Emotional Sobriety – Berger and Herb K. – Exploring Emotional Sobriety – Workshop – Part 1 of 4 – Allen B.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Exploring Emotional Sobriety Provides a Life that Flourishes with Dr. Ellen Berger and Herb Kagan. Both Dr. Berger & Herb are committed to getting together and presenting on emotional sobriety in future events like these, and thank you for the Retreat Center in supporting Dr. Berger and Herb on their efforts of spreading their knowledge and insights. Thank you. Thanks, Tanya, so much. My name is Herb, and I'm an alcoholic, and that's perhaps incidental to the gathering of people on this call. It's certainly not to me. 1984 is my sobriety date. Dr. Berger was actually the clinical director at that hospital where I found a recovery. I wasn't in the hospital. My wife was for her recovery, but I was willing to support her recovery and I got caught in the draft. A big surprise, but it wasn't a surprise to anybody else. It was a surprise for me. And eventually Dr. Berger became my therapist. I like his style. He was a Marine and quite frankly, he still is a Marine. I was a monk and quite frankly, I'm still a monk. And so we call ourselves the monk and the Marine. It's kind of an interesting contrast. Dr. Berger? Well, thanks Herb. And welcome everyone on this Sunday morning. And it's a perfect morning for it, isn't it? It's a little overcast and I'm out in West Lake, California and it's raining out here. So it's, it's perfect to be here with you guys and huddling down this morning. My journey in recovery started back in 1971, right after I came back from Vietnam. I'm a Vietnam combat veteran. I went in the Marine Corps at 17 to address my problem with alcohol and came back to Vietnam with a problem with alcohol and other drugs. But it did work. I ended up getting involved in treatment in the summer of 1971. I was the third Marine admitted into a program that was just signed into orders by the Commandant of the Marine Corps called the Drug Exemption Program. And at that point in time, the way they treated Vietnam vets with drug problems was just to discharge us and let the problem, you know, be the community's responsibility to address. But the Marine Corps decided that they were going to step up and try to help us. And so they created this drug exemption program. And I was very fortunate to be the third Marine admitted in the program. The third day the program was in operation. And obviously it was new. They didn't have much idea about what they were doing, but they did one thing right is they turned to the 12-step community and there happened to be a group of young people who found this new way of life with this woman called Flowbird. They were called Flowbirds Birds. And one of them, his name is Tom McCall, was invited to come out and share his story with us on a Tuesday night. It was the Tuesday night drug rap session. So if you can get this picture, about 20 Marines in our combat fatigues all squared away, which meant that our blouses are starched and our boots are shined, and we got our regulation haircuts on. And then this hippie walks in. He's in a pair of khaki shorts, Birkenstock shoes, a wrinkled Hawaiian shirt, and his hair pulled back in a ponytail. So it was a real strange juxtaposition of energy. I was quite skeptical myself. What does this guy have to say to us? He was probably out protesting the war while we were over there, you know, putting our lives and fighting this war, putting their lives at risk. But after about five minutes, all of those differences disappeared. What I experienced with somebody that was incredibly courageous and authentic. he talked about things that i felt but i wouldn't dare give voice to he shared things that I experienced but I didn't want to ever tell anybody else about those experiences and his his authenticity that night just leveled the playing field I mean I was all in what I say all the time is that I experience an emotional freedom in Tom that night that he was comfortable being himself. And I was never comfortable being myself. The only time that I experienced that was when I was either drunk or when I wasn't high, but the rest of the time, I didn't have that experience. And here was somebody that was okay with himself without using any drugs, including alcohol. And i wanted that I had a thought to myself that if I could have that in my life, life could work. And I went up to him afterwards and I said, how did you do that? And he told me, he says, you know, I found this new way of life through working these steps. And if you stick close, I'll show you how to do it. And i did. That was in the summer of 1971. I'm glad to say today that Tom is still my sponsor after 49 years. We're still connected. I talk to him almost on a weekly basis, still consult him for things I'm struggling with in life. And our relationship, of course, has changed. But I still consider him my sponsor. And I feel very, very fortunate to have someone like that in my life. So after I got clean and sober, the program didn't have any counselors. So they invited me to come on board. I had about 60 days sobriety. Today, you couldn't get a job as a counselor if you had 60 days anywhere. But I was hopefully one step ahead of some of the guys coming in. Sometimes I'm not so sure I was. And and I came on board and I now fell in love with helping people and working with people and being a counselor. And I really said that this is this is now my purpose in life. This is what I want to do. So I decided that being a clinical psychologist would be a good thing. So I had to go back to school. I was a high school dropout, you know, high school got in the way of my drinking. So I didn't have time for that. So I went back to школ and, you know, one class at a time, one day at a time. And in 1987, I graduated with a doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of California Davis. So those were the three, if you will the three-legged stool that my recovery was resting on is being turned on to recovery because I did. I got turned on to the possibility of living a different life and I say this all the time there's two kinds of motivations. One motivation comes from pain it's called a deficit motivation is what Maslow talked about. That's a good motivation it's powerful right you got a toothache you're going to move heaven and earth to get to that dentist and get that toothache taken care of. The problem with that kind of motivation, and we see it all the time in terms of recovery, people come out of the gates because they're hurting and they're sprinting to get better. But once they start to feel better, they stop, right? They don't continue the journey. The second kind of motivator which I'm very fortunate to have tapped into is what we call a growth motivation. It's the desire to be what you can be. And when you get bitten by that, which Herb has been bit by that motivation. I've had a chunk of me taken out with that motivation, we're here forever. And it's always a journey and that's what Herb and I have shared as he shared with you. We had a professional relationship before and then he came to me one day and says, hey, there's this guy Richard Rohr, I think you'd like him. You want to come to a workshop with me? I said, God, I'm all in. That started our journey together. we did that workshop we went to a an initiation retreat so herb and i are initiated men in case you guys wondered we've been through an initiation process um which sometimes i'm not sure what that means anymore but we did it and it was an incredible experience and we've attended many of richard's um workshops and presentations and so our relationship started to grow and i came him with this emotional sobriety stuff. And I say, look, I know you're into helping people with the steps and I just see this. This is such an important part. And then later on, we both discovered that Bill even said the steps are designed to help you achieve emotional sobrietry. That is the ultimate goal of our recovery. And that has opened up a whole new world for me um and it's exciting because it's taken my recovery and in the people that i get a chance to work with and the people at herb and i share with it's taking our recoveries to the next level it really has we've used the word amplified recovery to describe it optimal recovery um it's it's such a powerful, powerful set of ideas and concepts that just unlocks to me the secret of life. And look, that's what