Emotional Sobriety
January 13th, 2009 | Secular | Permalink | 1 Comment »
About the author:
Dr. Tian Dayton is a clinical psychologist, teacher and writer. Dr. Dayton taught psychodrama, sociometery and group psychology in the Drama Therapy Department of New York University for eight years. A regular guest on radio and TV, she has authored a number of books in the field, including The Drama Within, Forgiving and Moving On, Trauma and Addiction and Heartwounds. Dr. Dayton lives in New York City, where she has a private practice and runs training groups.
Notes on the book:
Emotional Sobriety is about finding and maintaining our emotional equilibrium, our feeling rheostat, the one that helps us to adjust to the intensity of our emotional responses to life.
Emotional sobriety is tied up in our ability to self regulate on both a mind and body level, to bring ourselves into balance when we fall out of it. Issues with excessive self medication–food, alcohol, drugs or complusive approaches to activities like sex, work or spending–tend to reflect a lack of ability to comfortably self regulate.
Emotions impact our thinking more than our thinking impacts our emotions. When our emotions are out of control, in other words, so is our thinking. And when we can’t bring our feeling and thinking into some sort of balance, our life and relationships show it.
In order 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.
Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, is the person who coined the term “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 in our relations with ourselves, with our fellows and with God.”
About the author:
Dr. Tian Dayton is a clinical psychologist, teacher and writer. Dr. Dayton taught psychodrama, sociometery and group psychology in the Drama Therapy Department of New York University for eight years. A regular guest on radio and TV, she has authored a number of books in the field, including The Drama Within, Forgiving and Moving On, Trauma and Addiction and Heartwounds. Dr. Dayton lives in New York City, where she has a private practice and runs training groups.
Notes on the book:
Emotional Sobriety is about finding and maintaining our emotional equilibrium, our feeling rheostat, the one that helps us to adjust to the intensity of our emotional responses to life.
Emotional sobriety is tied up in our ability to self regulate on both a mind and body level, to bring ourselves into balance when we fall out of it. Issues with excessive self medication–food, alcohol, drugs or complusive approaches to activities like sex, work or spending–tend to reflect a lack of ability to comfortably self regulate.
Emotions impact our thinking more than our thinking impacts our emotions. When our emotions are out of control, in other words, so is our thinking. And when we can’t bring our feeling and thinking into some sort of balance, our life and relationships show it.
In order 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.
Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, is the person who coined the term “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 in our relations with ourselves, with our fellows and with God.”
