7. You Can't Make Me Angry

In this episode of Spiritual Sobriety, Chris McDuffie introduces Dr. Paul O’s framework for building spiritual sobriety, using the metaphor of a baseball diamond to map the four bases of recovery: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual sobriety. Drawing on Buddhist teachings, the 12 Steps, and the premise that no external person or event can make us angry, Chris offers a practical and empowering vision of what it means to round the bases of sobriety. Not once, but again and again, one day at a time.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why our emotions, including anger, begin within us, not outside us

• Dr. Paul O’s four bases of spiritual sobriety: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual

• How the Eight Worldly Preoccupations from Buddhism connect to our anger and suffering

• What it means to stay “at bat” in long-term recovery with progress, not perfection

• How physical, mental, and emotional healing all build toward a loving connection with yourself and others

In This Episode:

• Chris recaps the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths and the 12-Step journey covered so far

• An introduction to Dr. Paul O’s book You Can’t Make Me Angry and its central premise

• The baseball diamond exercise: labeling each base and identifying who is on the opposing team

• First base—physical sobriety: eating, sleeping, hydrating, exercising, and healing the body

• Second base—mental sobriety: confronting the “thinking disease” of addiction and trauma

• Third base—emotional sobriety: identifying, feeling, and responding from our core values

• Home base—spiritual sobriety: choosing love, forgiveness, and seeing the good in ourselves and others

• W.H. Auden’s poem As I Walked Out One Evening and loving our crooked neighbor with our crooked heart

Featured Practice:

Take 5–10 minutes today to work with the baseball diamond exercise. You will need a pen and paper.

1. Draw a baseball diamond on your paper and label the bases: First Base: Physical Sobriety, Second Base: Mental Sobriety, Third Base: Emotional Sobriety, Home Base: Spiritual Sobriety.

2. Ask yourself: who is on the opposing team trying to tag you out? Name the emotions, people, or patterns at each position. Anger at third base, fear as the opposing manager, and so on.

3. Now fill in your own team. Who is supporting your recovery? Who is your coach?

4. Sit with this question: “Am I committed to rounding the bases again and again, not just once?”

5. Notice what arises without judgment. Let it be information, not indictment.

Journal Prompt:

“Where am I on the baseball diamond today and what would it look like to take one honest step toward the next base?”

Key Quote:

“Spiritual sobriety is a fluid, dynamic dance and freedom from our suffering, from dukkha, from our attachments, and from grabbing and aversions.”

Chris McDuffie is a licensed psychotherapist, mindfulness teacher and sober coach in private practice. He is the CEO and lead therapist for Chris McDuffie Counseling, a leading concierge practice caring for mental and behavioral health needs. He lives in Carlsbad, California, and holds a  Master of Social Work from Fordham University. He teaches recovery from addiction and co-occurring disorders through the spiritual practices of Buddhism and the 12 Steps.

If this episode resonated with you, share it with someone walking their own sobriety path.

Follow Chris for reflections and meditations:
Website: https://www.chrismcduffietherapy.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chris__mcduffie/

Insight Timer: https://insighttimer.com/buddhanature

You don’t have to walk this path alone.

Transcript

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Welcome. This is Spiritual Sobriety, a podcast about recovery, awakening, and learning how to live with a little more honesty, compassion, and freedom. I'm Chris McDuffie. I work as a licensed psychotherapist, meditation teacher, sober coach, and someone who has spent the past 15 years walking the path of recovery and spiritual practices. In this podcast, we explore the intersection of Buddhist wisdom and the 12 steps, not as theories, but as lived practices. Practices that help us meet suffering directly, loosen the grip of old patterns, and remember who we are beneath the stories we carry. Each episode is an invitation to slow down, reflect, and bring these teachings into your real life. Not to just fix yourself, but to relate to yourself with more clarity and kindness. Wherever you are listening from, I'm glad you're here. Let's begin. Hi everyone, welcome to Spiritual Sobriety. I'm your host, Chris McDuffie. Today we will discuss how to build spirituality while maintaining abstinence. We have been discussing Buddha's Four Noble Truths, which is his introduction to teaching the end of suffering. As a reminder, the Buddha's Four Noble Truths are generally reported as follows. The first noble truth is that the nature of our human existence includes suffering, pain, anxiety, and dissatisfaction. The second noble truth explores the origin of our human suffering. In short, he teaches us that we are always trying to escape from or think we can avoid the pain and discomfort that the anxiety and fear of dissatisfaction breeds. In the third noble truth, the Buddha reports that there is a path to ending our self-generated suffering, which he outlines in the fourth noble truth. The fourth noble truth is Buddha's presentation of the specific actions to follow which will bring the cessation of our suffering and finally lead us to joy and happiness. Our discussions thus far on spiritual sobriety have explored the following defining spirituality, defining suffering, identifying the cause of suffering, how to balance our suffering with gratitude and the eight worldly preoccupations, or the emotions that breed our suffering. So from a Buddhist perspective, we have been looking only at the first three of the Four Noble Truths, and from a twelve-step approach, we've been looking chiefly at steps one through nine. Both of these powerful spiritual pathways offer suggestions and practices to identifying the cause of our suffering and how to end our suffering. Let's keep reminding ourselves throughout each day of the definition of spirituality for our purpose. On spiritual sobriety, spirituality is defined as bonding in love or simply love. When we are suffering, we are not loving ourselves. We are at war with ourselves. When we are suffering, we turn against those who love us and want the best for us. So how do we build spiritual sobriety so that we may love ourselves, especially when we are in pain and suffering? Today we will look closely at step twelve perspective on building spiritual sobriety. You'll want to read the book by Dr. Paul O called You Can't Make Me Angry. Dr. Paul O is an original co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous and was a psychotherapist. His wife Max was a therapist also and co-founder of Al Anon, and You Can't Make Me Angry, which is technically a couple's communication guide to create a spiritual union in marriage and all relationships. In short, the book follows the premise that no external force, event, or person makes one angry. Rather, it is our internal perspective and reactions to these situations that drives our feelings of mad, sad, glad, or happy. Do you remember all eight of the Buddhist eight worldly preoccupations that we discussed in the earlier podcast? As a reminder, they are generally referred to as happiness and suffering, fame and insignificance, praise and blame, gain and loss. Buddha suggested that our anger and our suffering comes from the wanting and not wanting of these eight emotions. Dr. Paul and his wife's teachings in You Can't Make Me Angry identify the actions that one must take to build spiritual sobriety within oneself to cultivate a loving connection with others. For our purpose, he identifies the stages or basis to work towards achieving spiritual sobriety. Dr. O uses a baseball diamond or diagram to illustrate his point. To be clear, all religious and secular spiritual pathways have the same or very similar building blocks that you may enjoy as much as I do, seeing how all these spiritual exercises, texts, religions, and philosophies all have so much in common. Consider drawing a baseball diagonal on your piece of paper or if you have a spiritual sobriety notebook. We will label the bases as follows first base physical sobriety, second base mental sobriety, third base emotional sobriety, and home base as spiritual sobriety. My AA sponsor, Jerry, says, I'm glad the spiritual bases are numbered and marked and have coaches, because when I try to do it all on my own, I think I'm going to first base, but somehow I end up in right field. Jerry just celebrated 38 years of continuously running the spiritual bases of sobriety, one day at a time, with progress, not perfection. Now consider who is on the opposing team trying to tag you out. Is your bartender playing right field? Is anger playing third base? Is your ego playing shortstop position? I invite you to take a few minutes and consider ascribing the names and emotions to each of these opposing teams and who is on your team. Who is the opposing manager? Is it fear? Is it trauma? You may wish to pause today's podcast and rejoin us in a few minutes after thinking. Remember that we begin today's discussion with the premise that our emotions begin within ourselves. This means quite literally that you can't make me angry. Our suffering begins with us, and the Buddha and the twelve steps remind us that our solution to ending our suffering also lies within us. Let's return to our baseball diamond to be clear. Let's return to our baseball diagram. To be clear, we are not trying to round the bases and arrive at home plate only once. We are not trying to win this game of spiritual sobriety only one to zero. Consider this illustration as a guide to long-term sobriety. We want to remain at bat, playing the offensive, working on the upward maturation of physical, mental, and emotional health as we consistently continue to round the bases again and again. I teach today's exercise to my AA sponsies and clients who are new to recovery from trauma and addiction to help illustrate the concept of both one day at a time and with no final goal. Spiritual sobriety is a fluid, dynamic dance and freedom from our suffering, from dukkha, from our attachments, and from grabbing and aversions. These help us run the bases of spiritual sobriety more effectively, efficiently, and with more awareness. And we don't get tagged out. Let's now explore each base a bit more. First base physical sobriety includes all the actions of loving and healing our physical self. Are we eating, sleeping, hydrating, and exercising? And more importantly, are our efforts in balance and practice with the intention of cultivating love for ourselves? Are we getting healthier day by day? Are we helping others get healthier? For those of you in early recovery, physical sobriety may include a medically supervised detox and careful monitoring of the symptoms of pause, post-acute withdrawal symptoms that occur for the first two years. We know that on average, individuals suffer for about 10 years in their attachments and their addictions and trauma before ever trying to get healthy with self-care or mental health. Consider how long it must take for the body to heal itself from these devastating effects of alcohol, heroin, crystal meth, cocaine, fentanyl, sex addiction, gambling addiction, eating disorders, and body dysmorphia. The first base is itself, is its own journey, not a destination. The second base is mental sobriety. Here we're exploring the devastating effect of trauma and use on our thinking mind. Remember, we like to call addiction a thinking disease since our fear, our trauma, and our negative impacted thinking makes us see things poorly. We literally thought it was a good solution to end our suffering or avoid our suffering by putting a needle in our arm or spending the family's savings on internet addictions or sex or gambling. We actually thought that we were not worthy of help or joy or love, or we thought we were deserving of the suffering. We thought that the solution to our suffering and the cause of our suffering was outside of us. You make me angry, is what we thought. The third base is our emotional sobriety. Are we using our practices to be able to identify, feel, and respond in a loving and kind way that honors our core values? Or are we angry too often, anxious too often, or in a state of prolonged depression too often? Steps one through nine help us identify how our suffering and our cycle of addiction created emotional imbalance and a lot of suffering and home base is spiritual sobriety. Are we choosing to learn how to love ourselves again and forgive ourselves and those who harmed us? Do we look forward and choose to see the similarities, the better, the good in ourselves and in others? Do we see that the Buddha within or the Christ within everyone we meet, including ourselves? Are we choosing to look down our path by looking only at imperfections and the imperfections of others? Or as poet W. H. Auden writes in his poem As I Walked Out One Evening, quote, you shall love your crooked neighbor with all your crooked heart. So are we daring enough to round the bases a second, third, and fourth time? Are we committed to cultivating our physical, mental, and emotional health so to form a loving connection with ourselves and others? This is why I argue that spiritual sobriety is essential for creating joy and happiness and relapse prevention. I hope you found today's podcast on spiritual sobriety empowering and supportive as you continue your sober life. Have a great day. Thanks. As we close, I invite you to take a moment and notice what stayed with you from this episode. You don't need to understand everything or do anything perfectly. This path unfolds one honest moment at a time. If what we explored today resonated and you feel called to go deeper, I offer one-on-one therapy and coaching for people who want personal support integrating these teachings into their lives. You can connect with me directly and learn more at Chris McDuffie Therapy.com. That's C H R I S M C D U F I Therapy.com. And if this podcast has been helpful, you're welcome to share it with someone who might need it, or take a moment to follow and review the show. Thank you for practicing with me. The path continues.