The Essence of Recovery Step Five - Healing

Healing isn’t a concept here—it’s the turning point where secrets lose their power and freedom finally feels possible. We open up Step Five as the place where honesty meets empathy, and where your story moves from your head into a safe relationship that can hold it. After laying the groundwork with change, safety, acceptance, and deep investigation, we show how speaking your truth to a trusted guide—sponsor, recovery coach, therapist, or spiritual mentor—transforms hard facts into real relief.

We understand why solo healing stalls, how the brain minimizes pain, and what happens when empathy interrupts shame. You’ll hear how specific storytelling—naming money mistakes, relationship harms, sexual confusion, cultural and childhood wounds—creates targeted healing rather than vague confession. We talk about building a support lattice over time: multiple sponsors across addictions, psychologists for depth, and spiritual directors when faith has a role. Each witness offers calibration and care, helping you pace the process without drowning in it.

This conversation connects emotional growth with the body. Just as muscles and tendons need rehab, unspoken pain and trauma sits in the nervous system until it’s released through shared truth and steady feedback. We outline a whole‑person approach—emotional, spiritual, mental, physical, financial, and social—so recovery isn’t just abstinence, it’s integration.  You live a full life. And when you’ve told your story fully, fear of being exposed fades, because there’s nothing left to hide. That’s the quiet superpower of Step Five: complete honesty that makes freedom possible.

If this resonates, grab the Recovery Growth Scorecard at Life Is Wonderful.Love, share this episode with someone who needs hope, and leave a review so more people can find the path. What’s the one truth you’re ready to say out loud today?

Chapters

• 0:00 Opening And Core Mantras
• 0:42 Scorecard And Daily Chemicals
• 1:45 Essence Series And Prior Steps
• 3:52 Step Five Defined As Healing
• 6:20 Why Solo Healing Fails
• 8:03 Coaches, Sponsors, And Safe Confession
• 10:12 Owning The Full Story Publicly
• 11:45 Releasing Trauma And Next Steps

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

What is the essence of step five? It is healing. And we have to heal before we get freedom. Welcome again to another episode of the 1% in recovery podcast, where we encourage you to laugh every day. Work hard, work hard in recovery, work hard in relationships, work hard in your business, job, school. Just work. And to love unconditionally, just put much more love out there and watch much more love return. You do those three things, you're gonna have a wonderful day. We say recovery is beautiful, your EQ is your IQ, and you cannot outthink an emotional issue. Courage people now, go to the website, lifeiswonderful. Download the recovery growth scorecard. That is going to start, continue, propel your recovery because every day you are injecting natural dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, and oxytocin. Plus, doing things if you're part of a 12-step fellowship, you will also be doing things where you feel connected to others. Download the scorecard, life is wonderful. Now let's jump into this week's episode. The essence of step five. We are doing the essence of every step. I try to look at the steps in a lot of different ways. First is that when I rewrote the 12 steps on how they should be written from a combination, emotional, psychological, spiritual way that you can get them and you can start working on them. Then I broke them down, the 12 steps, into one word. One word is the way to really grasp each step. Now what we're doing, we're doing the essence of the steps. And I'll go over every step as we keep moving forward. Step one was you've got to embrace change. Change is coming. Step two, safety. You have to feel safe, otherwise, you will not grow emotionally and spiritually. Step three, acceptance. You got to accept where you are currently in your life to move forward. When you still want to hold on to some secrets, you still don't want to divulge what has gone on, or you're a gambler, some secret credit card or loan, you're not going to move forward. Step four, like we said, that's the investigation where you're really starting to just get totally honest and putting things on paper, putting things in a computer, because the only way to grow, just like putting all your goals on a spreadsheet, on paper, journaling, the only way to grow is to write things down. It is a proven method. The thing is, I got it in my head, will invariably show up where you forget something or you don't really attack your life the way you should. So after the investigation, after you get completely honest and put everything down, now step five, the essence is healing. Now, if we're doing the original 12 steps, you're going, you're talking to someone, whether that's a sponsor, whether that's a recovery coach, whether that's a psychologist. But you know, the way I rewrote it is this is when we finally tell the world we're a human being because we're doing things to get us out of our low self-esteem. We are doing things where we're getting out of our isolation and loneliness. So we start telling a person. First person I started talking a little bit more about emotional issues was my psychologist. Now, like I tell people, I had sponsors in 12-step alcohol programs, 12-step gambling programs, psychologists. And over the years, now I've not drank in 28 years, not had gambled in 25 years, and I've gone even uh some couples therapy with psychologists. I've done some other individual later on. I've had different sponsors for various reasons, but it was always about developing an intimate relationship where I could talk about childhood. I could talk about trauma. I could talk about sexual stuff. I could talk about financial stuff, I could talk about my current feelings and not feel judged, not feel like someone's going to try to change either what had gone on in the past or my current feelings. And so healing is so important. Think about it from a medical standpoint. When we go to a hospital, we go to a doctor, and we have, let's say, a virus, you have a cold, you have the flu, you have some other type of respiratory issue, you want to get over it, you want to heal yourself, your body needs to heal from whatever is now inside your body, attacking your body. Same thing if you broke a bone or you tore something, you need to heal that bone. You need to heal those muscles, those tendons. And it's the same way emotionally. That's why going on some type of solo emotional journey never works. Because you have no framework of someone giving you feedback. We always minimize how bad things were. The only way to truly understand, to listen, to be empathetic is when we hear another person tell us they may be the observer, the third party, or they may be the actual person where things happen. And that is where the healing happens. And so it's so important when we're doing this. And that's why, as a recovery coach, yes, I hold your hand, yes, I get in your face, but I also show an amount of empathy and love and care. These 126 days, that's why the recovery freedom circle works. We move forward because we are attacking whatever ails you in all different ways. Most importantly, emotionally and spiritually, but the other ones are very important mentally, physically, financially, socially. All of this gets us integrated into our life where we are just totally fulfilled and living it. Like I say, I just want people to just live their best life, feel that life is wonderful. So when I I give you examples, I talked about everything that kind of happened to me, yes, to my psychologist, to this sponsor that was concentrated in alcohol. To another sponsor I was concentrated in gambling. Now, the gamblers, there's about numerous, there was probably about five or six uh in those early days because I needed to talk, because I'm more of a gambler than a drinker, and I totally understand the gambling mind more so. I mean, I understand addiction and I understand depression, anxiety, I understand all of that. I understand recovery. But I so I told my story multiple times. And then later on, even almost a good 15 years later, I actually talked to more spiritual uh growing up Catholic. I went to a couple Catholic priests. I had my own resentments, my own obstacles, why I didn't go sooner. Because when I did confession early on as a child, it just felt like we were just going through the motions. There was no actual listening or caring, and all I had to do was say some, Hail Mary's Our Fathers, and everything was good. The problem was it wasn't solved. I still had all these emotions, all these blocks. So it's so important to keep pushing and growing by talking to more people. That is how we heal. And that's why it's so important. You first have to get into that safety in step two. You've got to start to accept it. You've got to finally investigate and be honest with yourself as you move forward. You're truly invested in total freedom from addiction, total freedom from gambling, drugs, alcohol. You've got to start talking to people. You've got to open up. Because the stuff that I've done is gonna be big. Stuff that you've done is gonna be big and could involve the law, could involve money, could involve sexual stuff, could involve childhood, neighborhood, your own culture, country. You know, son, uh, you know, I I go through a lot of this stuff because it's so important to just feel powerful. Like I feel my higher power God in my blood. I feel totally open that no one, no one can ever come back to me and tell me, hey, I just found something out. I go, man, it's I've been telling my story uh face to face. I've been on YouTube, I've done a podcast. Uh there's nothing that you can bring up that's gonna cause surprise. And even the people that I love. Uh certain things with different people, uh, it took a little longer to uh come clean. But once you get that total freedom, I found ways to get this out there. So I truly want people to understand that step five is just about healing. I want you to feel heard, feel listened to, find a way to feel comforted, find a way to move forward, find a way to get that 99-pound weight off your shoulders, back. Because so much of us keep all that trauma hidden inside our bodies. We have to release it. Time does not heal, only emotional work heals. And so move forward. I'd love to work with you if that's how you feel you want to move forward. If not, me, find someone because I want everyone to just live in total freedom where they can just live their best life. With that, remember life is wonderful. And that concludes this episode of the 1% in recovery podcast.