesting. The. The cause of that, the ideology of that. You know, it really starts when we're very, very young. And because we're so dependent on the people around us, we are constantly checking in with them to see how they're thinking about us. And Whether they are going to interest or not. So they call it mind mapping now. And they say a lot of species have that ability. And it's early on, it's very rudimentary. It just says, is this person going to act for me or against me? Going to be friend or foe? It's very, very basic. But as we grow older and as our cognitive abilities change, as we know the brain develops and has more capability the older we get. And it's not just are they friend or foe, but do they like me? Am I, am I lovable, Am I acceptable? Do I belong? And so it starts to change. The quality of it starts to change. And since we're so dependent early on for our environment, for everything. I mean, we're 1% dependent on our environment as we are. We start do things to take care of ourselves and to be more differentiated or we would like to call a self support. What Joe just described a minute ago was you were supporting yourself. Now Joe, you know, you'd like people to like you and stuff, but you're not driven by it. You don't have to have it to be okay. You're okay if they like you. If they don't, it's that I'm okay even if you know that. We talk a symptom of emotional sobriety, so to speak. But this mind mapping thing turns into this reflected sense of self. And so what happens as we start to go into our adolescence? We are monitoring and managing our reflected sense of self all the time. Just remember back to high school what it was like walking around and wondering how people were thinking about you and whether you were acceptable or not.
• 5:05
  Speaker A: I mean, yeah, that's when I found drugs.
• 5:08
  Speaker D: Your dependency doesn't mean that you're sick. And our job is to grow ourselves and becoming aware of this reflected sense of self. And as Tom says as kids, we're not, we're not volunteering to be victims. We're doing that part of what it means to be alive. It's not just survival. We're trying to figure out how to our experience as being humans and our
• 5:36
  Speaker C: old way of thinking or our current way of thinking sometimes is that that we are volunteering for these other people to victimize us. But the truth is we're not volunteering to be victim. We're doing it to ourselves. I'm both the victimizer and the victim. And it's like. And people get very offended when you try to point that out to them.
• 5:59
  Speaker D: And when we put the word victim on it, it's almost shooning. For that.
• 6:02
  Speaker C: It's got so much.
• 6:04
  Speaker D: If we move it away from victim and just say, this is what you do, and it's a natural part of our growth and development. And there is a new possibility, right? There's a new possibility that you can move beyond that dependency on your environment for support. You can start to do what Joe does. I want to be Joe. I want to be like Joe. That's going to be our middle.
• 6:30
  Speaker B: Me too.
• 6:31
  Speaker D: I want to be like Joe. I want to be like Joe because Joe is supporting himself. He's standing on his own two feet. I wish I could grow my hair like you, Joe. See, I would love to be a roller today, man. I'm just a bald old guy.
• 6:48
  Speaker B: It's no good unless you got, you know, the gift of gab. And you certainly, you can turn a phrase like nobody else.
• 6:57
  Speaker D: And I was going to share this with you. I was smiling when I was at the IDAA conference this last weekend. So I was. I was in Chicago every year. There was an organization started in 1949 called International Doctors and Alcoholics Anonymous by Charles McKinley. And it's an organization that once a year has a convention and they invite doctors. There's a big membership in IDAA and they get anywhere. This conference had about 590, I think was the final attendance. They had anywhere from like 600 people to a couple thousand, depending on location. And like, when it was in Colorado, they had a lot. I mean, because everybody wanted to go to Colorado, right? But Chicago, I was. I was just as an aside, I grew up in Chicago. And they have cleaned up downtown. Chicago, man, is a cool city now.
• 7:47
  Speaker B: That's too bad.
• 7:49
  Speaker D: I'm nostalgic, but in a nice way. I mean, it's really. It was really, really. I. I had a great time. But anyway, at this conference, there's this one guy, his name was Dr. Matt Ramon, and he's got this book. It's called Give Me a Second. It's called the Marble Approach to Recovery. And what he says is, is that in recovery we lose our marbles. And what he's done is. Is argued that stoicism is a way to get your marbles back.
• 8:23
  Speaker C: Absolutely.
• 8:24
  Speaker D: And I. I got that. So I got to get your address. I wanted to mail it to you because he printed out a chapter of his book and was giving it out for free to people. And I thought, my God, man. I read through is the overlap between emotional sobriety and stoicism, as you've always said, top is quite, quite remarkable. It's. It's it's definitely, definitely it's, I mean,
• 8:49
  Speaker C: just gives us confidence of the shoulders we're standing on, you know. Yeah, it's like we got, we know about the 12 step process, but we go back 2000 years to these guys and you know that there's never any new wisdom. So it was somewhere back before that. Before that it's like there's, I love it. So it's. But when you say about the marbles, I have a little, I, you know, I love metaphor. So I have a thing in my, my therapy office next door. It's like. And people don't know it, but this glass is a bottomless glass. And so I set it on the table and I have a bunch of marbles. And so as we're talking I'm putting marbles in it, filling it up through the course of the session. Now go. This is you at the end of a session and then you pick up the, and then you leave. And of course then the marbles just go everywhere. And, and, and it's really good to make the point for somebody because we, you. I have always done, I've done this for a long time. I've done great therapy at times and did nothing with it. You know, it's just. Yeah, I know it's just, I mean I was one of the great clients of all times. But, but I, but I didn't understand the need for practice. It's like, like so, so that's a beautiful way to do it and I love the idea that, that the definition is loosing our marbles.
• 10:08
  Speaker B: I attended some type of 12 step meeting and instead of chips or medallions or key tags, they gave a little mesh baggie of marbles. Like there was an alley in there and that's what they gave it. An anniversary getting your marbles back, you know. Here you go.
• 10:28
  Speaker A: I love that. Yeah. Something you can play with, you know.
• 10:31
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 10:33
  Speaker C: Here's what we, here's what we give around here instead of chips, you know. How many, how many years I gave somebody the 15 ball the other day. They had 15 years. It's like, like, it's like, it's like. And I love giving those out.
• 10:47
  Speaker B: Yep. After 15 you got to start playing snooker.
• 10:50
  Speaker C: Yeah, well, I think I haven't figured out right now. I've just got a couple of people who've started over. So I thought, okay, well you know, because they're, you know, I said you're gonna, if you make it to where I am, you're gonna have to have a 40 ball. And I don't think they make them.
• 11:07
  Speaker B: Now. I love stoicism, but there's something I miss and, and some parts of Buddhism. Alan, you'll remember we did a sort of a video workshop on spiritual bypassing. And it was sort of avoiding the whole emotional experience of life by delegating, you know, to whatever a person's spiritual practice is. But there's an intellectual bypassing that I become susceptible to in taking a stoic approach when an emotional reaction is more. A balanced emotional reaction would be better for processing than bypassing. Feeling bad with, you know, some sort of, you know, Joe wisdom that I've borrowed from the ages. Right.
• 12:01
  Speaker C: Well, but let me just. I'll just use my. That's a real misconception about stoicism. It's because the word stoic is based on the word porch. That's where they met. Okay. So. So it's amazing how it's now become tough, you know, because the stoics are. They talk about. They talk about their emotions all the time. The stoics are really just about being in the present moment and taking full responsibility for the present moment. And if, and, and it doesn't, it doesn't. If you're feeling what you're feeling, you're feeling it. And it's like, you know, you don't need to make apologies for it. You just need to feel it and do what you're going to do. But, but, yeah, but I, but I. In the bigger picture, I do agree with you. Anything. Well, and, and we. What was. I saw on this emotional fluency workshop thing I'm doing lately, it's like, I got quotation from David Hawkins, Dr. David Hawkins, and it says the fear of life is really the fear of emotions. And it was.
• 12:59
  Speaker D: Again, Tom, I like that it was too simple.
• 13:01
  Speaker C: It was almost too simple. For the fear of life is really just the fear of emotions. I mean, yeah, it's like I had. I'm still reading it, but. But it's like his stuff is amazing.
• 13:12
  Speaker A: You know, this makes me think of somebody I used to date years ago who had a really rough childhood. And we were talking about therapy or the possibility of therapy or maybe she should give it a shot. And she would tell me that, like, I. I'm worried that if I go to therapy, I'll start crying. I won't be able to stop. Like, she just had such fear of the emotions that would be unleashed and that. And then that. And that the emotions would tip her over, you know, that she couldn't handle Them. And I think, and I have that I feel cowed by certain feelings that I, you know, the, the, the best way forward or the best survival strategy is to kind of suppress them. I talked recently with you guys about going to a funeral and kind of even feeling then like I, I, I didn't, I, I didn't feel, I felt safer not being vulnerable and letting the tears flow, you know, than in kind of suppressing that feeling and just kind of getting on with it. But I know that, I mean, it's, it's been an intellectual exercise to understand that the opposite is true.
• 14:17
  Speaker C: But the fear of that is very common in people who are. Who, you know, and it's because there is no small amount of emotion for them. It's like they, because they haven't expressed emotions effectively. They are, you know, I often call it emotionally constipated, but it's like they're, they're, they're, they're, they're stuff full of emotions. So it does feel. You know, I've had people not want to express emotions. And you've got this too, I bet. Alan, not in my office. Because, because they say, I don't want to hurt you, and I don't want to. I don't want to break anything. You know, they don't even trust themselves not to be violent, you know, because the emotion is so big. That's, that's. Ellen, that's why, that's what I miss doing the longer retreats, because those are the times where you have, we have time to put people in a, in a structure where they can actually experience going all the way through it. And everybody gets to witness that. And it's so cool to do that rather than just tell people about it. You can see somebody. No, you went through it and you. And it didn't destroy anything. Everybody's fine. You're good and think. I. And feel what it feels like to be clean, you know, where your emotions are clear.
• 15:30
  Speaker D: So, Tom, tell me if I have a misconception about stoicism.
• 15:35
  Speaker C: Okay.
• 15:36
  Speaker D: I have not the same response that Joe has, but it's similar in that there's a piece missing to me in stoicism and the piece I've found in emotional sobriety that helped me connect the dots was understanding the emotional dependency and how that created this I'm okay if mentality. Now I definitely see what you're saying is stoicism is really a way of being okay. Even it, I mean, there's no question about it. The way that they think about and Talk about meeting life and dealing with the experiences you're having in life are very grounding and self supporting. I would describe them that way. But it seems like what, what's missing for me and I don't know, you know, maybe we could even think about this. What's missing for me is understanding what the path I'm on that makes that the next step in my development. See, that's what I think emotional sobriety has done for me.
• 16:42
  Speaker C: Well, I think
• 16:45
  Speaker D: a growth disorder.
• 16:46
  Speaker C: Right. See, I think what we do with emotional sobriety and see, I definitely again believe. No, I think that's there in stoicism is because there's reminders always to. They don't use this term, but don't give your power away, you know that. I mean this, this is, this is what, this is what got Socrates killed. You know, is, is, you know, because he wasn't gonna, he wasn't gonna do, do something that somebody else told him he had to do because it was the right thing to do. And, and so many people wanted him to do that. It's like, you know, he was, he's gonna be. It's always about being true to your value system. But I think what's. But I, I agree with you this way for me, when I put it together, we do very well in emotional sobriety. What everybody has done up to this point is, is. Is find a language to communicate that specifically like what you're talking about. See, especially for those of us who come from our background, if we can turn it into language that we understand about dependency.
• 17:46
  Speaker A: Okay. And so this has to do with how difficulties with emotional sobriety impact those we love. And I like the way that Joe put this emotional inebriety or emotional inebriation as a symptom of addiction. And what book is this from, Joe? I'm reading an excerpt.
• 18:01
  Speaker B: It's called Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. How to Heal from Distant Rejecting or Self Involved Parents by Lindsay Gibson.
• 18:15
  Speaker A: How emotionally immature parents affect their adult children's lives. Emotional loneliness comes from not having enough emotional intimacy with other people. It can start in childhood due to feeling emotionally unseen or by self preoccupied parents. Or it can arise in adulthood when an emotional connection is lost. If it's been a lifelong feeling, it points to the likelihood of not being sufficiently emotionally responded to as a child. Growing up in a family with emotionally immature parents is a lonely experience. These parents may look and act perfectly normal, caring for their child's physical health and providing meals and safety. However, if they don't make a solid Emotional connection with their child. The child will have a gaping hole where true security might have been. The loneliness of feeling unseen by others is as fundamental a pain as physical injury, but it doesn't show on the outside. Emotional loneliness is a vague and private experience, not easy to see or describe. You might call it a feeling of emptiness or being alone in the world. Some people have called this feeling existential loneliness. But there's nothing existential about it. If you feel it, it came from your family. Children have no way of identifying a lack of emotional intimacy in their relationship with a parent. It isn't a concept they have. And it's even less likely that they can understand that their parents are emotionally immature. All they have is a gut feeling of emptiness, which is how a child experiences loneliness. With a mature parent. The child's remedy for loneliness is simply to go to the parent for affectionate connection. But if your parent was scared of deep feelings, you might have been left with an uneasy sense of shame for needing comforting. When the children of emotionally immature parents grow up, the core emptiness remains. Even if they have a superficially normal adult life, their loneliness can continue into adulthood if they unwittingly choose relationships that can't give them enough emotional connection. They may go to school, work, marry, and raise children, but all the while they'll still be haunted by that core sense of emotional isolation. In this chapter, we'll look at people's experiences of emotional loneliness along with how self awareness help them to understand what they were missing and how to change.
• 20:19
  Speaker B: Pretty cool, eh?
• 20:20
  Speaker D: Yeah.
• 20:22
  Speaker B: And I saw a video of the author sort of talking about the book, which she didn't like the title when it was suggested to her, but they went with it. And you know, it sold a million copies. Right. You know, like people really connected with. Hey, and that, by the way, I
• 20:42
  Speaker C: agree with what that dog is saying
• 20:45
  Speaker B: is like, well, you know, this is emotional maturity right here. Right. Express the feelings. The dog has needs and doesn't feel ashamed to express that. I have to have my needs met. Right. I think that's a wonderful example.
• 21:03
  Speaker A: Alan must have the most therapized dogs in the world. They're just so. They've read all this stuff.
• 21:08
  Speaker C: Yeah, but, oh, no, it's like a preacher's kid, man. It's not going to work that way. It's like, yeah, yeah, Alan straightened him out.
• 21:18
  Speaker B: You'll have to listen to this show, Alan. Because the dog was the best power of example so far. Expressing their feelings unabashedly with no sense of shame, I think. Yeah. That's wonderful. It's like a double standard, isn't there? Right? You know, tell me what you need. You're such a burden, right? You know, you never, you know, I want to hear how you're feeling. Don't be angry at me. You scare me.
• 21:43
  Speaker C: Right? It's like, tell me what you need. No, tell me something else you need. You know. You know, tell me. What do you feel? No, no, no, no. What else do you feel?
• 21:52
  Speaker D: It's like it might be more acceptable to me.
• 21:55
  Speaker C: Hey, listen. That we. We could do a hell of a skit on based on that. A family that basically just wants to just sort through and get only what they want from each other.
• 22:05
  Speaker B: This idea got me thinking about a couple of things. One is, how does my difficulty with emotional sobriety impact others? You know, my kids are in therapy. I'm sure talking about my emotional, you know, immaturity or inebrity or what have you. It's never 0% emotional sobriety or 100% emotional sobriety. It's, how can I be stable, sufficient emotionally sobriety, emotionally sober enough? Because it's not about perfection. I just need to be in. Invite other people's emotions, be prepared to state mine. Like we were talking about earlier. There's nothing like it. And I always thought of emotional sobriety difficulties as Bill Wilson was describing them, as a symptom of my addiction. Maybe not maybe. Where did they come from? How was I programmed? You know, what were the emotional difficulties my influencers had and that I was informed and impacted by?
• 23:17
  Speaker A: Joe, Joe, you cut out after. You always thought your emotional sobriety difficulty was a symptom of your addiction. What'd you say right after that?
• 23:26
  Speaker B: Oh, guys, you missed a lot. It was great. And I don't remember. No, it was that it, it. That my emotional sobriety issues aren't necessarily a symptom of addiction, but rather a part of my programming. Like we're all imperfect, right? And what were the sort of strengths?
• 23:48
  Speaker D: And, Joe, one of the things I'm saying now is a little different than that. See, I don't think it's programming. I think what's happening is it's. It's the evolution of our development. See, I think that every species is going to be concerned about what's going on around them in terms of being able to figure out how to adapt to whatever environment we're in in order to be able to actualize our potential in that given environment. See, it's a very different thing. I don't know, Tom. If you ever read any of Goldstein's work. He wrote a book called the Organism.
• 24:30
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 24:30
  Speaker D: And it was back in the.
• 24:31
  Speaker C: I didn't read that one, but I have read some.
• 24:33
  Speaker D: Yeah, yeah. He, you know, he's often quoted by Gestalt therapist and other humanistic therapists because he was the first person to really capture this idea of self actualization. And he had this idea by observing these brain injured World War I veterans, that people tend to actualize their full potential given the limitations that they have at that particular moment in time. And he saw that tendency to actualize your potential as existing in all humans. Right. Is that we really. And so these brain damaged people, even though they were completely compromised in some ways, they still found a way to deal with their environment as best as they could. Upgrading our consciousness to. Now, what we're talking about in emotional sobriety is that now we're making ourselves a lot less dependent on what our environment is doing and much more dependent on what we're doing.
• 25:38
  Speaker C: Yeah. Yes.
• 25:39
  Speaker D: And that's shifting. That's shifting the balance. And see, I think because we are. Have this, you know, this, this cognitive ability, because of our cerebral cortex, we're able to do this differently than any other species on the planet. And that comes with blessings and with a curse. I mean, I know it, but I mean, look, our imagination is an incredible thing. And I love how it works when it's creative and discovering. And my imagination can put me in the darkest hole and, and creating a living hell, but it can also create the most beautiful, incredible experiences.
• 26:21
  Speaker A: Well, yeah, I, I've been thinking a lot about, you know, those twin human impulses of, you know, the people's capacity to be selfish and to literally build concrete walls with barbed wire around themselves and between each other or as well as their capacity for community and selflessness and to kind of see themselves as part of a whole. These things pushing against each other.
• 26:46
  Speaker C: I like the fact that we're talking about imagination because imagination is neither good nor bad. And it's like one of the nutshells I sent you, Patrick, as a. To consider this was fear will hijack your imagination if you're not paying attention. We can go either way with it, and we're very creative in either direction.
• 27:05
  Speaker D: That's right.
• 27:05
  Speaker C: We are. Yeah. I mean, we're good.