34. Recovery frontier is "emotional sobriety"

By Tom O'Connell

Alcoholics Anonymous was founded in 1935 by two men, Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith. And it grew, and grew, and grew. Then, a little more than 20 years later, a sober but emotionally challenged Bill Wilson sat down and wrote a thought-provoking article.

Wilson, who had often struggled with depression in his recovery from alcoholism, titled the AA Grapevine article "The Next Frontier: Emotional Sobriety." He notes at the outset that many "oldsters" on the "booze cure" still lack emotional sobriety.

An honest man, he discusses his own "failure to grow up, emotionally and spiritually," and his frustrating inability to "get off the emotional merry-go-round." He makes it clear that the Jekyll-Hyde disease of alcohol addiction takes its toll long after the actual excessive drinking stops. And discussing his own search for peace and joy, he says, "How to convince our dumb, raging, and hidden 'Mr. Hyde' becomes our main task."

He describes a recent 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?" Then it dawned on him that his basic character flaw was his dependence on people or circumstances to supply him 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."

Anticipating another long spell of depression, he came to a profound realization: "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."

Since he had already accomplished some spiritual growth, he was starkly aware of his flaws. So he prayed for grace. "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 set of circumstances whatsoever. Then only could I be free to love as Francis had. Emotional and instinctual satisfaction, I saw, were really the extra dividends of having love, offering love, and expressing a love appropriate to each relation of life."

Instead of trying to possess and control the people and conditions around him, he made a commitment to begin offering love to others regardless of the return to him. "This seems to be the primary healing circuit," he writes, "an outgoing love of God's creation and his people, by means of which we avail ourselves of his love for us....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. "

He suggests, "If we examine every disturbance we have, great or small, we will find at the root of it some unhealthy dependency and its consequent unhealthy demand. Let us, with God's help, continually surrender these hobbling demands. Then we can be set free to live and love." As he moves away from depression he writes, "Nowadays my brain no longer races compulsively in either elation, grandiosity, or depression. I have been given a quiet place in bright sunshine."

In recovery from all addictions, depression is a major hazard. Yet the spiritual approach to mental imbalance in recovery has been the remedy for countless people. And the therapy described by Bill Wilson, for many, has proved to be the ultimate solution.

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