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We give much attention to getting sober from drugs and alcohol but emotional sobriety is something that, in alcoholic or dysfunctional families, everyone loses. And everyone needs to get back.
The essence of emotional sobriety is good self-regulation. It means that we have mastered those mind/body skills that allow us to balance our moods. The emotional part of our brain actually sends more inputs to the thinking part of our brain than the opposite says Antonio Damassio in his book The Feeling of What Happens. In other words, when our emotions are out of control, so is our thinking, and when we can’t bring our feeling and thinking into some sort of balance, our life and our relationships feel out of balance too. The ability to self-regulate, to bring ourselves into balance, is key to emotional sobriety.
Living with or growing up with addiction is a bit like inhaling second smoke. We inhale the thinking, feeling and behavior of the addict emotionally, psychologically and behaviorally; we take who they are while using, into our own inner world.
Many of the clients that I treat have never had a problem with substance abuse.
But they still act drunk.
They think in distorted ways and their emotions alternate between being overly intense or shut down, they have trouble regulating their inner world once they get triggered.
It was Bill Wilson the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous who named emotional sobriety as the “next horizon” to be met once addicts became physically sober. I would extend that need for emotional sobriety to anyone who has grown up around addiction or been the spouse of an active addict.