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

Name: 12 Smart Things to Do When the Booze and Drugs Are Gone
Author: Allen Berger

12 Smart Things to Do When the Booze and Drugs Are Gone is a work by Allen Berger (2010).

Core claims

Berger’s twelve “smart things” are not coping strategies but a phenomenology of ego-deflation in slow motion—mapping the same territory Jung called individuation and Wilson encoded in the Steps, but now applied to the long, unglamorous aftermath where the drama of getting sober gives way to the harder work of becoming a person.
The book’s deepest contribution is its insistence that emotional sobriety is not the absence of disturbance but the capacity to hold paradox—a claim that aligns Berger directly with the Jungian coniunctio oppositorum that Cody Peterson identifies as the archetype of the Alcoholic.
By naming specific developmental arrests (the false self, grandiosity, the need to be right, the inability to grieve) Berger provides what amounts to a shadow inventory for recovery culture, filling the clinical gap that the Big Book’s moral inventory was never designed to address.

How does Berger’s concept of the “false self” in recovery compare to the ego-Self axis disturbances that Edward Edinger describes in Ego and Archetype, and what does this comparison reveal about the developmental psychology implicit in the Twelve Steps?
In what ways does Berger’s emphasis on grieving losses in sobriety parallel the “making the darkness conscious” imperative that Cody Peterson traces through Wilson, Jung, and the archetype of the Alcoholic in The Shadow of a Figure of Light?
Richard Tarnas argues in Cosmos and Psyche that depth psychology rendered a richer inner world but could not heal the subject-object split; does Berger’s pragmatic, relationally focused approach to emotional sobriety represent a partial resolution of that split, or does it remain confined to Tarnas’s “subjective universe”?