Emotional Sobriety
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Emotional Sobriety
Emotional sobriety was the topic at this mornings meeting.
Im lookinmg to understand what y'all think this means? What does it mean to you? Are you there....do you feel you have emotional sobriety? How did you get it....or nurture it, or cultivate it?
Im lookinmg to understand what y'all think this means? What does it mean to you? Are you there....do you feel you have emotional sobriety? How did you get it....or nurture it, or cultivate it?
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Hmm, I think emotional sobriety is peace of mind.
I think it's knowing that you're living a good life and doing the right things. It's not about perfection, but about doing the best you can in every situation all day.
For me, I definitely had to acquire it. I had lived a lifetime of negativity and I had to work to begin to turn that around and to accept the person that I was.
And, yes I do nurture it, every day. I spend some quality time with me!
I think it's knowing that you're living a good life and doing the right things. It's not about perfection, but about doing the best you can in every situation all day.
For me, I definitely had to acquire it. I had lived a lifetime of negativity and I had to work to begin to turn that around and to accept the person that I was.
And, yes I do nurture it, every day. I spend some quality time with me!
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For me it means quality sobriety. No I don't have it all of the time. There are still times I struggle with depression, anger, and irritability. The good times out-weight the bad. It is still work in progrees. I believe it is something I have to work at always. I choose to let things get under my skin, irritate me, make me depressed. Sometimes I don't have it in my to fight it off. I feel as long as I don't drink over it, and I see it happening less and less then I'm heading in the right direstion.
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At this point in time, I dont think I have emotional sobriety. To me, that means just because I feel something, doesnt mean I have to be that.
Just because I feel angry, doesnt mean I have to be angry.
Instead of asking myself how I feel...Im trying to ask myself how I want to be.
If I want to be kind...I cant wait until I feel kind. I just need to BE kind, regardless of my feelings.
Im learning to cultivate emotional sobriety I guess. Doing the right thing, being honest, and open. I dont feel like being honest...no way....if I let my feelings dictate my actions though, I'd be what I used to be.
Im not where I wanna be....but thank God Im not where I used to be.:ghug3
Just because I feel angry, doesnt mean I have to be angry.
Instead of asking myself how I feel...Im trying to ask myself how I want to be.
If I want to be kind...I cant wait until I feel kind. I just need to BE kind, regardless of my feelings.
Im learning to cultivate emotional sobriety I guess. Doing the right thing, being honest, and open. I dont feel like being honest...no way....if I let my feelings dictate my actions though, I'd be what I used to be.
Im not where I wanna be....but thank God Im not where I used to be.:ghug3
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Im not where I wanna be....but thank God Im not where I used to be.
For me I numbed myself for so long that feelings can be overwhelming right now. I'm having to relearn how to deal with emotions.
Good thread, I've been pondering this very thing a lot lately.
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After a couple years of recovery I felt like I wasn't struggling with staying sober, but my behavior and mentality hadn't improved as much as I thought. When it came to relationships I was nuttier than a fruitcake.
It was that realization that led me to Codependents Anonymous, I knew I'd found my next home in recovery after a couple of meetings. It also led me to some individual therapy to understand my lifetime of dysfunction in relationships, and I started attending church services after turning my back on the church almost 30 years ago.
I'm not sure I'll ever be "there", or that I ever want to stop working on my emotional sobriety. For now it's too fulfilling to have the awareness of my issues and the desire to continue working on them. I agree with Anna 100%, it's about having inner peace, serenity, doing the next right thing, accepting who I am, and accepting others as they are.
I think it was today's online AA Thought For The Day that showed one of my favorite readings. While it defines humility, it speaks to me of emotional sobriety. Here it is......
Dr. Bob defining humility:
On his desk, Dr. Bob had a plaque defining humility:
"Perpetual quietness of heart. It is to have no trouble.
It is never to be fretted or vexed, irritable or sore;
to wonder at nothing that is done to me, to feel nothing
done against me. It is to be at rest when nobody praises
me, and when I am blamed or despised, it is to have a
blessed home in myself where I can go in and shut the
door and kneel to my Father in secret and be at peace,
as in a deep sea of calmness, when all around and about
is seeming trouble."
"Dr. Bob and the Good Old timers", page 222, first written
by Andrew Murray, a So. African religious leader, ca. 1828-1917.
It was that realization that led me to Codependents Anonymous, I knew I'd found my next home in recovery after a couple of meetings. It also led me to some individual therapy to understand my lifetime of dysfunction in relationships, and I started attending church services after turning my back on the church almost 30 years ago.
I'm not sure I'll ever be "there", or that I ever want to stop working on my emotional sobriety. For now it's too fulfilling to have the awareness of my issues and the desire to continue working on them. I agree with Anna 100%, it's about having inner peace, serenity, doing the next right thing, accepting who I am, and accepting others as they are.
I think it was today's online AA Thought For The Day that showed one of my favorite readings. While it defines humility, it speaks to me of emotional sobriety. Here it is......
Dr. Bob defining humility:
On his desk, Dr. Bob had a plaque defining humility:
"Perpetual quietness of heart. It is to have no trouble.
It is never to be fretted or vexed, irritable or sore;
to wonder at nothing that is done to me, to feel nothing
done against me. It is to be at rest when nobody praises
me, and when I am blamed or despised, it is to have a
blessed home in myself where I can go in and shut the
door and kneel to my Father in secret and be at peace,
as in a deep sea of calmness, when all around and about
is seeming trouble."
"Dr. Bob and the Good Old timers", page 222, first written
by Andrew Murray, a So. African religious leader, ca. 1828-1917.
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When I was drinking I was often acting very immature and childlike- lieing, manipulating people, always trying to get my way by whatever means it took. I think emotional sobriety is about acting your age, which it is hard to do when you are addicted.
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OMG...Astro...this is TOO weird!
All week Ive been pondering the word "humility". Tossing it around, trying to understand how to get me some of that.
In order to get some...I thought humility must mean "to humiliate oneself" LMAO! I was terrified of the picture of having to humiliate myself in order to start learning humility.
K...now Im laffing at myself.
Humility does not equal humiliation...in case anyone was wondering.
Thanks Astro for posting that!
All week Ive been pondering the word "humility". Tossing it around, trying to understand how to get me some of that.
In order to get some...I thought humility must mean "to humiliate oneself" LMAO! I was terrified of the picture of having to humiliate myself in order to start learning humility.
K...now Im laffing at myself.
Humility does not equal humiliation...in case anyone was wondering.
Thanks Astro for posting that!
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Originally Posted by ImJulie 
I thought humility must mean "to humiliate oneself" LMAO! I was terrified of the picture of having to humiliate myself in order to start learning humility.
Every day I have the opportunity to practice humility with some simple service work. I empty the trash and restock the bathrooms with toilet paper at my AA club. It's done quietly, I never expect praise nor look for recognition. I've been laughed at a few times for being the "janitor", I just smile and thank my Higher Power for another 24 hours of recovery.
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Join Date: Jan 2007
Location: MI
Posts: 132
for me it's acknowledging your thoughts but not letting them induce feelings. esp unwanted ones.
I went to this seminar the other day where they talked about being conscious of what your ego is telling you vs. your spirit. it's been so helpful...hard to master but totally makes sense. My spirit wants to be loved and give love, wants to be kind...it's my ego that says " oh screw them they can't hurt you" and it alters the true reaction you wanted to give.
I love it...whenever i'm getting heated i am learning to stop and say ok...who is this speaking to me? spirit? ego? what do i want to be like? most often it's your spirit. but you have to accept that your ego exists...if you try to fight either you're just creating a war inside of youself
I went to this seminar the other day where they talked about being conscious of what your ego is telling you vs. your spirit. it's been so helpful...hard to master but totally makes sense. My spirit wants to be loved and give love, wants to be kind...it's my ego that says " oh screw them they can't hurt you" and it alters the true reaction you wanted to give.
I love it...whenever i'm getting heated i am learning to stop and say ok...who is this speaking to me? spirit? ego? what do i want to be like? most often it's your spirit. but you have to accept that your ego exists...if you try to fight either you're just creating a war inside of youself
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Thread Starter
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Hmmm, when I typed "emotional sobriety" into google....this is the first thing that came up. Its long, but I enjoyed it....maybe somebody else will be able to take something from it too.
"The Next Frontier: Emotional Sobriety"
by Bill Wilson
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.
(c) Copyright, AA Grapevine, January 1958
Its long, but I enjoyed it....maybe somebody else will be able to take something from it too."The Next Frontier: Emotional Sobriety"
by Bill Wilson
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.
(c) Copyright, AA Grapevine, January 1958
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Join Date: Nov 2007
Posts: 26,425
I haven't had time to read this whole thread...hope to later tonight. But I've been looking at something about the whole emotion thing the last few months. Oh...and I think of sobriety as also meaning being awake to the moment...
I am begining to look at emotions as something that is a great part of being a human being...and something that I will have both good feelings and bad feelings.
I am thinking that emotions SHOULD be a PART of my decision process. Just as I wouldn't stick my hand in a flame, I should include my feelings as part of the decision process. I just don't see that I really want to act from detachment from my feelings overly much.
I guess an example would be that if I don't particularly feel comfortable with a person, it could be that I need to act differently than I feel...but it would actually seem like a disservice to myself and them if I forced my self to be close freinds with them because it seems like what I "should" do.
anyways...just piping in with where I am at....
I am begining to look at emotions as something that is a great part of being a human being...and something that I will have both good feelings and bad feelings.
I am thinking that emotions SHOULD be a PART of my decision process. Just as I wouldn't stick my hand in a flame, I should include my feelings as part of the decision process. I just don't see that I really want to act from detachment from my feelings overly much.
I guess an example would be that if I don't particularly feel comfortable with a person, it could be that I need to act differently than I feel...but it would actually seem like a disservice to myself and them if I forced my self to be close freinds with them because it seems like what I "should" do.
anyways...just piping in with where I am at....
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Thanks for sharing that Julie, there's a book that goes by a similar name:
Emotional Sobriety: The Next Frontier: Selected Stories from the AA Grapevine
Emotional Sobriety: The Next Frontier: Selected Stories from the AA Grapevine
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Join Date: Jul 2007
Posts: 558
Great thread.
Thanks for sharing what you learnt at the seminar, Selah. I think this is something I need to think about too.
Originally Posted by Selah
for me it's acknowledging your thoughts but not letting them induce feelings. esp unwanted ones.
I went to this seminar the other day where they talked about being conscious of what your ego is telling you vs. your spirit. it's been so helpful...hard to master but totally makes sense. My spirit wants to be loved and give love, wants to be kind...it's my ego that says " oh screw them they can't hurt you" and it alters the true reaction you wanted to give.
I love it...whenever i'm getting heated i am learning to stop and say ok...who is this speaking to me? spirit? ego? what do i want to be like? most often it's your spirit. but you have to accept that your ego exists...if you try to fight either you're just creating a war inside of youself
I went to this seminar the other day where they talked about being conscious of what your ego is telling you vs. your spirit. it's been so helpful...hard to master but totally makes sense. My spirit wants to be loved and give love, wants to be kind...it's my ego that says " oh screw them they can't hurt you" and it alters the true reaction you wanted to give.
I love it...whenever i'm getting heated i am learning to stop and say ok...who is this speaking to me? spirit? ego? what do i want to be like? most often it's your spirit. but you have to accept that your ego exists...if you try to fight either you're just creating a war inside of youself
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Join Date: Jan 2007
Location: MI
Posts: 132
:ghug Thank you...I just found it so helpful, I've been trying to share it although not everyone understands.
Something else I found interesting (that tapped right into my codependant habits) is that EVERYONE has the right to their own path, even if they are wreaking havoc...sort of like 'who do I think I am?' trying to give everyone the right answer all the time...esp my exabf aka love of my life. I had to let him go..last thurs, i'm struggling hard, but i have to know it's his choice. And this is mine.
Originally Posted by caraway
Great thread.
Thanks for sharing what you learnt at the seminar, Selah. I think this is something I need to think about too.
Thanks for sharing what you learnt at the seminar, Selah. I think this is something I need to think about too.
Something else I found interesting (that tapped right into my codependant habits) is that EVERYONE has the right to their own path, even if they are wreaking havoc...sort of like 'who do I think I am?' trying to give everyone the right answer all the time...esp my exabf aka love of my life. I had to let him go..last thurs, i'm struggling hard, but i have to know it's his choice. And this is mine.
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First off let me say this is an awesome topic with some awesome replies!!!!
To me it means being at peace with myself and the world.
Happiness just being me and where I am at today.
No, but I am miles ahead of where I was when I first got physically sober, I still have miles to go.
Yes, when I compare where I am at now to where I was at when I first got physically sober.
For me it was originally working the 12 steps of AA, now I live the principles of the steps to the best of my ability.
Progress, not perfection is where I am at today and where I work on staying, I can not hope to ever approach perfection, I simply work at progressing one day at a time.
Perfect peace? Heck no, but I am at peace with myself and the world far more then I have ever been and I have found that the more I give away to others the more at peace I become!
I really do like this Tennis:
That expresses inner peace, which I could not have without being at peace with the world.
Absolutely fantastic shares all of which I have gained from, thanks all of you.
Emotional sobriety was the topic at this mornings meeting.
Im lookinmg to understand what y'all think this means?
Im lookinmg to understand what y'all think this means?
What does it mean to you?
Are you there
do you feel you have emotional sobriety?
How did you get it....or nurture it, or cultivate it?
Progress, not perfection is where I am at today and where I work on staying, I can not hope to ever approach perfection, I simply work at progressing one day at a time.
Perfect peace? Heck no, but I am at peace with myself and the world far more then I have ever been and I have found that the more I give away to others the more at peace I become!
I really do like this Tennis:
emotional sobriety is being comfortable in my own skin.
Absolutely fantastic shares all of which I have gained from, thanks all of you.
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