Emotionally Sober for Life

The Emotional Sobriety Workshop Series

Some years ago, Pavillon Recovery Center discovered the work of Progressive Recovery. Since it is based in the Twelve Steps, and offers practices that promise to advance individual recovery, they invited Ron Chapman to deliver community workshops as well as skills development for their staff. In 2020, amid the difficulties of the pandemic, they approached Ron to deliver virtual workshops available free of charge to anyone. They decided to focus these quarterly sessions on Emotional Sobriety, and to emphasize that recovery from alcoholism or drug addiction invariably brought many of us into the realm of relationship and co-dependency recovery.

These five workshops began in December 2020 with a look at expectations inventory, especially as it relates to a difficult time of year for many in recovery. Then the sessions proceed through core step-work, all with a progressive mindset and practices. What follows are these workshops.

The idea of Emotional Sobriety comes from Bill Wilson’s 1957 article, The Next Frontier, which proposes that our difficulties in recovery stem from crippling dependencies on people and circumstances outside ourselves. In addition, if you need a better understanding of the Progressive Recovery approach to the Twelve Steps, please click here.

Welcome to the Emotional Sobriety Workshop Series. Be curious. See what you can learn.

As always, take what you like and pass it on.

Expectations Inventory and Emotional Sobriety

Workshop #1 - December 2020

All people and families in recovery have to deal with disappointments, frustrations and resentments. Too often however, we don’t take the time to look deeply enough, or we many not know how to understand our role in these negative outcomes. The good news is that many of these difficulties are preventable. Even better news is that the personal inventory practices within the Twelve Steps are the solution.

This first workshop in the Emotionally Sober for Life series teaches us about identifying, exploring and releasing expectations. The result is to reap the benefits of emotional sobriety, and to find the balance that comes with greater experience of the promises of recovery.

A Deeper Approach to Personal Inventory - Steps 4 & 5

Workshop #2 - March 2021

For most of us, our first personal inventory is frightening. It also tends to look mostly at our bad or questionable behavior. That is often more than adequate to begin to clean up our affairs.

However, the Big Book urges us to get down to “causes and conditions”, and to search for “old ideas” and “decisions based on self.” For many of us, these become more evident as our sobriety continues and with additional inventory. 

It is with this deeper exploration that we begin to find underlying patterns that explain far more than our behavior. That changes the nature of the items we take to our sponsor, or spiritual advisor, or therapist, as well as what will need to be addressed in the steps that follow. It takes us beyond actions in order to discover the challenges inside ourselves .

This second workshop in the Emotionally Sober for Life series looks more deeply into “our part” in the personal inventory, especially as it applies to the relationships in our lives and in our recovery. The result is to greatly increase our understanding of ourselves, and to significantly change the items which we then bring into the letting go process (Steps 6 & 7), the amends work (Steps 8 & 9), and the monitoring efforts (Steps 10 & 11).

Becoming Whole Through Steps 6 & 7

Workshop #3 - June 2021

Our emotional sobriety is and always will be a work in progress. That’s simply because the restoration to sanity promised in Step 2 progresses over time, our understanding of the challenges we face deepens with each 4th and 5th Step taken, and all the steps that follow then advance our recovery practices because our understanding grows and grows.

Many of us find that the lynchpin in this continues to be Step 6 & 7, where we learn to practice letting go over and over and over again. Slowly but surely wholeness comes to us. First as improved behaviors, though that is a mere beginning because the twelve-step recovery program is not really a self-improvement program. As we continue with deepening our practices, our inner motivations begin to be altered, followed by changes in our being.

The third workshop in the series of Emotionally Sober for Life seeks to move us more deeply into the practice of letting go. This then sets the scene for the amends to follow (Steps 8 & 9), which then deepen as well. It is the process practiced over time through which wholeness comes.

Living the Amended Life through Progressive Steps 8 and 9

Workshop #4 - September 2021

Amends-making is an essential part of recovery and a foundation for finding emotional sobriety. After all, we can’t be at peace with ourselves without finding the means to be made right with others.

Yet making-right is far more than the conventional approach to making amends. While the actions we must take to establish good connection with others includes honest apology, acts of restitution, and even living amends, an amended life is a remaking of ourselves. While willingness is essential, as is action, much of this overhaul is an inside, spiritual effort. How do we allow a Higher Power and the effect of the twelves steps to change us in fundamental and profound ways? For that matter, how can we practice our program of recovery in a way that promotes psychic, psychological and spiritual change? Isn’t this far, far more than self-improvement, and much more valuable?

Sobriety, physical and emotional, is a launching pad. This fourth workshop in the series of Emotionally Sober for Life seeks to set a greater aim for us. Then to reframe our approach to Steps 8 and 9 to add a whole new component that will bring us to another level.

It is not uncommon to hear it said in recovery communities that quitting drinking and drugging is only a beginning. And sometimes wise elders in recovery will tell us there is far more that is possible for us. Living an amended life offers remarkable potential.

Progressive Realization of the Promises of Recovery

Workshop #5 - December 2021

Recovery is a launching pad. When we work the twelve steps progressively, our recovery becomes progressive. As does our emotional sobriety. So of course, the promises of recovery must necessarily be progressive in nature.

Many of us thought that the improvements in our life when we got clean and sober were great. Yet as we work more deeply to discover the real nature of our inner obstructions, the old ideas that govern our identities and our realities, recovery becomes even more remarkable. We leave behind the notion of moving from bad to good as we see that recovery is designed to get better and better, and better still.

It turns out spirituality is a continuous upward spiral. Not that we don’t sometimes slide back downward. Of course we would since we will continue to encounter life and living as they unfolds. Yet progress over time is ever forward.

For example, “we will know a new freedom and a new happiness” is a familiar promise. Yet what might it be like to engage in increasing freedom and contentment that continues to grow? What about knowing serenity, or experiencing peace? How might we practice our recovery more vigorously so that serenity and peace continue to progress?

There is so much to consider, and to experience. This final workshop of the Emotionally Sober for Life series offers new ideas and new possibilities. Let the exploration begin.