Girlfriend of Bill by Karen Nagy

Author:Karen Nagy [Nagy, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hazelden Publishing

[8]

Emotional Sobriety Is an Ongoing Process

THE SETTING WAS LOVELY; the barbecued food was delicious, accompanied by soda and lemonade. It was a joyful celebration, with a deejay spinning lively music. A few couples were dancing, but many people (mostly guys) were standing around the perimeter, looking uncomfortable and acting downright shy and nervous. Even my own date wouldn’t dance with me and was acting like a goof-ball. I was half-expecting a principal to appear and make an announcement that everyone should be nice and dance together.

But this wasn’t middle school, or high school. It was a wedding, and the bride and groom were middle-aged PIRs. They’d invited all their PIR friends and their dates, and many of the PIRs were, like my date, fairly new to recovery. I remember looking around at all these PIRs, some of whom were in their forties and fifties, standing around the dance floor, acting like they were still in junior high, ready to jump out of their own skin. And I remember thinking, “What the heck is happening here? Have they reverted back to adolescence?”

“News flash. They didn’t revert back,” my PIR friend Mark patiently explained to me a couple of days later when I shared my observations. “They may never have moved forward!” He said a PIR’s emotional development often stops at whatever age they are when their addiction takes over. As their disease progresses, a PIR’s emotions usually run amok or might become numb from their drinking or drugging. As a result, they often misinterpret their emotions or continue to hide behind their addictive behaviors to cover up what they’re feeling—if they’re feeling anything at all. When they stop drinking and drugging and enter recovery, they might enjoy physical sobriety but discover they are still a ways from experiencing emotional sobriety.

In recovery, PIRs who work their programs learn to live life in balance, free of the chaos they experienced when their addiction disorder held them hostage. They practice taking responsibility for their out-of-control addictive behaviors—past and present. When it comes to emotional sobriety, PIRs learn to take responsibility for the out-of-control or distorted emotions (past and present) that may be connected to their addiction disorder. They learn to honor what they’re feeling, and practice responding appropriately by acting and reacting in a mature, balanced, and healthy way. They learn to live in the present moment, a day at a time, as emotionally and physically sober individuals, no matter what that moment or that day may hold.

Sometimes it takes years for PIRs to realize that their emotional sobriety is not progressing as well as their physical sobriety. This makes sense, because in early recovery they have enough to do just trying to live clean and sober. As a result, a non-PIR could very well be dating a forty-five-year-old PIR whose emotional age is sixteen! This made so much sense to me when Mark explained it. It helped me better understand why my PIR would sometimes act so stubborn, fly off-the-handle, pout like a

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