The true measure of a man is not how he behaves in moments of comfort, but how he stands at times of challenge.
Martin Luther King
For my dependency meant demand – a demand for the possession and control of the people and the conditions surrounding me.
Bill Wilson, on Emotional Sobriety
Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
J.K. Rowling
In every situation there is a gift and opportunity.
Shirzad Chamin, Positive Intelligence
Many years ago, during a long hot summer like this one, I arrived one morning at a psychoanalysis session in a mood of intense agitation. The evening before, it had just become apparent that my bumper crop of tomatoes had been afflicted by blight. It was only going to be a matter of time until the entire crop would turn rust brown, and the fruits begin to rot.
My analyst immediately recognised an opportunity and, having heard me out with attention and compassion, asked: „Tell me, Herr Little, what is your relationship with setbacks?“
What an extraordinary question! On reflection I grasped that the whole purpose of psychoanalysis was to formulate and address such questions, in order to shift my perception to newer perspectives, even to unknown realms.
Setbacks? As long as things went well, I felt reasonably stable and grounded. When plans went awry, however, I could find myself in a tailspin, to a degree that I experienced the felt sense of existential threat soon followed by the unbearability of being in my own skin.
Those days, the solution was to open a bottle or light up a joint, the weed coming from the same garden as the tomatoes, only protected from blight in a specially constructed hothouse.
It was really a case of me hiding from myself how susceptible my moods were to the vagaries of life, to the unpredictable unfurling of things, especially if it didn’t line up with my expectations, indeed, my demands and emotional dependencies.
Emotional dependencies is a term used by Bill Wilson, a co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) in a reply to a letter he received in 1953 from a person who, though abstinent from alcohol, was still struggling from deep depression. In his two-page reply, now known under the title „Emotional Sobriety, The Next Frontier“, Bill wrote, among other things:
How to translate a right mental conviction (ed. „Trust God, clean house, help others”, shifting from fear to love) into a right emotional result, and so into easy, happy, and good living – well, that’s not only the neurotic’s problem, but it’s also the problem of life itself for all of us who have got to the point of real willingness to hew to right principles in all our affairs.
Even then, as we hew away, peace and joy may still elude us. That’s the place so many of us AA oldsters have come to. And it’s a hell of a spot, literally. How shall our unconscious – from which so many of our fears, compulsions and phony aspirations still stream – be brought into line with what we actually believe, know, and want! How to convince our dumb, raging, and hidden „Mr. Hyde“ becomes our main task.
And further on: Suddenly I realized what the matter was. My basic flaw had always been dependence – almost absolute dependence – on people or circumstances to supply me with prestige, security, and the like. Failing to get these things according to my perfectionist dreams and specifications, I had fought for them. And when defeat came, so did my depression.
It is interesting to observe that Bill was in his 18th year of sobriety – as in abstinence from alcohol – when the penny dropped. He was now on the threshold of moving from physical sobriety to emotional sobriety.
His description of this shift in awareness is one of the many great gifts he left as his legacy. He continued to explore the Human Condition and inspire many thousands of recovering alcoholics and their families for the remaining twenty years of his life.
On a side note, my translation of the statement; to supply me with prestige, security, and the like… into the trauma-informed language of the 21st century would draw attention to every child’s needs for ample acknowledgement, attention, affection, and an ongoing felt sense of safety.
For those of us who came up short in any of these areas, our Inner Child may, even decades later, continue to attempt to draw our attention to the necessity of healing the woundedness, the childhood trauma. Until these cries for help are heeded and acted upon, we will remain in bondage to impulsive, somatically driven reactions, the coping patterns of the helpless child. This is a form of mental gridlock.
Looking at setbacks in the context of Bill Wilson’s perception, as long as I am in a state of emotional dependence, it will always be upsetting, indeed threatening, if things don’t turn out as I – in my mental gridlock – need them to turn out, in order to feel safe.
Expectations are premeditated resentments is a phrase often heard in Twelve Step Recovery meetings. Setbacks, therefore, and, specifically, our suffering in reaction to them, show the degree to which we are still emotionally dependent on things going the way we would dictate.
But isn’t it perfectly normal and human to have expectations? This is a question often put to me in my coaching sessions. My reply is that it is perfectly human to have wishes and desires.
This becomes problematic, however, whenever we are attached to specific outcomes. It is in such attachments that the emotional dependencies are revealed. In the gardening example cited above, my self-worth was somehow connected to harvesting a healthy bumper crop of tomatoes. As soon as that was in jeopardy, I was thrown out of kilter.
This is not to say we should not grieve the losses we experience in life. On the contrary, the ability to grieve well, in a healthy, life-affirming manner, is indispensable for the cultivation of Emotional Sobriety.
In 1969, the Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced the Five Stages of Grief (Death) model in her international bestseller On Death and Dying.
The Kübler-Ross model identifies five common emotional stages experienced during grief or major life changes: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. These stages are highly individualized, non-linear, and can be experienced multiple times, simultaneously, or in any possible order.
In the mid-seventies, Kübler-Ross noted: „Most of my patients have exhibited two or three stages simultaneously, and these do not always occur in the same order.“
David Kessler, who had co-authored publications with Kübler-Ross during her lifetime, provided an example of the model with reference to the recent global covid public health crisis, as follows:
„There’s denial, which we saw a lot of early on: This virus won’t affect us.„
„There’s anger: You’re making me stay home and taking away my activities.„
„Then there’s bargaining: Okay, if I social distance for two weeks everything will be better, right „
„There’s sadness: I don’t know when this will end.„
„And, finally, there’s acceptance. This is happening; I have to figure out how to proceed.„
„Acceptance, as you might imagine, is where the power lies. We find control in acceptance. I can wash my hands. I can keep a safe distance. I can learn how to work virtually.„
I would phrase that last part differently. We may find the illusion of control in acceptance. Acceptance is sometimes misunderstood as rolling over in acquiescence or compliance.
My experience is that the acceptance of „what is“ – as in crystal-clear humble awareness in the present moment – is the only viable starting point for the next step, in terms of action, if we are to live in „ease and flow“.
What Kessler describes as sadness above is what Kübler-Ross refers to as depression. If we tie this back into Bill Wilson’s piece, he had, up to the point of writing that piece, failed to navigate all five stages and has repeatedly become stuck in the depression. His insights into his emotional dependencies allowed him to navigate the process described by Kübler-Ross to a successful conclusion.
Like all advances in mental fitness, this is not a „one-and-done“ issue. Nor is the progress linear. This points to the fact that daily practice in the cultivation of Emotional Sobriety and Mental Fitness is as important as it is in the realm of physical fitness. We all know that if we fail to take regular physical exercise, we become sedentary.
When then, we initially endeavour to get fit again, it takes persistence, patience, and regular practice. For some time, we will not experience much benefit; we simply feel the pain and suffer the inconvenience of this new activity. At some point, however, we cross a threshold whereby we begin to experience the benefits, in terms of well-being.
Once this threshold has been reached, a virtuous cycle ensues and remains operative as long as we maintain the newly established regime.
Several setbacks have emerged in my life over the past few weeks. My daughter’s garden was severely damaged by a ten-minute summer hailstorm, plans for hosting further men’s retreats in one of my favourite places were dashed, a dear friend had to deal with sudden severe health challenges, and some unexpected financial issues came into play.
The pattern I observe is generally the same. First, I feel my body tense up. Breathing becomes shallow, heart rate increases, the mind begins to rev up, my Saboteurs preparing to go on a rampage. These are the early warning signs of the gridlock of my childhood days. My response, today, is to welcome the wave as I would a cherished teacher, my personal Jedi Instructor.
Then comes compassion, in such cases, compassion for the Inner Child who is on the brink of panic and the adult me who still gets to deal with such ingrained dynamics. Compassion for others involved and the circumstances, in general, may follow.
The next stage is self-regulation. Breathing exercises, a mantra, somatic exercises, concentrating on the pressure points on the soles of my feet as I walk down to the river – there are no limits to the creativity we can apply on creating our customised practice of self-regulation.
Once calm, I can switch to the love inspired Powers of Sage: Explore, Empathy, Innovate, Navigate, Activate – all available in the context of the „Sage Perspective“ which states that „every experience encompasses gifts and opportunities“ (for more on Saboteurs and Sage, see the description of PQ elsewhere on this website).
We all need to feel a sufficient degree of safety. In my daily tapping (EFT) practice, I am repeatedly reminded that „I am safe here and now“. This may sound banal. It has proven to be a gamechanger in my cultivation of Emotional Sobriety in which setbacks now play an essential role.
