Workshop: Emotional Sobriety - The Next Step (Part 10 of 11)

Workshop: Emotional Sobriety - The Next Step (Part 10 of 11)

What makes a recovery story truly inspiring? This workshop-style episode from Wilson House in 2002 lets you sit in on a deep AA weekend focused on emotional sobriety, with Dave F and Mark H sharing exactly how they work the programme beyond just putting the drink down. Instead of theory, you’ll hear real, sometimes brutally honest accounts of how they use the Big Book’s “precise, specific, clear-cut instructions” to bring power into daily life.

Mark talks about the “spiritual law of order” – how a cluttered home and messy finances can mirror a cluttered inner life – and challenges everyone to start with something as simple as tidying their bathroom and sorting out old boxes and unpaid bills. The heart of the session sits around Steps Five, Six and Seven.

Mark walks through how he prepares for a fifth step with meditation, reading pages 70–75 in the first person, and creating a kind of ceremony with sage to clear the space.

He explains why he won’t sit through endless inventories for ego drama and instead looks for patterns: “The intent of inventory in the fifth step is to examine the exact nature of your defects.” Dave then chips in with practical tools like using the Sacrament of Penance to see how pride, sloth and other defects really show up, and why he believes it’s the “firing mechanism” of defects that’s removed, not the human tendencies themselves.

There’s plenty of humour too, especially when he reads a raw piece of his own resentment inventory about over‑dependent sponsees and admits how quickly his ego can take over, even after many years sober. If you’re already working the steps and wondering how to deepen emotional sobriety, this session gives concrete examples, questions you can write on, and a very human look at what long-term recovery actually looks like in ordinary life.

Where might your own “spiritual law of order” need a bit of honest attention next?