12 Smart Things to Do When the Booze and Drugs Are Gone

Emotional Sobriety Is the Individuation Process Stripped of Its Mythological Costume

Allen Berger’s 12 Smart Things to Do When the Booze and Drugs Are Gone occupies a peculiar and necessary position in recovery literature: it begins exactly where most recovery texts stop. The Twelve Steps carry a person through surrender, moral inventory, amends, and the cultivation of conscious contact with a Higher Power. Berger’s premise is that this entire arc, as powerful as it is, leaves a human being standing on the threshold of a second, equally demanding transformation—learning to live as an emotionally mature adult. Each of his twelve prescriptions (developing a personal recovery philosophy, tolerating discomfort, grieving losses, moving beyond the need to be right, learning self-validation) reads on the surface as practical self-help. Read with depth-psychological ears, however, they constitute a working manual for what Jung called the withdrawal of projections and the relativization of the ego. Cody Peterson, in The Shadow of a Figure of Light, argues that the Twelve Steps are a “clear, precise, and unparalleled expression of a modern myth of expanding consciousness.” Berger’s book is the prose commentary on what happens after the myth has been enacted—when the hero returns from the underworld and must actually live among other people. Wilson himself gestured toward this territory in his 1958 Grapevine letter on emotional sobriety, acknowledging that “mere sobriety” left him vulnerable to depression and dependency. Berger takes Wilson’s brief confession and builds an entire developmental psychology around it.

The False Self Is the Shadow That Survives Sobriety

Berger’s most penetrating move is his identification of the “false self”—a compensatory persona constructed in childhood to manage unmet emotional needs—as the central obstacle in long-term recovery. This is not merely pop psychology. It converges precisely with what Peterson, drawing on Jung and Edinger, describes as the ego’s identification with archetypal contents. The false self in Berger’s framework is the recovering person’s inflation: the grandiose belief that one should never feel pain, that relationships should supply unconditional validation, that emotional equilibrium is a permanent state rather than a dynamic achievement. When Berger instructs readers to stop seeking approval and start validating themselves, he is prescribing what Jung would recognize as the differentiation of ego from persona. When he urges the reader to grieve the losses that addiction caused—and, crucially, the losses that preceded addiction—he is opening the door to what Peterson calls “making the darkness conscious,” the sine qua non of genuine transformation. The book quietly insists that the addict’s real problem was never the substance; it was the developmental arrest that the substance both masked and deepened. Richard Tarnas, in Cosmos and Psyche, notes that depth psychology “subverted the naïve orthodoxies of traditional religion while extending the range of spiritual inquiry.” Berger performs an analogous subversion within recovery culture itself: he challenges the naïve orthodoxy that working the Steps is sufficient for full human flourishing and extends the range of what recovery can mean.

Holding the Tension of Opposites Is the Real Twelfth Step

Throughout the book, Berger returns to the theme of holding contradictory emotional states without collapsing into action. Learn to sit with discomfort. Accept that you can be both grateful and grieving. Recognize that self-care is not selfishness. These instructions are, in Jungian terms, exercises in sustaining the tension of opposites until the transcendent function produces a new attitude. Peterson identifies this same dynamic as the core of the Wilsonian myth: “humankind is awash in any number of insoluble psychic conflicts… all providing a potential passageway into improved conscious contact with the Unconscious Self.” Berger operationalizes that passageway. Where Wilson and Jung speak in mythic and theoretical registers, Berger speaks in the register of Tuesday-afternoon therapy, translating the coniunctio into relational and behavioral terms that a person two years sober can actually use. His chapter on moving beyond the need to be right is a masterclass in ego-deflation applied to daily conflict: the compulsion to win every argument is reframed not as a character defect but as an unconscious defense against the annihilation anxiety that preceded addiction. This is shadow work without the Jungian vocabulary—accessible, concrete, and surprisingly rigorous.

Why the Book’s Modesty Is Its Greatest Strength

Berger does not cite Jung, does not invoke archetypes, and does not position himself within the tradition of depth psychology. This is precisely what makes the book valuable as a bridge text. It demonstrates that the principles Peterson excavates from the mythic substrata of the Big Book—surrender, shadow integration, the relativization of the God-image, the discovery of the Self through paradox—are not esoteric abstractions but lived realities that manifest in how a recovering person handles a disagreement with a spouse or sits with grief after a parent’s death. Berger’s twelve prescriptions are, in effect, a behavioral translation of the individuation process for people who will never enter a Jungian analysis but who are, as Peterson puts it, “living the myth and the symbol without knowing it.” For anyone navigating the disorienting flatlands of long-term sobriety—where the acute crisis has passed but the soul’s deeper work has barely begun—Berger provides something no other book in the recovery canon quite offers: a map of the second transformation, the one that has no dramatic bottom, no white-light experience, and no narrative arc except the slow, daily practice of becoming more fully human.