hey guys I'm Heidi Priebe welcome back to my Channel or welcome if this is your first time here today on this channel I want to talk about a term that I came across fairly early on in my attachment healing work that really appealed to me but that I never found a proper definition for that I could really sink my teeth into and that term is emotional sobriety so I believe that the first person who came up with this term was Bill W who is the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous and he referred to this term as
having a proper balance between yourself your fellows and your higher power and in this video I'm going to talk more later on about what I think he meant by that as well as how you can use this term even if you kind of instinctually hate the term higher power I'm not going to ask you to find God here but this is one of those terms that I read and kind of instinctually felt like there was something there inside of it for me it was kind of like yeah I don't know exactly what emotional sobriety is
or what it means to me yet but I know that it's something thing I want so this video is essentially just me making a video for myself three years ago with a little bit more clarity about what that term now means to me as well as how to practice it so how do you take this idea of staying emotionally sober and actually bring it into your life in a consistent and actionable way so like most terms with psychology I like to look at what the term they were modeled on literally means so when we talk
about sobriety from something like drugs or alcohol usually what we are referring to is being in an unaltered State of Consciousness so if I have not consumed any agents that are impacting my ability to perceive the world around me clearly we call me sober and the same is true mentally and emotionally because just like we can get addicted to certain substances we can also get addicted to certain patterns of thought or emotion that distort our ability to see reality clearly so that can look like things like limerence and fantasy addiction where we're kind of blurring
the line between fantasy and reality and assigning highly positive traits to other people that might not be mirrored in their true personality it can be things like compulsively needing to think of ourselves as self-reliant and assigning ourselves characteristics of invulnerability that we stick to even in times where being open and vulnerable and accepting help from other people might be the wiser option it can look like patterns of rumination obsessive thought or physiological responses that come online that are out of our conscious control so things like the fight flight freeze or fun response might arise for
us in moments where we're not encountering a true threat but our body thinks we are and so it very quickly starts distorting our physiology to respond to a threat that isn't truly present so this I kind of liken to the experience of getting addicted to a substance either mentally or physically so you can get mentally addicted to let's say alcohol you can just start to compulsively think about it all the time and feel panicked when you don't have it but you can also become physically addicted to alcohol your body chemistry can start to change once
you start drinking regularly for long enough to the point where withdrawing from alcohol can actually cause physical issues and the same is kind of true when it comes to our emotional system so we can get consciously addicted to certain thought patterns but we can also get physiologically addicted to them so once again those are those patterns a fight flight freeze or Fawn that come online in situations where they might not be strictly the best possible responses but our body has learned to generate them for us without us consciously wanting that to happen and the reason
why I want to make that distinction is because the more we talk about emotional sobriety both in this video and out in the real world it can feel really easy to just kind of assume it's a moral failing when you are not being emotionally sober when in reality these can be deeply ingrained patterns and so we're not going to be able to break them all at once the best we can do and we're going to get into this when we start talking about how to practice emotional sobriety is become highly aware of when and why
we flip into non-sober States sometimes it is a conscious choice or a semi-conscious choice to slip into these states something like a romantic fantasy I can decide to put myself into but something like a nervous system response I cannot as easily decide to just not have so in this video we're going to talk about how to start inching our way closer to a state of more frequent emotional sobriety there's actually a term that I really like from dialectical behavioral therapy which is wise mind when you are in Wise mind you're able to integrate both your
emotions which you're aware of and in touch with with logic and reason about a given situation so you're able to hold those two things at once value them both as important and make choices accordingly and all of us have of the state available to us when we feel well regulated which is synonymous with when we feel physically and emotionally safe so the process of achieving emotional sobriety means the process of developing more and more moments in which we can access that wise self that self that feels safe enough to access all of the emotions that
are genuinely present in our bodies as well as competent enough to understand and make sense of them in a way that helps us make wise integrated decisions so something else that I found very comforting to think about early on in my attachment healing Journey was that secure attachment is not like this level of a video game that you unlock right it's not a permanent state of Enlightenment where you constantly feel good and balanced and emotionally sober it is an average so if on average most of the time you are in a state of emotional sobriety
and you're making decisions from that wise well-balanced place then you are centered in Secure attachment and the way way that you get to that place of centeredness is through a series of moments where you choose the emotionally sober response insofar as you are able to so you do not have to do it perfectly you do not have to get it right a hundred percent of the time but every time you choose an emotionally sober response you're slowly working your way there the same goes for every moment when you realize I'm not emotionally sober and you
choose to acknowledge that and leave the major decision making to your wise regulated self who you know is going to come back online at a later Point once you've found a way to make yourself feel both physically and emotionally safe so now that we've got the defining out of the way I want to move into how to practice emotional sobriety so I've broken it down into what I believe is a very sober series of steps so this is not once again about achieving Perfection it's about making small progress from wherever you are starting from step
one in this process is very simply learning to tell the difference between when you are emotionally dysregulated and when you're emotionally sober now for some of us this is going to look more obvious than it is for others often Those Who air a little bit more anxious on the attachment Spectrum are going to be quick to recognize when they're very activated and the reason for that is because it tends to be a very high intensity feeling on the flip side Those Who air more avoidant tend to deactivate in moments of high stress so what that
looks like is more of an emotional numbness so it might actually be experienced as a lack of emotional distress or a lack of any sort of feelings of attachment to a situation even if logically you know that normally you feel quite attached to that situation but I want to be clear it doesn't matter where you're starting from this can be a tricky thing to pinpoint because part of being emotionally intoxicated is your mind trying to convince you that you are in fact in your right frame of mind and you ought to act on it so
there is one thing I have found that consistently helps me pin point in retrospect when I was and was not in a state of emotional sobriety and that is regret so when I walk away from a situation and two days later or six months later experience a high degree of regret over how I handled it that tends to be an indication to me that I may not have handled it from an emotionally sober place now regret is not always a perfect indicator because sometimes my feelings of regret are coming out of a present moment Fawn
response let's say so it's an imperfect system and you have to try to get as honest as humanly possible with yourself in mapping your own sobriety levels but all you're doing at stage one of this process is developing as much of an awareness as humanly possible of what it feels like to be in a secure wise integrated calm state where you feel as though your emotions are manageable and you're able to make sense of your experiences versus a state where you feel either heightened emotion or significant present moment lack of emotion another key indicator might
be how much you are in story so are you noticing yourself telling your yourself a whole bunch of stories about right and wrong and what other people should or shouldn't do and making a bunch of comparisons and judgments and noticing your body kind of further respond to those comparisons and judgments and stories about what should and shouldn't be happening or are you able to just kind of experience your emotions very directly so how clear does your own emotional experience feel to you for myself being in story is almost always an indication that I'm not emotionally
sober when I'm emotionally sober I'm able to look at most situations and go I feel angry or I feel hurt or I feel hopeful whatever it is I usually have a very clear and direct first-person experience of what I am feeling when I am not emotionally sober I have a whole bunch of stories and justifications and rants I want to go on or I might feel holier than thou or I might feel significantly lesser than another person right when we are emotionally sober for the most part we can hold a sense of respect for ourselves
and respect for other people and if it feels really difficult to do either one of those things that's okay it's just likely an indication that you are not in a state of emotional sobriety where you are seeing things calmly and clearly in a state of sobriety you can dislike things about yourself or the other person but it doesn't feel like this huge deal right if you don't like someone you just don't spend time around them in an emotionally activated state it might feel like we desperately need to change people to get something out of them
or to preserve our own Pride or prove to ourselves that we're okay so once again step one is just about noticing your patterning what is it like for you to be emotionally sober and to be perceiving reality accurately and to be understanding your own emotional responses versus what does it feel like to be emotionally intoxicated and to be either really caught up in or really detached from your emotional experience and then we move on to step two which is starting to notice and name our triggers so what tends to to flip us into an emotionally
intoxicated State fairly consistently so very easy example for a lot of those of us who air insecurely attached is that being around our families might very quickly trigger us into a state of emotional intoxication we might go home to visit our families and find ourselves feeling either instantly more combative and snappy and annoyed or more shut down and dissociated and deactivated or an entire range of things in between so for most of us there are certain people who tend to trigger an emotionally non-sober response in us there can also be certain situations certain environments let's
say certain types of social situations certain workplace environments whatever it is the goal here is just to take what you learned in step one and start mapping it out so that you can learn to start predicting which situations you are likely to not be emotionally sober in once again you cannot just decide one time to be emotionally sober and then do it forever these are deeply ingrained responses so to get to the point where we are usually sober we first have to account for the fact that we are going to have to spend a long
period of time just learning how to navigate non-sobriety with minimal side effects so what we're doing here is figuring out which situations or which people or which feeling States inside of us trigger the belief inside of us that we are not capable of dealing with the emotions that come up around that thing so I have another video called emotional self-containment what it is and how to practice it or something like that that I will link in the description of this video that talks about how to deal with those triggers when they come up in our
system and in my opinion that's a really important part of developing emotional sobriety but for now all we're doing is figuring out what those trigger points are and if you're still struggling and you don't really know what those triggers are just try to make some guesses sit down and write out a list of five types of situations that might be likely to emotionally trigger you or that might or that have in the past flipped you quickly into a fight flight freeze or Fawn response or that have really activated or really deactivated your attachment system just
start with writing down five situations that might trigger you into a lack of emotional sobriety and then continue to add to that list as you go now the reason why we're doing this is because it becomes necessary for step number three step number three is developing an action plan for how you will behave when you are not emotionally sober so in step one we learn how to differentiate an emotionally sober state from an emotionally intoxicated one in step two we learn which situations tend to bring out those responses in us now if you are able
to notice you're not emotionally sober when you are not emotionally sober kudos to you that's a very high level skill and most people including secure people really struggle to do that so the purpose of step three is to decide for yourself when you are in Wise regulated mind what is important to you which things you definitely do not want to do when you are not emotionally sober and how you can start developing some rules or boundaries or guidelines for your own behavior that you will follow all of the time so that you do not start
making important decisions from a place of being emotionally hijacked so I kind of liken this too when I was a new University I would get drunk a lot that was one of my early coping mechanisms and when I would get drunk my favorite thing to do was to call everybody I knew and try to convince them to come out to the bar and I did not care if they answered the phone and told me they were in bed and wanted me to stop calling I would call four more times I had no shame and often
the next morning I would have shame and I would go oh I really wish that I had not harassed everybody to come out last night so I eventually made a rule for myself where I went after I have had four drinks that was the line at which I recognized it was highly likely that my judgment was going to become impaired I am not allowed to use my phone unless it's to call a cab so it doesn't matter how good of an idea it feels to me in the moment if I've had four drinks or more
within a relatively short period of time I'm not allowed to call anybody and invite them out even if once again in that moment it feels like a phenomenal idea and then when I was drunk I would have to it here to my sober reasoning because I knew in my mind if this is that important to sober me there must be a really good reason why I don't want to do this even if right now it feels like I do she made such a big deal about sticking to this bottom line and this is exactly the
way we need to be treating our emotional intoxication if I know that around a certain person I'm going to naturally want to Fawn and say yes to anything they ask of me maybe I have a bottom line rule for myself that if I'm around this person there is a high chance I'm in an emotionally intoxicated state so if they ask me to do anything I'm not going to give them an answer until I've had 24 hours to myself to think about that thing and then I will get back to them that's a very simple bottom
line rule I can follow when I'm in an emotionally intoxicated state if they ask me for something I need to tell them that I need time to think about it and then take some time to myself even if in the moment I feel a hundred percent sure that this time I'm actually emotionally sober and and actually it's totally okay for me to agree to this thing doesn't matter bottom line rule right does not matter even if you're sure you're right if you make a deal with yourself in a sober State you stick to it even
if you're pretty sure you're not emotionally intoxicated this is how we practice self-protection so another example of this is that when I was working on this skill early on in my own attachment healing process I had this one person who I knew tended to trigger my fight response I would get really defensive around them and I would always want to tell them about how they were wrong and I was right so I made a rule with myself total bottom line non-negotiable rule with this person I cannot ever use externalizing language so I cannot say things
like you are toxic you are rude you are the problem I have to I have to speak to them using I language all of the time I feel hurt I feel uncomfortable in this interaction I felt angry when you said this to me it did not matter how sure I was that I was right and they were in the wrong I could not tell them so and this was not to protect them it was to protect me because sober me knew that that type of language would only escalate the situation an emotionally intoxicated me was
not capable of dealing with an emotionally escalated environment in a wise and self-protective way so step three is all about developing rules that you can follow when you are not emotionally sober and sticking to them no matter what even against your better judgment in the moment again these rules are about protecting what you know you want for yourself when you're in a wise well-regulated and emotionally sober State and it's important that these rules are incredibly simple because when we are emotionally intoxicated we're kind of working from like a four-year-old's perspective and a four-year-old cannot handle
complex instructions the max instructions they can handle are like if this not that or if this yes that right so if in the presence of this person don't immediately agree to anything if in the presence of this person don't use externalizing language right it has to be super super simple and super black and white because again your emotional four-year-old self is not capable of understanding and following rules that are more complex than that what's much more likely to happen is that they will give up and just go with the trigger if the rule is not
incredibly simple to implement and follow and this leads us to step number four which is overall work on beginning to tolerate the difficult emotions that tend to be the things that trigger you into an emotionally intoxicated state so if you tend to kind of freeze and go quickly offline anytime you feel a sense of shame it might be helpful to learn how to sit with and integrate shame so that it doesn't flip you into an emotionally intoxicated response pattern same goes for feelings of anger if feeling like someone is disrespecting you flips you very quickly
into a fight response where you're super physiologically aroused and really unable to think clearly you might want to do some work on learning to express yourself assertively so that your only options when you feel defensive are not blow up or self-abandoned and I find that generally those of us who grew up insecurely attached tend to have a need to do some work around our relationship to uncertainty and vulnerability if you grow up securely attached a big part of what you learn is that life is in constant motion and that everything is always changing and that
to be alive means to feel fairly vulnerable and exposed and to have to grieve things that you've lost on a regular basis but attachment relationship are there to help us soothe and get through those challenges versus if you grew up with an avoidant leaning attachment style you're more likely to tell yourself the story that you can make the world predictable by just making sure unconsciously of course that you never experience your own vulnerability which does not mean you're invulnerable it just means you develop patterns of thinking and feeling that distort your experience of that vulnerability
so you believe that it isn't there but this can often give way to highly neurotic thought patterns because if you're neglecting your true emotional experience a lot of things stop making sense and if you grow up more anxiously attached you might have this belief that yes the world is scary and unpredictable and you are vulnerable but you can find a certain person a savior of some sort who can come along and perfectly take away your pain if you can just crack the code of someone else and get them to attend constantly to you you won't
have to stay present with any of that existential vulnerability so a big part of step four for anyone who grew up insecurely attached is to do some work on your relationship to that which you cannot control how much are you you able to relax in a world where everything is in constant motion and where nothing is guaranteed does that thought terrify you because you know that you don't have close enough connections to be able to soothe the pain of things going wrong or are you able to accept it and to lean into your close relationship
for camaraderie around that pain but not to get rescued from it right so to be securely attached means that both you and the people you love are aware of the fact that life is inherently chaotic and vulnerable but at least you're not lonely in it you're not savioring each other from your pain but there's a sense of solidarity a sense of We're All in This Together and when one of us is struggling we're able to be present with each other as we each find our own way towards the solution to our problems but again the
vulnerability and uncertainty that is inherent to being alive never properly goes away and to be emotionally sober is to know that and to have strategies for coping with it without needing to deny it and again this is an incredibly long process I will link some videos of mine in the description of this video that I think might help along the way when it comes to learning to tolerate and be present with the emotions that generally flip us into an emotionally intoxicated response but remember this doesn't happen overnight it happens over a long period where we
build those tiny moments of secure processing up very very slowly and the fifth and final step in this process for today is try to keep your expectations of emotional sobriety realistic and develop a life filled with habits that support it so when it comes to alcohol abuse you don't want to try to get sober in a bar filled with other alcoholics right and the same is true of emotional sobriety if you grew up making significant thinking or feeling distortions over the course of your life there's a very high chance that a lot of the people
you have dated chosen to surround yourself with chosen to work with etc etc are also not particularly secure and are also involved in a lot of distorted thinking so you might have a lot of people you can go to who will serve as kind of yes men for you and go absolutely you're 100 right and the other person is 100 wrong or your partner is always overreacting and being unreasonable and the problem is never the way that you're approaching things which might feel really validating in the moment but this type of unbalanced processing is unlikely
to help us stay emotionally sober in order to make sure that we are keeping ourselves as sober as we're able to we need to be conscientious about surrounding ourselves with other people and environments who are committed to doing the same if you can't think of a single person in your life who's able to provide you with that kind of a mature and honest and direct feedback I recommend looking for either a support group or a counselor who is able to provide you with that for myself unquestionably having a therapist who operated from a place of
emotional sobriety themselves and getting to speak with that person and bring my problems to them and see what it looked like for a well-regulated balanced person to respond to those issues and and ask me questions about them that did not feed into my neurotic thought patterns went a really long way towards me even beginning to understand what emotional sobriety looked like and from that point I was able to bring more of it into my personal relationships and the relationships that were able to absorb and evolve into more emotionally sober Mutual connections went through incredible growth
spurts and some other relationships fell by the wayside but the beautiful part is that it becomes easier and easier the longer down this road you walk to connect with other people who are intentionally seeking out and choosing emotional sobriety in their own lives and the last thing I want to point out here is that peace around having realistic expectations when you have an addiction to anything whether it is a substance whether it is a thought pattern whatever it is normally we develop that addiction because it was a response to very real pain that we found
intolerable and I think it can be really common for people to think that sobriety either literally or emotionally or both is going to be the solution to them feeling bad all the time when in reality it's going to give you a more direct unaltered experience of your own pain right so you're not going to suddenly feel better the more emotionally sober you are what you are going to feel is your true feelings whatever those are I don't think I actually knew what grief and sadness and raw pain felt like until I got emotionally sober I
don't think I knew what the pain of rejection and abandonment and loss felt like in relationships before I got emotionally sober I only knew how to write other people off and tell myself that the losses didn't matter to me emotional sobriety will force you to confront the really difficult feelings that you developed distorted thinking and feeling patterns in order to avoid because at a very young age you may not have been mature enough or capable enough of coping with those kind of big existential pains and insecurities and vulnerabilities but now as an adult if you
choose to you can train yourself to to deal with those things directly instead of spending your life playing kind of whack-a-mole with all of the symptoms that's all emotional sobriety is it's not an escape from any sort of pain it's the choice to finally deal with and work through the pain so that you can come out the other side of it rather than spending your entire life preoccupied with avoiding it alright that's all I have to say for today on the topic of emotional sobriety let me know as always what's coming up for you guys
as you go through this video and as always I love you guys I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other and your inner children and I will see you back here again really soon foreign [Music]
