Getting Down to Root Causes

“Don’t you teach and write about emotional sobriety? Why did you get offended?”

~Jessica T

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This idea of emotional sobriety is so easily misunderstood. While it emerged from the twelve-step recovery community, it’s gained much wider adoption in our culture, which includes the misunderstandings.

If you’d like to know more about the foundations of emotional sobriety, click here. https://www.seeingtrue.com/blog/what-is-this-emotional-sobriety

Here’s the misunderstanding in a nutshell: Since physical sobriety is understood to be complete abstinence from alcohol or substances, emotional sobriety has been misconstrued to mean ‘complete abstinence from disruptive emotions.’

Good luck with that!

We are humans and our responsive biological systems, everything from neurology to psychology, have developed to alert us to things needing our attention. The greater the emotional or psychological import, the greater will be our response. To be abstinent of disruptive emotions would be to no longer be human.

Now let’s do a bit of reframing from the article linked to previously.

The source of our upsets is actually not other people, things or circumstances. Most everyone is merely living according to their own standards, which rarely intends to harm others. And most of life is unfolding in whatever ways and means that are called for. However, whenever we perceive that our well-being is threatened, our visceral, human reaction is to blame the person, thing or circumstance that has precipitated our feelings. Then we set out to try to change it.

Good luck with that!

Therein is the risk of emotional or psychological turbulence. Interestingly enough, if we turn our attention inward to address the upset, therein is a means to freedom and emotional sobriety.

Emotional sobriety is not a steady, unfeeling state devoid of emotion. Instead, it is an active practice of monitoring our experiences, the ways we are affected, owning our own experience and maintaining balance. Equipoise, one teacher called it, neither drawn nor repelled. Think of it as objectivity, the ability to simultaneously see what has happened, acknowledge our experience of it, then work with the entirety to stay balanced.

A friend said it this way, “Oh! You mean I may get screwed up by something, but to not get screwed up about being screwed up.”

Now back to what we can do.

I don’t practice or teach emotional sobriety as an emotional state, rather as a dynamic and continual practice of rebalancing. We will always be a risk of getting knocked off balance. That is true to all of life and living

The question is always how we engage and address our imbalances. Better still, to alter our perspective of and relationship to upsets. They give us data. Information that allows us to be restored to great balance. Over time, that practice brings us into greater understanding of ourselves and others, which leads to greater life effectiveness as well as compassion and patience.

Seeing True in Reality and In Practice™

The secret is in staying present, and determining how to engage the upsets, and even welcoming them. To embrace all that comes to our experience, turning inward to find reconciliation and resolution, then turning our attention back into the world for whatever calls to us.

Who wouldn’t want to walk the world with greater awareness? Or the balance it brings?