Is sobriety from drugs and/or alcohol about compliance alone?
Or is it about learning how to be alive and live life deeply
rather than only on the surface?
Addicts agree, that the familiar escape
of 'run and numb'
is exactly that,
numbing emotions.
What happens when the individual becomes sober
and wishes to move past compliance alone?
Emotions become real.
Identifying emotions early in sobriety is challenging for the recovering addict
who knows black and white, all or nothing thinking and feeling,
joy or pain or numb.
Learning about emotions,
realizing they are only a part of us
and feeling them
lead us to emotional sobriety.
Learning to identify emotions, all of them, the shades of gray
between the black and white feelings are a skill that can be learned.
Identifying and clarifying emotions and feeling them
lead us back to being whole, living deeply, acceptance and peace.
What is Emotional Sobriety?
• Emotional sobriety is about finding and maintaining our emotional equilibrium.
• Emotional sobriety is tied up in our ability to self regulate .
To bring ourselves into balance
when we fall out of it.
• Balance is that place where our thinking,
feeling and behavior are reasonably congruent;
where we operate in an integrated flow.
• When our emotions are out of control,
so is our thinking.
• When we can’t bring our feeling and thinking into some sort of balance,
our life and our relationships show it.
• Emotions impact our thinking more than
our thinking impacts our emotions.
Our limbic system,
which is where we experience
and process emotion,
actually sends more inputs to
the thinking part of our brain, i.e. the cortex, than the opposite.
• The essence of Emotional Sobriety is good self regulation.
Self regulation means that
we have mastered those skills that allow us to balance our moods,
our nervous systems, our appetites, our sexual drive, our sleep.
We have learned how to tolerate
our intense emotions
without acting out in dysfunctional ways,
clamping down or foreclosing on our feeling world or self medicating.
• Addiction and compulsive, unregulated behaviors
reflect a lack of good self regulation.
• To maintain our emotional equilibrium,
we need to be able to use our thinking mind
to decode and understand our feeling mind.
That is,
we need to feel our feelings and
then use our thinking to
make sense and meaning
out of them.
Or is it about learning how to be alive and live life deeply
rather than only on the surface?
Addicts agree, that the familiar escape
of 'run and numb'
is exactly that,
numbing emotions.
What happens when the individual becomes sober
and wishes to move past compliance alone?
Emotions become real.
Identifying emotions early in sobriety is challenging for the recovering addict
who knows black and white, all or nothing thinking and feeling,
joy or pain or numb.
Learning about emotions,
realizing they are only a part of us
and feeling them
lead us to emotional sobriety.
Learning to identify emotions, all of them, the shades of gray
between the black and white feelings are a skill that can be learned.
Identifying and clarifying emotions and feeling them
lead us back to being whole, living deeply, acceptance and peace.
What is Emotional Sobriety?
• Emotional sobriety is about finding and maintaining our emotional equilibrium.
• Emotional sobriety is tied up in our ability to self regulate .
To bring ourselves into balance
when we fall out of it.
• Balance is that place where our thinking,
feeling and behavior are reasonably congruent;
where we operate in an integrated flow.
• When our emotions are out of control,
so is our thinking.
• When we can’t bring our feeling and thinking into some sort of balance,
our life and our relationships show it.
• Emotions impact our thinking more than
our thinking impacts our emotions.
Our limbic system,
which is where we experience
and process emotion,
actually sends more inputs to
the thinking part of our brain, i.e. the cortex, than the opposite.
• The essence of Emotional Sobriety is good self regulation.
Self regulation means that
we have mastered those skills that allow us to balance our moods,
our nervous systems, our appetites, our sexual drive, our sleep.
We have learned how to tolerate
our intense emotions
without acting out in dysfunctional ways,
clamping down or foreclosing on our feeling world or self medicating.
• Addiction and compulsive, unregulated behaviors
reflect a lack of good self regulation.
• To maintain our emotional equilibrium,
we need to be able to use our thinking mind
to decode and understand our feeling mind.
That is,
we need to feel our feelings and
then use our thinking to
make sense and meaning
out of them.
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