Redmayne

It's often and rightly said that those who suffer the most pain become the most spiritual.

What is not said is that those who experience this phenomena often develop a high degree of emotional literacy, defined as being,

The ability to understand your emotions, the ability to listen to others and empathize with their emotions in a way that improves your personal power and improves the quality of life around you.

Emotional literacy also improves relationships, creates loving possibilities between people, makes co-operative work possible and facilitates the feeling of community.

It cannot be bought or faked and although it may be taught, it can only be learned by individuals experience, nothing less will do.

Applying this to both mine and many others time spent in their personal 'alcohell' combined with time spent in recovery, to be hopefully followed by lasting sobriety. It's not to difficult to suggest that most of us, perhaps unwittingly but nevertheless deservedly so, probably enjoy a high degree of emotional literacy...

Which is similar to emotional intelligence, a very but not exclusively so, feminine trait, take a bow ladies.

'Men systemize. Women empathize' see, Prof. Baron-Cohen, 'The Essential Difference.'

Emotional literacy, steps it up a gear, making it applicable to all, regardless of their race, class, gender, age or (dis)ability. None more so for those in recovery from the insidious, self destructive , delusional ravages of being an active alcoholic and is probably , the greatest, of many gifts that sobriety provides to us all....no matter where we are on our journey or how long time spent in recovery.

Remember, it's the quality not the quantity that counts.

SoberLeigh

Nice post, Redmayne.

Boleo

"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."

The Next Frontier: Emotional Sobriety, by Bill Wilson

Boleo

“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity.”
― Paulo Coelho, Alchemist

Redmayne

Thanks for both your replies, both of which have merit, from a personal point of view, to which others have the perfect right and might even add some constructive comment or criticism...

I tend to favour, compromise or as the Buddhist's suggest, 'taking the third way' when there's is no immediate credible logic or answer to whatever I'm dealing with and at the same time applying the principle that whatever contradicts logic and experience should be abandoned...which allows me to strike a balance between what is and isn't credible until real clarity prevails, as it always does in the end.

Allowing for the fact that for those blessed with emotional literacy this rarely applies, otherwise it's unlikely that they'd have this ability in the first place.