Just for today, I can sit with what I am experiencing right now, I can live my life a feeling at a time. A day at a time I am learning what it means to live an emotionally sober life. I used to think that emotional sobriety sounded dull, flat and unexciting. I thought that living in the emotional extremes was living life to the fullest. But today, when I feel the beauty of feeling my feelings without acting out, I have a kind of peace inside that feel good.  I understand that emotional sobriety allows me to feel more fully and deeply when I can allow my feelings to fill and inform  me but not control me. Doing this expands my sense of self and my confidence that I can manage my own inner world. It allows me to live in the moment and to be more spontaneous and adaptable. Now I see living in emotional extremes as a way of not feeling fully, as a form of acting out or running away from what I feel, running from my manageable feeling center.

Emotional sobriety allows me to be more of who I am

The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.

M. Scott Peck