It is commonly said that one cannot recover from alcoholism: one will always be recovering.
There is also a common pursuit in recovery of something called 'emotional sobriety'. Apparently sobriety and all that that entails and produces is not enough. That's for beginners only. That's 'spiritual kindergarten' (note the misuse of Bill W's phrase, here). Underlining passages in the Big Book will get you only so far. We need to be emotionally sober.
What is sobriety? Freedom from alcohol.
What is emotional sobriety? Freedom from emotion.
A laudable goal. Freedom from the very thing that characterises our humanity.
Now, the emotional sobriety gang will protest that that is not what they mean. But the trouble with words is that they mean what they mean whether you want them to or not, and they often betray the unconscious desire whether you want them to or not. There is also the principle that one should pick the word that does accurately convey what one wants to say rather than picking the one that fails to do so then complaining one is misunderstood.
There is, of course, besides the literal use of the word, the figurative use of the word sobriety.
Per the OED:
Moderation in any respect; avoidance of excess or extravagance. Staidness, gravity, seriousness; soundness or saneness of judgement, etc.
What emotional sobriety therefore means is sterility, the amputation of the animating limbs, the administration of spiritual bromide to stifle the libido, emotional castration, the aweless, awful materialism of quotidien nuts and bolts, the eternal reasonableness of the utilitarian, the thin blue lips of the Puritan, the weighty cleaving to the earth, the washing out of all colour, the leaching out of all micronutrients, the dustbowl of flowerless, weedless uniformity.
However, this cannot be achieved. The emotions, themselves, have other ideas.
Some choose to drug the horse that refuses to be tamed. Game over. A picture of a horse is pasted over the window so you cannot see the sleeping horse inside the stable.
Others choose to pursue the unachievable, to attempt to quench the unslakable, the quell the indefatigable, to put up little picket fences on the beach to stop the ocean swilling, with storms or tides, into the back-country.
The control of emotions becomes the new God, the restraint of the monster the prerequisite for the reestablishment of a new Eden, but not the plush lustre of the Real Garden; instead, the manicured, mono-species lawn of Metro-land, the pale green squares of success.
Life is no longer the purpose. Morality. Philosophy. Higher callings. Vocations. Avocations. Captivated with the splendour of kaleidoscopically shifting coloured beads. No: all of that will have to be put off until one is well. What we need is reality and more reality; specifically, the reality of feeling; the authenticity of the true self. 'What does God want?' someone asked, rhetorically. 'For me to be true to myself,' came the reply from the same source. God is expelled from the system, shining not as the sun in the sky but as a copper disc on the ceiling. The universe is reduced to me and truth to myself, not the upper-case Self that transcends the lower-case self of separation and smallness, but that latter repository of micro-negativities and perpetual reactions-to. To be true to oneself is not to find the thousand-and-one exciting people, thoughts, activities, and transcendental pursuits waiting for the yearning soul but to excavate and forensically analyse the emotional vomitings, pissings, and soilings that are cast beside the real path to God.
Emotion is of the body. It is the physical correlate of thought; the signalling system; the perceptual interface with the world. As with all other physical aspects of life, it is not to be despised. There is nothing wrong with the material. As C. S. Lewis says, God Himself does not despite the material. He made it because he likes it. A life lived well will take care of physical needs and will also attend to the emotions.
What does attending to the emotions mean?
Firstly, becoming aware of a certain category of emotions (the little spikes of aversion and attraction) as signals. The lights on the dashboard; the markings on the road; the signpost to the left, to the right, and overhead. Driving is impossible without them, but they're not the journey or the destination. They're not the point. They're not interesting.
Emotions that get stuck also need to be dealt with. If I'm still upset about an hour ago, last week, last year, or 1976, that needs to be faced and remedied. The remedy is not complicated. The answer to all resentment: dropping my self-centered plan for reality. The answer to all fear: dropping my self-centered plan for reality. The answer to all selfishness: dropping my self-centered plan for reality. There's really no mystery here. The answer is a single, spiritual answer, which is the abandonment of self.
A well-lived life will have a welter of emotions, some positive and some negative, but most irreducible to such a tedious scale. Nothing wrong with negative feeling per se. If you do not feel revulsion watching the news or pity observing suffering, there is something wrong with you. But beyond positive and negative feeling is real sensitivity to the universe, which cannot be caught and labelled. Pin the butterfly and you kill it.
Misplaced emotion (bloated negative reactions to the trivial or neutral) and stuck emotion (the unpassed kidney stones of the past) are real in the sense that they are there but they are not real in the sense of reflecting any absolute reality.
To build an identity about one's grievances and victimhoods is essentially to build an identity around precisely those things that are untrue and unreal. This is not authenticity. This is a denial of authenticity. The perpetually aggrieved are dull. The un-aggrieved burn with light. It is that which lies beyond such surface signalling emotion to which one is to be true, and that which lies beyond is that element of the person that emanates from the Divine, with a particular role to play in God's masque.
The devil, if he exists, which he does, wants us to inhabit the material, to wander the earth not as an exile from eden but as the only desert-y reality there is, divorced from the spiritual not as across a barbed-wire fence but in a sleep where the spiritual is simply forgotten, lost in a fog on the other side of the crumbled bridge, not the bridge of reason, but the bridge of 'man's primitive desire to create a god to explain the natural world'. Of course, now, the devil will say, we know better. We do not need God. We have ourselves. Its real goal is to teach this lesson: We are mindless. We have no real mind. The problem is not in the mind, in thought, in consciousness, but in the body. There are no mental problems any more. There are no moral problems. There are no consciousness problems. There are only neurotransmitters, trauma in the tissues, problems with the reward circuits, genetic predispositions, bad brain wiring, organic causes. We're downstream of the body: monstrous concoactions of purely physical processes, hideously aware of our own predicament but unable to effect any change in it except by manipulation at the physical level. Spiritualised, this means focusing on the breath, becoming aware of the surroundings, feeling where in the body the tension is. This is not spirituality: this is materialism. Even when the emotions themselves are analysed, the problem is located not in the individual's consciousness but in what someone else did in the material world. Seek but do not find. Place the problem on the highest shelf then kick away the ladder. The devil seems perfectly reasonable, rational, friendly, kind, and, above all, understanding. He is not to be trusted. But the AA programme is to be trusted. God is to be trusted.
What does the AA programme suggest I do?
A moral inventory. And what I discover by doing this, and by acting on the information obtained, is that there is a universe beyond the self that is quite simply Divine to inhabit. Along with that comes my entire physical experience, the aches and pains, the plights and gripes, the full panoply of emotions, positive and negative, the full Wagnerian orchestra, the Turangalîla: 'love song, hymn to joy, time, movement, rhythm, life and death'.
Recovery is possible, and, beyond the attainment of physical sobriety through spiritual realignment, the objective is not emotional sobriety but emotional abandonment, wealth, festival, catastrophe, with all of its sensational, appalling, invigorating, merciless, contradictory, evanescent, mercurial, and unfathomable excessess.
For God's sake, quite literally, stop picking at yourself and live.