Alcohol Abuse Advice

Achieving Emotional Sobriety

Abstaining from alcohol and achieving an emotional balance in your life are not the same thing.

Now obviously, in order to have emotional sobriety in your recovery, you have to have established a firm baseline of physical abstinence from alcohol. This is a prerequisite and goes without saying. But to really attain a smooth life with a high level of emotional balance….that is another story entirely.

So how do we go about attaining this level of emotional sobriety? How can we achieve this balance among the storm of early sobriety?

One way that we can strive for this balance in our life is through daily meditation. So many recovering alcoholics who stay sober for a while end up returning to a chaotic and busy lifestyle that does not really allow for rejuvenation. This is no good for us and we need to recharge our batteries every once in a while. This can be done through ritualistic meditation, or through a less formal means of relaxation if you prefer. But the important thing is that you have this increased awareness of the need for emotional stability in your life.

Getting bent out of shape at work? Do you feel restless for no apparent reason? Are you irritable? Listen to these signals. You must become more aware so that you can identify these symptoms and react accordingly. Unbelievably, many people go through life without even realizing when they are getting emotionally off balance and therefore never take any steps to correct it. If you are in recovery from alcoholism then you have to do better than this. You must stay on top of this awareness so that you can take corrective action and avoid the slide into relapse.

Now another great strategy when it comes to maintaining emotional sobriety is in the idea of prevention. If you can stop this state of unbalance from ever occurring then you will be in good shape when it comes to your recovery. How can we do this?

The best way that I have found is a bit counter-intuitive: you have to reach out and help other alcoholics. Now for many people, this sounds like it might lead to more chaos and instability in one’s life, but the exact opposite seems to be the case when it comes to sharing our experience with other recovering alcoholics. The benefit that you get from doing so far outweighs any emotional turmoil that you might encounter along the way. In attempting to reach out to others in sobriety, we can put our own situation into a much clearer perspective. Most of us assume this is not necessary, but it definitely benefits us to do so. A big chunk of our emotional balance is in simply reassuring ourselves that we are OK.

Another great way to achieve emotional sobriety in your life is to push yourself to grow holistically. This is also counter-intuitive at first because we think that by pushing ourselves outside of our comfort zone that we will be knocked off our emotional square. Once again, it turns out that any benefits from pushing for this growth in our life outweighs any of the chaos that might come along with trying to reach our goals. Another way to put it is that it is always worth the trouble to push ourselves towards new goals, even if we are scared at first.

Related Recovery From Alcoholism Articles