Emotional Sobriety I

by Alcoholics Anonymous

faulty emotional dependencies

upon people,

upo...

upon any set of circumstances...

Emotional and instinctual satisfactions, I saw, were really the extra dividends of having love, offering love, and expressing...

It is most clear that the real current can't flow until our paralyzing dependencies are broken, and broken at depth. Only then can we possibly have a glimmer of what adult love really is.

frustrated

rejected.

rejected;

My stability came out of trying to give, not out of demanding that I receive.

If we examine every disturbance we have, great or small, we will find at the root of it some unhealthy dependency and its consequent unhealthy demand.

Now it's becoming easier to spot ego,

One especially difficult resentment was a reasonably justified one. When I was a teenager, a dear friend was murdered. He had been an important part of my life and the closest thing I had to a father. When he died, I felt as if I had been dropped into a shark tank with an anvil tied to my foot. "Swim!" the whole world seemed to be saying, jeering at my confusion, loss, and pain.