What are emotional sobriety and emotional addiction?

What are emotional sobriety and emotional addiction?

For many people stuck in addiction, one aspect that spurs it is the drive to manually soothe and medicate emotional experiences from the past which are re-appearing in the present. When people become sober, they are now faced with the emotional addiction and large feelings that were underneath.

ACoAs may have never taken a drink but become para-alcoholics. According to ACA, this means ACoAs can take on the characteristics of the alcoholic without ever taking a drink. One of the big characteristics is emotional addiction: using an “internal drug store” to offer the body and mind emotional “hits” that are familiar from the past. The most common emotional hit cycles are with shame, fear, anger, and misery.

Raised by alcoholics, children have no choice but to have their nervous systems fly into an emotional state and, with a drunk parent, were often left un-soothed, berated or emotionally abandoned. In adulthood, ACoAs may find themselves cycling through similar emotional states to when they were in childhood.

In therapy, you would become increasingly aware of your particular emotional cycles, what contributes to them and how to currently soothe them in the present. You will feel old feelings and be able to process them while using the resources of the present to offer comfort, solace, and kind words so as to no longer live in this state. In processing some old emotional wounds and traumas, you may use creative means to reparent through the trauma– such as with visualization, chair work, phrases, and bodywork.