Emotional Sobriety for Everyone - IN-PERSON

In 1953 Bill Wilson answered a letter to a depressed member of the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous who inquired if the Twelve Steps could help him with depression. Bill gladly responded to this request and put forward in his letter what he had discovered about the cause of his depression and the way he achieved emotional freedom. He termed "emotional sobriety." Over the past 30 years I have unpacked Bill's insights into emotional sobriety and discovered that he was really channeling the spirit of his times. Bill Wilson identified the cause of his suffering as emotional dependency. This was the result of a failure to grow up, what we can think of as a growth disorder. As it turns out, many brilliant psychotherapists of the time and since then have also identified the cause of our emotional suffering as an over dependence on people, places and things. In fact, the founder of Gestalt Therapy, Fritz Perls, M.D., described maturity as "...the transcendence of environmental support to self-support." This workshop will focus on unpacking the wisdom of Bill Wilson's letter by relating it to the work of master psychotherapists like Carl Jung, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, Fritz Perls, Rollo May, Virginia Satir, and Victor Frankl, to mention but a few. Dr. Berger will reveal the path to emotional maturity and emotional autonomy. He will provide several ways of understanding the events that cause us to be emotionally disturbed so we can use them as a touchstone for our emotional and spiritual growth.