Emotional Balance Plateaus
The Responsive & Reflective Phases
The responsive phase is when a seeker responds to life with new confidence and is inspired to reach for higher goals. If you have the capacity for a new direction, assume life as the true self, and free yourself from self-imposed limitations. If you need to find goals, the reflective phase examines your personal drives and finds new directions.
Meditate and contemplate a new life to enter into healthy attitudes. I am told that only one or two percent ever reach the pinnacle of this plateau. Fortunately, many more visit this regularly. We are all capable of altruism. Even hardcore isolated individuals are aware of their capacity for constructive behavior. It is a part of our humanity.
A capacity for self-determination and the confidence to act with self-assurance are the rewards that such people are endowed with. Some great individuals of my time come to my mind. Lincoln and Washington, Gandhi, and their likes spring to mind, but there are those who acted as role models within a smaller society, who equally belong here.
I have some people in my mind, who are human heroes to me, but they very ordinary people to the rest of the society. These people are no social giants. Within our society, these folks are often told to “step aside” by the Ruling Class. (From Chapter 2)
Normal Functioning
The Normal Plateau is where the majority of us live. The main difference in attitude is that normal people talk to one another. They lie a lot and exaggerate and contradict one another. The attitude is more congenial here. We are not sure of ourselves, but we are willing to debate with the best of them. The fear of the outside world is not gone, but we feel safe enough to express an opinion.
I nicknamed this the “Yeah, But!” crowd because we are in an adversarial state of mind, and the noise is worldwide and deafening. A woman says what she knows about the subject at hand, and when she takes a breath someone says, “Yeah, But!” and adds his two cents, followed by a “Yeah, But!” etc. Most of this is about trying to keep up, and from this cacophony somehow, everything gets done.
This plateau is where the maturation process finally takes place. We enter it with a remnant attitude from the low-functioning plateau and transcend the normalcy of it when we enter into a more peaceful place named the high-functioning plateau. The entire trip is human in scope and nature.
Before the Normal plateau, we were incapable of hearing or caring about the rest of the world around us, and after the Normal Plateau, we will be focused solely and unselfishly on helping that world. The process of maturation is wondrous.
In short, maturation is becoming whole to oneself. It is assuming a presupposed role in my society that only I can fill. If I do not take this place, it will remain wanting. If I do assume its function, it will enhance my community.
By ‘Becoming’, I mean, “I have accepted the responsibility of my own existence.” The pivotal role of a mature person. The functional quality of peerage that carries us to the High Functioning Plateau. (From Chapter 2)
Transition Point I
In AA, we often hear, “I was pulled out of hell” and indeed that is the way of recovery. The condition of full isolation will never be turned around by the individual who needed to create that condition as a self-protective measure, and it is not reversible because isolation means that one has severed all connections to outside information.
The fear within us is in charge, and all judgments are predicated to knee-jerk reactions of that fear. There is no way of enlightening a brain that is not listening.
The solution always involves someone reaching in and rescuing the person within. Intervention is the art of accomplishing that. The Judge says, “AA or jail!” The Boss says “AA or out!” The wife says “AA or the keys to the house!” All the recognizable first steps in the art of intervention are getting past the self-imposed isolation. The shock value has to be sufficient to get past the system of denial, which has been protecting the individual all this time.
In order to leave the imaginary world of isolation, one must reconnect with the outside world. The isolation is self-imposed as a solution and will never be turned around from within.
The event must be initiated from the outside. In my case, it was the repeated kindness of a neighbor who never stopped bringing me cookies and cake. I had not been exposed to that level of caring for a long time, and the gestures stirred a feeling inside the wording of which I still remember, “Maybe there is something left inside” and I went to AA.
It begins by reaching past the fear and re-instilling human trust in one person as a reconnection to the outside world. Usually, it is with an intervention counselor. AA or one of its hundreds of off-shoots will then establish a new society, where you will rebuild a new relationship, in which you feel accepted.
Self-help groups give us a readymade society to return to. A society that was different from the one that I separated from. One that is not critical of even flawed humans who have come back from the dead. AA gave me a re-entry into a social life among other people, who were not very much like me, but in which I could function. They’ve created a place, where I never felt fully a part (maybe because I am an agnostic), but where I was welcomed and was accepted as I was. I was given a stepping stone to which I have become. (From Chapter 2)
The Dysfunctional Plateau
Being ‘dysfunctional’ means that we are out of sync with our society. We do this because we have been reared in a dysfunctional home, where life is a struggle for everyone. Many others are off-balance from having developed habits, addictions, or fixations of sorts, which have altered their focus from developing in a natural way.
Alcohol can do that to people. We can see the on-set of this sort of change of focus in the person who stays at the watering hole longer than the others who dropped by for a drink after work. In other circumstances, we see this same sort of disconnect begin in individuals who blindly strive for success or perfection, where the phrase “The end justifies to means” is bandied about.
The symptoms are not hard to detect. They all involve being fixated on something other than openly sharing one’s life with family and friends as a primary pursuit. Where their pursuit is always a private matter and marks the descent into a dysfunctional need for privacy that can progress into a need for privacy.
The need for secrecy is the doorway to all dysfunctional behavior that separates us from our society and, ultimately, our family and friends. It is the opposite of self-worth because we have to be secretive about our pursuits as opposed to being openly proud of what we do.
Being dysfunctional means that all of our efforts are directed at protecting a cone of isolation, where no one else can be involved because we know they would not agree or understand. The need for privacy comes from within and is protected by sophisticated forms of denial that can adapt to any outside pressure by merely shifting internal convictions as needed. The rules are hers to make or break since they are done in private.
Emotional Balance 1
Over time what I found to be true about addicted people is no different than for the rest of the population. Emotional Balance (EB) is an emotional sobriety with a more generic approach. I’ve come to find that what troubles addicts are exactly the same that holds everyone else back from becoming truly healthy. The main difference is that people addicted to alcohol and drugs are much less inhibited in their addictive behavior.
Drunks wear lampshades as hats and druggies want our spare change while those who are addicted to power or money have quieter addictions.
We are all human in our behavior. All of us are capable of bad behavior under the right conditions. We are equally all endowed with altruistic urges. Mankind has not yet reached its ideal form yet and our animalistic urges can show a barbaric side of us. That is what EB is all about, our humanness, a range of minute to minute emotional behaviors that are subject to intellectual control. For thirty years, I self-medicated to numb a feeling of inadequacy, from not knowing how to assemble myself effectively.
Through a series of measures that I now call Emotional Balance, I have learned to become present to myself. I no longer need artificial means to dull a painful feeling of not belonging. Unlike the steps of AA, Emotional Balance is not dedicated to living a life of contrition now we strive to get beyond past mistakes and free the future of the self-imposed limitations. Emotional Balance gives us prospects instead of destiny.
Emotional Balance does not change the steps but instead re-interprets and updates them with some refreshing insights that have come about since they were introduced in 1954. What we get from the steps is a description of attitudes under differing circumstances from being dysfunctional at our worst to being altruistic in better times.
The AA steps are a regiment that if followed will cause emotional changes that lead to a serene way of life and millions of us know that to be true.
What has been missing until now is a set of directions on how to effectively employ these steps. The problem for Bill Wilson was in being unable to find one single set of rules to implement them. For instance, if he were to suggest that one should be less aggressive a mild person would be badly served.
We are too different for anyone's rule to fit all. Bill was limited to elaborating on the philosophy of recovery, for which he has been elected one of the ten most influential people of the last century, and leaves the problems of process to the individual.
The root problem of alcoholics was discovered early on to be that they are “childish and immature.” Emotional Balance focuses on exactly that in nine separate ways. We use the Enneagram to recognize the habits and immature characteristics that have to deal with along the recovery process.
Emotional Balance has bunched some of the steps into phases of recover which we have called Plateaus. In essence, there are three distinct frames of mind that alter both our ways of thinking and of acting, our changing approach to life as we mature really. The aim always is to explain the leg work, to make sense of to understand what is going on during the recovery process. Maturity is about becoming aware of one. Chart 1 is the AA recovery process in practical terms.
Note: All charts are to be read, as with all recovery starting at the bottom. Levels of response Enneagram high-functioning people are described as no longer having to worry about their own lot since that has seen to that. They are the opposite of self-centered in that their focus is on the betterment of their society. They are said to be altruistic in nature. The ego has assumed its proper role.
Normal people represent the greatest proportion of all societies. We are adversarial in nature because none of us are sure of ourselves and we keep arguing about everything trying to up-man-ship one another all the time. The ego is confident enough to be contentious but not self-confident enough to be above the fray.
Dysfunctional people are so personally conflicted that they need to isolate themselves from their society. All of their energy is devoted to protecting them from what they see as a threatening and hostile outside world. The ego rules, without an ability to concede any points.
The terms in this chart and throughout this work will be tilted in the direction of alcoholism since that is the language of the steps, but in a later section, this discrepancy will be addressed. The impression of viewing these charts is that we are fixed on one approach to life but just the opposite is true. Our emotions often lead us through all three of these Plateaus without our consent or awareness, especially before a more mature awareness is developed.
Instead of living at one Plateau, we migrate up and down the Plateaus, stopping to rest at an achieved level which elevates as we progress in our recovery. Here is a story to demonstrate our emotional volatility.
An office worker was constantly being harassed by the office manager and this one day he started on her early on. By 9:30, she was already bent out of shape and was reacting in what was obviously dysfunctional ways. “I’m going to quit this lousy job, that bastard will have to find someone else to pick on. I hope the s-o-b gets run over by a car on his way home tonight.”
We are not jerked around by our emotions like that most of the time. But, even after an event like the one above or after the confrontation, this young lady faced earlier in the day. We seem to consistently return to an emotional level that represents how well we cope with life.
This young lady displayed an ability to ride with the punches later on in the day and shows some maturity in recovering her composure so quickly. The example explains our capacity to engage with life at all levels of functioning. Although it is almost impossible for truly dysfunctional people to access their higher selves, they are still aware that a better self that they have experienced in the past exists.
This system of division of the human attitudes comes from an analysis of personality types called the Enneagram (Ennea=nine + gram=chart). This is similar to the Myers-Briggs personality work but on steroids. One of its many authors, Don Riso, expanded the thinking into a full-blown text that defines each of nine personality types into 9 clearly defined levels of emotional functioning for each Type.
This text along with the12 Steps of AA are our basic references for Emotional Balance. Looked at more objectively however, it is easy to see that the thinking is not at all limited to addicted people. Recovering from a dysfunctional way of life is about peoples not just addicted people.