Emotional Sobriety

Emotional Sobriety:

I heard this phrase in a meeting and have been chewing on it ever since. I have asked several people men and women what they make of this and what it means and I had some pretty cool replies.

I heard:

"I'm a Big Book man. If it ain't in the book then I can't tell ya. However, I heard Bill W. speak about this. I can't remember much." I was disappointed by this.

"Emotion Sobriety is not taking things so personally". OK.

"Alcoholics are immature. Emotional Sobriety is remembering that the world doesn't revolve around us". Good.

"Google Bill W's letter on this subject". I will.

And last night at a meeting I just decided to hit at the last minute....the topic was "Emotional Sobriety". Too cool.

What I got from all the feedback from the people that shared is summed up in this phrase that I have grabbed hold of since I came back into the rooms...

"DO THE NEXT RIGHT THING".

And so today I am taking an inventory of some things in my life where in the past few weeks I have not been doing the next right thing and it is effecting my serenity.

They all center on relationships in my life. How stinking Co-dependant of me.

First there is a relationship with a man that I adore. We were involved deeply 9 years ago. He has since married and has children. He is unhappy in his marriage and wants a relationship with me. Emotional. Mental. Physical. Sexual. I want that too. I still love him very much. He is the one man that I pushed out of my life because I knew I couldn't give him what he wanted. It was hard to do. But I let it go and we both moved on. Until recently.

I wrote about him here a long time ago: http://authenticallyspeakingtara.blogspot.com/2008/03/breakfast-in-oz.html

So doing the next right thing would be to let it go again. Until he figures out what he needs to do to fix his marriage and family or call it quits. I don't want to do something that cannot be undone. Adultery cannot be undone. Ever. So for today and for this week I will be chewing on how to do what I need to do and the words that I will use to not hurt or be self righteous. I will do the next right thing for me. I cannot have the destruction of a marriage or family on my head. It is one thing that I don't have to take an inventory of now and don't want it on my step work to make amends for later. Ewww.

And there is another relationship in my life. Not a real one. But it is a friendship that is very close. There is no way in hell that this relationship would go anywhere. There is nothing that this guy could ever offer me. Nothing that I could glean from him. Sane people do not stay in relationships with people that are unhealthy and unstable. Recovering alcoholics cannot surround themselves with people that are going to muddy the waters emotionally. So this relationship will also not be pursued. Distance has to be a priority. For me. I like spending time with this guy. Yes. He makes me laugh. We have fun. But his perspective on the program of AA and the recovery process is clouded. He is a "have to attender". Court ordered and in severe denial. His anger and stubbornness prevent him from taking from this program what is good and spitting out the bones. It is sad.

I do not want to subject myself to unhealthy relationships because I crave the attention. I need the closeness. I have to be looking at this and how it can be a stumbling block for my recovery and my emotional maturity. My emotional sobriety.

So. With walking this first step....I have to realize that I am powerless over alcohol and that my life is unmanageable. I am embracing all that. And realizing that perhaps all the recovery from my past is still tucked tightly inside my spirit and my mind. I just need to keep "DOING the next right thing". It is the doing that is the ass kicker for me. Knowing is just the first part. Doing. It seems to me while writing all this stuff out that most of what am doing are 'action things' . Admit. Do.

Interesting stuff.

Here is the copy of Bill W's Letter on Emotional Sobriety

EMOTIONAL SOBRIETY
"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 and 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 neurotics 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 of 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, 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 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 act of circumstance whatsoever.

Then only could I be free to love as Francis did. Emotional and instinctual satisfactions, I saw, were really the extra dividends of having love, offering love, and expressing love appropriate to each relation of life.

Plainly, I could not avail myself to 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 dependence meant demand, a demand for the possession and control of the people and the conditions surrounding me.

While those words "absolute dependence" 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 real 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.

If we examine every disturbance we have, great or small, we will find at the root of it some unhealthy dependence and its consequent 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 gain 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"


Bill Wilson