Overview
“Emotional sobriety” is a term from 12-step programs that refers to maintaining emotional, mental, and spiritual conditions conducive to a healthy and sober lifestyle.
History and Etymology
The term comes from a January 1958 issue of the AA Grapevine magazine where William Wilson (known as Bill W. in AA circles) published an article, based on an old personal letter, titled “The Next Frontier: 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 (which is to say, humility) in our relations with ourselves, with our fellows, and with God.”
“Those adolescent urges that so many of us have for top approval, perfect security, and perfect romance — urges quite appropriate to age seventeen — prove to be an impossible way of life when we are at age forty-seven or fifty-seven.”
“Since AA began, I’ve taken immense wallops in all these areas because of my failure to grow up, emotionally and spiritually. My God, how painful it is to keep demanding the impossible, and how very painful to discover finally, that all along we have had the cart before the horse! Then comes the final agony of seeing how awfully wrong we have been, but still finding ourselves unable to get off the emotional merry-go-round.”
“How to translate a right mental conviction into a right emotional result, and so into easy, happy, and good living — well, that’s not only the neurotic’s problem, it’s the problem of life itself for all of us who have got to the point of real willingness to hew to right principles in all our affairs.” 1
Commentary
In my experience, the term has been sufficiently used outside of the context of AA and 12-Step programs enough so that it can to refer to any attempt to address unhealthy aspects of one’s life that are associated with active addiction or the potential for relapse, especially if increasing one’s capacity for emotional regulation, consistent self-care routines, and protective boundaries. Many of these habits and capacities are the result of therapeutic interventions that at least attempt to root their practices in empirical approaches and modifying theories of the mind.
Still, if the term is being used in the context of AA circles, it can carry all the connotations of engagement with Protestant spirituality and religion that characterizes AA philosophy. That includes monitoring for character defects and emotions that accompany them, such as anger, self-pity, and fear. In theory, it might sound obvious that those negative emotions might be associated with producing intolerable states that precede a relapse, but in practice, this can veer into suppression and gaslighting that labels those emotions as unhealthy entirely. For instance, if someone is spreading untrue and hurtful rumors about you, experiencing anger, betrayal, and insecurity are themselves considered threats to emotional sobriety. To care about what others might think of you is considered a relic of pride and ego that must be uprooted, usually with a recitation of the Serenity Prayer that declares that what others think of you and do about it is out of your control and none of your business. In fact, you might be told to focus on your part in that situation, like what you may have done that incentivized someone to spread rumors about you. If you struggle to internalize that framework, you become in-need of a spiritual awakening that brings you closer to acting through the will of your Higher Power instead of your own. As Wilson wrote:
I kept asking myself, “Why can’t the Twelve Steps work to release depression?” By the hour, I stared at the St. Francis Prayer…”It’s better to comfort than to be the comforted.” Here was the formula, all right. But why didn’t it work? Suddenly I realized what the matter was. My basic flaw had always been dependence — almost absolute dependence – on people or circumstances to supply me 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
Bluntly, this is delusionally naive.
Depression is a distinct experience from the situational disappointment and grief that comes from mourning a loss of material attachments or an angst driven by a perfectionism unrequited with reality. Study after study into the neurological and biological mechanisms through which depression is experienced demonstrate that there are physiological foundations for its executive dysfunction. The argument that one need only release their dependency and expectations of the world around them to look inward amounts to a mind-over-matter, mindset-is-everything proclamation of radical Cartesian mind-body dualism. It’s steeped in the Protestant moral-psychology that posits an ultimate soul endowed by a Creator as a Higher Power that can be strengthened spiritually to conquer the material sins, weaknesses, and flaws of the flesh.
Imagine if someone were to recommend “walking it off” in response to a broken leg. We would reasonably call this person stupid. They’ve extrapolated walking as a healthy exercise into an infinitely healing activity, and then they’ve decided someone who cannot do it can be healed if only they chose to do it. If they fail, they simply didn’t choose hard enough and should seek a Higher Power’s will to do what they themselves cannot. If they succeed by powering through, which would inevitably worsen a broken leg into a bleeding one, this is seen as proof that the solution works regardless of the worsening situation at-hand. Similarly, calls for someone who experiences depression to simply not do things that make them sadder and to do things that make them happier are also flawed. The individual’s exact capacity to experience reward from dopaminergistic pathways rather than be stuck in a state of anhedonia is broken. You cannot use a broken tool to fix itself. Depression is a disorder precisely because it leads to a distinct phenomenological engagement with the world that changes one’s perception of rewards, risks, time, agency, intentionality, sensory information, intersubjectivity, communication, etc.
Wilson himself was a proponent of using psychedelics to induce spiritual awakenings, as he had undergone one himself in a hospital while being administered belladonna and was close friends with an even bigger drugs enthusiast in Aldous Huxley, with whom he shared a doctor named Humphry Osmond who literally coined the term “psychedelic.” Later in life, in part through his discussions with Osmond that brought somewhat more grounded biological and therapeutic concepts to the forefront of his worldview, Wilson embraced biochemical interventions that the AA General Service Board was furiously opposed to and censored from AA communication channels. Aside from LSD, Wilson had also explored high doses of Niacin (Vitamin B3) to counter his depression through a doctor named Abram Hoffer, and Wilson reportedly felt enormous improvements in his symptoms after.
I bring all this up primarily because of two incidents where, in a more neutral recovery setting, an AA diehard attempted to impose a perspective of emotional sobriety that was completely incongruent with their experiences, which only led to friction. In one case, someone expressed frustration that there is no 12 steps for a depression that left them without intrinsic motivation to live their own life, articulating almost exactly some of the sentiments that Wilson does in his letter, only to be recommended a Codependents Anonymous (CODA) meeting: “sometimes we need someone to give us a kick to get started.” This is one of the reasons I take a critical focus towards AA in my commentary, because elevating something into a gold standard also turns it into a hammer that treats every problem like a nail. Our brains naturally seek shortcuts, so echo chambers that encourage a reliance on a gold standard, even as a first-stop, run the risk of discouraging critical reasoning that actually addresses the roots of someone’s problem. In the second case, someone was attempting to express that they didn’t automatically see certain emotions as unhealthy, even if they have negative implications like anger or grief that might be ordinary parts of the human experience. This same person had undergone months of counseling about managing emotions that could get out of hand by seeing their feelings as information to act on rather than an enemy to suppress or endure. The facilitator in this setting shut it down simply with “I don’t have time for that shit” while repeating the framework that certain emotions are unhealthy. This strikes me as a natural consequence of the notion of emotional sobriety that Wilson developed. After all, if physical sobriety referred to abstinence that views substances or disorders as enemies to personify and combat as if they’re agents of the Devil lying in wait that must be warded off through constant moral surveillance, then emotional sobriety is naturally going to have echoes of that thinking by framing certain emotions as comparable to substances.