CAPTAINZING2000

Emotional Sobriety

Is When:


1. I am free of resentments, jealousy, and envy--and free to forgive quickly.
2. My emotions are not so violent that they cause me to go or be on a dry drunk.
3. I am able to make normal everyday decisions without my vision being unduly influenced by my emotions.
4. I am able to identify & live by my personal values without compromise to emotional pressure.
5. I am able to enjoy life as spiritual principles would dictate --such as being properly revolted by ugliness, sin and suffering, and positively rewarded by happenings of love, beauty and principle.
6. I am happy when others do things better or quicker than I have done them.
7. My emotions are in sync with my intellect and both are in synch with God's Will.
8. I can live freely without being emotionally subservient to another human being.
9. I can move freely between the emotional states of child, adult and parent.
10. I derive genuine, healthy pleasure from helping others without thought of reward, money, prestige or station.

~~Author Unknown~~

LDT

I recognize I'm a little OCD about my personal accomplishments...getting "things done" just so I can cross them off my to-do list.....Crazy, I know. I have to really work at #6.

Ken33xx

Emontional soberity: The ability to regulate strong emotions • Ability to regulate mood • Ability to maintain a perspective on life circumstances. • Ability to regulate potentially harmful substances or behaviors • Ability to live in the present • Ability to regulate activity levels.

Or simply put emotional soberity is my ability to balance the ups/downs of life in a consistant manner.

Aellyce

Isn't it similar to the concept of Equanimity?

Patriciae

For myself, emotional sobriety is when my thinking, my words, my actions and my deeds.... all line up and I am at peace from the inside - out.

I recognize it when a situation will arise and instead of "stinking thinking" being in charge of the way I respond.....I try to take a minute to breath instead of just"reacting"....... I choose to respond with my head, my heart and my soul all in peaceful agreement.

I just love the 12 steps, they keep me responsible and accountable to God, myself and others

desypete

i find most people who claim to have good emotional sobriety are ok so long as things go there way and people say the things they want to hear

the ones who have this good emotional sobriety tend to say very little as they have it

GracieLou

Living and coping with life on life's terms.

Ken33xx

Yep.

The real test comes when life slams you hard and for the first 14 years or so of my sobriety it was was up, up and away.

Then 2007 (US housing crisis) rolls around and bam the bottom falls out. By 2009 I was all but wiped out.

So how did I handle my first major crisis in sobriety?

Well, I didn't pick up a drink and sometimes that's all you can say.

MIRecovery

I didn't pick up a drink either and that is all I can say as well. I have to trust in God and others. With time and work I hope to have it back

Ken33xx

What I have learned is to take action and change what I can, accept what I can't and ask for help when I can't tell the difference. (Which is often the case.)

It's a mantra I repeat regularly in hopes of achieving emotional sobriety when I find myself unbalanced.

Today I try and keep my program very simple.

jdooner

I don't think its a destination or a list. I know this is not the point of this OP and I agree with most of what has been stated. But I was really, really sick. I am getting better day by day. I see the distance I have come when working with others actually. Its a beautiful mirror to see my own traits.

For me emotional sobriety is realizing this is a journey with no destination. Learning and seeking, not for answers but to build layers of growth. I am finding as the illusions of my life are dismantled in recovery I get glimpses of serenity that I am able to pass along to others and positively affect them with my experience, hope and strength. To me this is the nature of emotional sobriety, which I believe has as many nuances as there are people.

Boleo

I think that many oldsters who have put our AA "booze cure" to severe but successful tests still find they often lack emotional sobriety. Perhaps they will be the spearhead for the next major development in AA-the development of much more real maturity and balance (which is to say, humility) in our relations with ourselves, with our fellows, and with God.
Those adolescent urges that so many of us have for top approval, perfect security, and perfect romance-urges quite appropriate to age seventeen-prove to be an impossible way of life when we are at age forty-seven or fifty-seven.
Since AA began, I've taken immense wallops in all these areas because of my failure to grow up, emotionally and spiritually. My God, how painful it is to keep demanding the impossible, and how very painful to discover finally, that all along we have had the cart before the horse! Then comes the final agony of seeing how awfully wrong we have been, but still finding ourselves unable to get off the emotional merry-go-round.
How to translate a right mental conviction into a right emotional result, and so into easy, happy, and good living-well, that's not only the neurotic's problem, it's the problem of life itself for all of us who have got to the point of real willingness to hew to right principles in all our affairs.
Even then, as we hew away, peace and joy may still elude us. That's the place so many of us AA oldsters have come to. And it's a hell of a spot, literally. How shall our unconscious-from which so many of our fears, compulsions and phony aspirations still stream-be brought into line with what we actually believe, know and want! How to convince our dumb, raging and hidden "Mr. Hyde" becomes our main task.
I've recently come to believe that this can be achieved. I believe so because I begin to see many benighted ones-folks like you and me-commencing to get results. Last autumn [several years back - ed.] depression, having no really rational cause at all, almost took me to the cleaners. I began to be scared that I was in for another long chronic spell. Considering the grief I've had with depressions, it wasn't a bright prospect.
I kept asking myself, "Why can't the Twelve Steps work to release depression?" By the hour, I stared at the St. Francis Prayer..."It's better to comfort than to be the comforted." Here was the formula, all right. But why didn't it work?
Suddenly I realized what the matter was. My basic flaw had always been dependence - almost absolute dependence - on people or circumstances to supply me with prestige, security, and the like. Failing to get these things according to my perfectionist dreams and specifications, I had fought for them. And when defeat came, so did my depression.
There wasn't a chance of making the outgoing love of St. Francis a workable and joyous way of life until these fatal and almost absolute dependencies were cut away.
Because I had over the years undergone a little spiritual development, the absolute quality of these frightful dependencies had never before been so starkly revealed. Reinforced by what Grace I could secure in prayer, I found I had to exert every ounce of will and action to cut off these faulty emotional dependencies upon people, upon AA, indeed, upon any set of circumstances whatsoever.
Then only could I be free to love as Francis had. Emotional and instinctual satisfactions, I saw, were really the extra dividends of having love, offering love, and expressing a love appropriate to each relation of life.
Plainly, I could not avail myself of God's love until I was able to offer it back to Him by loving others as He would have me. And I couldn't possibly do that so long as I was victimized by false dependencies.
For my dependency meant demand-a demand for the possession and control of the people and the conditions surrounding me.
While those words "absolute demand" may look like a gimmick, they were the ones that helped to trigger my release into my present degree of stability and quietness of mind, qualities which I am now trying to consolidate by offering love to others regardless of the return to me.
This seems to be the primary healing circuit: an outgoing love of God's creation and His people, by means of which we avail ourselves of His love for us. It is most clear that the current can't flow until our paralyzing dependencies are broken, and broken at depth. Only then can we possibly have a glimmer of what adult love really is.
Spiritual calculus, you say? Not a bit of it. Watch any AA of six months working with a new Twelfth Step case. If the case says "To the devil with you," the Twelfth Stepper only smiles and turns to another case. He doesn't feel frustrated or rejected. If his next case responds, and in turn starts to give love and attention to other alcoholics, yet gives none back to him, the sponsor is happy about it anyway. He still doesn't feel rejected; instead he rejoices that his one-time prospect is sober and happy. And if his next following case turns out in later time to be his best friend (or romance) then the sponsor is most joyful. But he well knows that his happiness is a by-product-the extra dividend of giving without any demand for a return.
The really stabilizing thing for him was having and offering love to that strange drunk on his doorstep. That was Francis at work, powerful and practical, minus dependency and minus demand.
In the first six months of my own sobriety, I worked hard with many alcoholics. Not a one responded. Yet this work kept me sober. It wasn't a question of those alcoholics giving me anything. My stability came out of trying to give, not out of demanding that I receive.
Thus I think it can work out with emotional sobriety. If we examine every disturbance we have, great or small, we will find at the root of it some unhealthy dependency and its consequent unhealthy demand. Let us, with God's help, continually surrender these hobbling demands. Then we can be set free to live and love; we may then be able to Twelfth Step ourselves and others into emotional sobriety.
Of course I haven't offered you a really new idea-only a gimmick that has started to unhook several of my own "hexes" at depth. Nowadays my brain no longer races compulsively in either elation, grandiosity or depression. I have been given a quiet place in bright sunshine.

Copyright © The A.A. Grapevine, Inc., January 1958

Ken33xx

Bill Wilson helped start AA and we're forever grateful.

However, according to some of what I've read Bill Wilson was hardly an example of emotional sobriety especially later in life.

I'll keep it simple with the serenity prayer.

Raider

Whoa!!!! I want to meet the person who practices every one of those ten.

Johno1967

I think he or she would likely be a Jedi Knight!
Seriously though I think to myself "why can't I be like that? What's stopping me other than myself?"

Ken33xx

I doubt Bill Wilson himself ever reached anything close to that level of emotional sobriety (except maybe when he was on acid.)

But is it possible? I'm sure there are monks in Thailand who might be able to pull it off.

When I think of those who have what I want in terms of emotional sobriety I think of a family member and a few others outside the program.

These are the people who say, "Well there's just nothing I can do about that now" or "I'll let that go" without much fretting.

Imo, AA members (including myself) often spin life around way too much.

Which is why I try to keep things very simple today. Either I can change something or I can't. And if I need help deciding I'll ask someone. No need to spin things any further.

dSober

Damn. Gee haennie, thanks, off to the dictionary again, lol. Getting back to your question though... yes, sounds like it to me.

As for the OP, IMHO: emotional sobriety = sobriety. A dry drunk is still, by definition, a drunk. In fact, by slight extension, I don't think a drunk needs necessarily to have ever consumed a single drop of alcohol, or any other mind altering substance for that matter.

Substance addicts just have a little extra motivation to get sober. Eventually we come to find, we're dead if we don't.

P.S. Great post Zing! I just printed it out and put it up on my "Wall of Proclaim". Thanks.

Patriciae

Bill W. was never perfect, he never said he was....ever. Bill Wilson was a human being just like the rest of us and he would have laughed his head off to think that some today try to put him on a pedestal.

Its Progress and not perfection. What Bill W. and Doctor Bob did was nothing less than a miracle in this drunks life. I thank God for them, because without the two of them and this simple program of Recovery.... I most certainly would have died drunk many years ago.

Step 6, on page 68 helps us realize that being a human being and knowing that we are all simply fallible .... is where this Step will take us.

I am truly grateful for Bill Wilson and all his imperfections

Page 68 in the 12 and 12:

Therefore, it seems plain that few of us can quickly or easily become ready to aim at spiritual and moral perfection; we want to settle for only as much perfection as will get us by in life, according, of course, to our various and sundry ideas of what will get us by. So the difference between "the boys and the men" is the difference between striving for a self-determined objective and for the perfect objective which is of God.
Many will at once ask, "How can we accept the entire implication of Step Six? Why - that is perfection!" This sounds like a hard question, but practically speaking, it isn't. Only Step One, where we made the 100 percent admission we were powerless over alcohol, can be practiced with absolute perfection. The remaining eleven Steps state perfect ideals. They are goals toward which we look, and the measuring sticks by which we estimate our progress. Seen in this light, Step Six is still difficult, but not at all impossible. The only urgent thing is that we make a beginning, and keep trying.

If we would gain any real advantage in the use of this Step on problems other than alcohol, we shall need to make a brand new venture into open-mindedness. We shall need to raise our eyes toward perfection, and be ready to walk in that direction. It will seldom matter how haltingly we walk. The only question will be "Are we ready?"

dSober

AA (the steps) is a very simple program. Hard to do at first for many, but VERY simple. Many having difficulty with it, throw out the baby with the bath water. That doesn't change what it is.

Boleo

A letter from a group in Chicago was mailed to Bill W in 1960, taking his inventory. This was Bill's response. Bill was 26 years sober at the time.

"That you seemed disillusioned with me personally may be a new and painful experience for you, but many members have had that experience with me. Most of their pain has been caused not only by my several shortcomings but by their own insistence on placing me, a drunk trying to get along with other folks, upon a completely illusionary pedestal; a station which no fallible person could possibly occupy.

I'm sure that you will understand that I have never held myself out to anybody as either a saint or a superman. I have repeatedly and truthfully said that AA is full of people who have made more spiritual progress than I ever have, or can make. That is some areas of living I have made some decided gains but in others I seem to have stood still. And in still other ways I may have gone backwards. I am sorry that you are disillusioned with me but I am happy that even I have found a life here."

Bill Wilson 1960