When most people think of sobriety, they think of recovering and abstaining from addictive substances and behaviors. However, there is also an idea known as emotional sobriety that ties into both Addiction Disorders and the wider world of Mental Health Conditions.
Understanding emotional sobriety means understanding your own relationship with negative thoughts, feelings, and circumstances. Achieving emotional sobriety is the key to practicing healthy emotional regulation and processing negative experiences in a productive way. Read on to learn more about how a Licensed Therapist can help you understand emotional sobriety and discover what this practice means for your life.
What Is Emotional Sobriety?
Emotional sobriety is understanding, processing, and interpreting difficult emotions and rising above the inner turmoil by learning to be mindful and have a value system that leaves you with few regrets. This entails affect regulation and replacing negative thoughts, overwhelming emotions, and changing associations in order to remain emotionally sober. This is important especially when you are dealing with negative emotions in a way that allows you not to react impulsively to those overwhelming or negative feelings. In doing so, you learn to replace negative thought patterns and maladaptive associations with ones that are healthy, productive, adaptive, and positively consequential. This does not mean always feeling happy or stress-free. Instead, emotional sobriety revolves around experiencing stress, anger, fear, and other negative feelings without letting them control you or influence your actions.
This term originates from addiction recovery treatments and programs, but its importance goes beyond Addiction Disorders. Anyone who struggles with a Mental Health Condition must learn to regulate negative feelings and replace negative thought patterns with positive ones. By doing so, you build the skills and resilience necessary to face hardship without harming yourself or others.
Goals of Emotional Sobriety
When you struggle to regulate emotions, every unfavorable experience you have becomes even worse and exasperates negative thoughts, which leads to maladaptive behaviors. Things that might ordinarily make you a little stressed—such as getting stuck in traffic, juggling deadlines, or getting into a spat with a partner—can ruin your entire day. In addition to adding to your stress, anger, and other negative emotions, these experiences create negative thought patterns and can lead to the development or worsening of Mental Health Disorders.
Without emotional sobriety, you attract chaos, crisis, drama, havoc, and stress. As a result, you end up seeking negative attention because of its potency and the adrenaline rush you get from being immersed in a chain of negative interactions. It may also have been easier for you to find and experience negative attention than positive emotions as a child and growing up without a secure attachment. With emotional sobriety, however, you are able to process negative experiences and create greater stability and self-assuredness in your life. This negates the craving for chaos, havoc, crisis, and drama. It will also allow you to learn how to build healthier social skills and be able to benefit from successful treatment for your mental health disorders or addictions in order to enjoy mental health and emotional well-being.
Emotional sobriety is the key to leading a more emotionally balanced life. It allows you to accept the present, move on from the past, and maintain a strong sense of self throughout life’s challenges.
Focuses of Emotional Sobriety
Because everyone experiences emotions in their own unique way, emotional sobriety looks different for everyone. However, the overall focus of emotional sobriety involves regulating, processing, and interpreting emotions in a healthy way. No matter what your journey to emotional sobriety looks like, the goal is always going to be creating a mindset that prevents negative thoughts and feelings from overwhelming you.
There are two practices that play into regulating emotions: cognitive disengagement and cognitive engagement. These concepts might seem mutually exclusive at first. However, this combination of practices allows people to reduce the impact of negative emotions and build more positive and productive thought patterns—thus creating stronger emotional regulation skills.
Cognitive Disengagement
Cognitive disengagement aligns with the addiction recovery principle of distracting yourself from the source of your cravings. If you do not think about drinking, you will not turn to drinking. The goal of this practice is to not let your mind fixate on and obsess with the subject of negativity or harm in your life by creating a cycle of crisis, chaos, drama, and havoc that can worsen and deteriorate your mental health.
In terms of Addiction Disorders, cognitive disengagement is most useful early on. It helps you achieve and maintain initial sobriety, creating a more stable foundation for you to then build skills like emotional regulation and distress tolerance.
Cognitive Engagement
Cognitive disengagement alone is not an effective treatment, though. If you distract yourself from negative thoughts, emotions, and situations entirely, you may let the problem fester and grow. Cognitive disengagement is the initial approach to emotional sobriety, but you must follow it with cognitive engagement.
Cognitive engagement is the practice of acknowledging negative thoughts and feelings in a healthy and productive way. This is easiest for minor negative situations, such as dealing with mild annoyances by taking a deep breath and then moving on with your day. However, the more you can engage with distressing emotions and negative thoughts, the easier it is to process them without allowing them to control your actions and dictate your behaviors or govern your choices. This makes cognitive engagement the key to true emotional regulation.
Moreover, cognitive engagement allows you to identify what exactly triggers negative thoughts, emotions, and relapse. Finding triggers lets you accurately address the core issue behind your negative thoughts and emotions, making this practice key to an effective change in your thought patterns.
Evidence-Based Therapy Can Help
A Licensed Psychologist and a skilled Therapist can help you understand and achieve emotional sobriety through evidence-based therapies and scientific approaches. A personalized treatment plan customized for you based on your personal history, current situation, and future goals allows you and your Licensed Clinical Psychologist to delve deep into the experiences behind your negative thought patterns. From there, you can recognize maladaptive habits and correct them to create more positive thoughts and behaviors.
Examples of therapy models that are effective in achieving emotional sobriety include Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Schema-Focused Therapy, Mentalization Treatment, Interpersonal Effectiveness, and Psychoanalysis.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
At its core, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is about identifying and changing negative or unhealthy beliefs and thought patterns. By correcting these misguided ways of thinking, you can unlearn maladaptive behaviors, correct self-limiting thoughts, and build stronger cognitive skills—including emotional sobriety. Undergoing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as part of your treatment plan with your Licensed Clinical Psychologist helps you address the root of negative thoughts and emotions at their core. This leads to greater awareness, stronger cognitive skills, and the development of better, healthier habits for your Mental Health.
Schema-Focused Therapy
In the world of psychology, schemas refer to a cognitive framework such as habits or thought patterns. Schema-Focused Therapy revolves around the idea that negative schemas are at the root of unhealthy thoughts, emotional dysregulation, and maladaptive behaviors. It combines principles of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy with an understanding of attachment styles and how they affect mental and emotional development. The result is a therapy that helps patients identify and understand their own mindsets so that they can make targeted, effective changes to their own patterns of thinking.
Achieving Emotional Sobriety with Blair Wellness Group
If you are looking for Schema-Focused Therapy from a Licensed Clinical Psychologist, contact Blair Wellness Group to see how our evidence-based treatment plans can help you.
