Emotional Sobriety is often overlooked in recovery. It is often mistaken that removing the substance of choice from the equation and everything goes back to normal. This could not be farther from the truth.  Gaining emotional sobriety is an absolutely vital step in the process of recovery. This is where we start to achieve real growth emotionally, and even spiritually, by working through all the defense mechanisms, character defects, and for me especially the co-dependency.

For me, finding my true self again has been a struggle, a dark shadow of shame has consumed my life for years due to the chaos and destruction my active addiction caused. But over the course of the past year, I have really dived deep into my emotional sobriety. Salina has guided me through this heavy process, and has been teaching me how to achieve a balanced, healthy emotional self that I can hold onto for the years to come. The biggest thing I have learned through this process is to stay differentiated, and not conform to my surroundings to appease others. My co-dependency has clouded my judgment and hindered my ability to stay true to myself and my values. I tend to focus more on how I can help others and make sure that there’s peace and in turn I deeply hurt myself in the process, by not allowing myself to express my true feelings. Through emotional sobriety I’m gaining new insights into how I can keep a balanced perspective, express my true emotions, and most of all not adjust my communication based on what I think the response will be. For years my gifts of motivating, and helping others has been ineffective when I regulate everyone else's emotions.

Furthermore, Dr. Berger says that “The bottom line is that the more undifferentiated we are, the more difficult it will be to achieve emotional sobriety. In other words, emotional sobriety requires us to have a sense of ourselves”. And that is exactly what emotional sobriety has taught me, to have a sense of myself, to be aware of my emotions, and more importantly what to do with them. My goal is to live in the moment, be able to express my feelings in a healthy manner. The more I find myself, the more I love myself, and ultimately the higher chance of long term sobriety I will have.