Emotional Sobriety Quotes

“If I forgive, I’ll no longer feel angry at the person for what happened. In my experience, anger can still come up, but when it does, we remind ourselves that we’ve decided it isn’t worth it to hold on to it any longer.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“The thing about long-term or unresolved anger is we’ve seen it reset the internal thermostat. When you get used to a low level of anger all the time, you don’t recognize what’s normal. It creates a kind of adrenaline rush that people get used to. It burns out the body and makes it difficult to think clearly—making the situation worse…. When the body releases certain enzymes during anger and stress, cholesterol and blood pressure levels go up—not a good long-term disposition to maintain the body in.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“The more I worked with clients’ grief issues, the better they were getting. Additionally, trauma was not being talked about as a relational issue; it was talked about as if it happened just within a person. It was during this period that it also became clear to me that the trauma I was seeing in clients was the direct result of relationship pain, and that if it remained unresolved, it would continue to drive dysfunctional relationship patterns.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“When we grieve, we naturally allow ourselves to feel the anger, hurt, disorientation, and sadness that are a part of processing pain. As we grieve, we let go of some of our hypervigilance. When we understand that feeling these feelings are part of the healing process, and that by feeling them we can allow them to dissipate, we begin to see light at the end of the tunnel.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“we’re expressing in our adult lives the anger we had to hold in as children. Our anger might also be acting as a defense against deeper feelings of pain and helplessness. We need to get to the root so that we can change the pattern.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“When our anger sits within us and never gets worked through, or when we don’t have constructive ways of processing or dealing with it, we may try to get rid of it by projecting it at someone else, or we may try to drown out our frustration, resentment, and pain with alcohol, drugs, food, or compulsive behaviors.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“This ability makes us more available to all of life. It builds self-confidence and inner strength.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“A trigger that is part of the healing process is recovery itself. During recovery, we “remember” what we have “forgotten.” For a moment it hurts all over again. But if we can get through that reexperiencing of the pain with the help of a solid recovery support network, there is freedom on the other side. Actually the fear of the pain is often worse than the pain itself.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“There are essentially three forms of memory, implicit or unconscious memory, explicit or conscious memory, and sensory or body/kinesthetic memory. Much of our childhood experience becomes part of our implicit (unconscious) memory and our sensory (body) memory.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“Stay away from “victim thinking.” We need to understand that we may not have been to blame for being children in painful homes. However, we need to guard against getting too comfortable in the victim role. Change doesn’t happen by accident. Victim thinking can become entitled thinking and can interfere with our motivation toward change. Find other family models. Resilient children seek out other types of families as models. They often spend time with and marry into strong family networks.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“Reenactment patterns. It is a natural phenomenon of unresolved and unconscious pain that gets recreated over and over again in what psychologists call an attempt to “master pain.” Memory is state dependent, so we tend to re-create familiar patterns when confronted with like circumstances.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“People who have experienced trauma may have a tendency to isolate or to withdraw for safety into a lonely world of their own in order to avoid pain. Reaching out may make them feel too vulnerable or rejection sensitive, or they may be out of touch with their need for connection and support or not know how to bring it into their experience.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“A person who escapes from an unhealthy family system while others remain mired within it may experience what is referred to as “survivor’s guilt.” The guilt one feels of being the one who “got away” while others may not have been able to.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“Along with mistrust, hyperreactivity, hyperarousal, depression, and aggression, the numbing response and emotional constriction that are part of the trauma response may lead to the loss of ability to accept caring and support from others. As mistrust grows, so does the ability to accept love and support (van der Kolk 1987).”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“Distorted reasoning—which may take the form of rationalizing and justifying bizarre or unusual forms of behavior and relations—can be immature and can also produce core beliefs about life upon which even more distorted reasoning is based. For example, “he is only hitting me because he loves me.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“It gets stored as a frozen sense memory (body memory) with little reason or understanding attached to it. These painful memories may not get processed, understood, and placed into the overall context of one’s life. They may become banished from consciousness by one of our psychological defenses of dissociation or numbing. They may get “forgotten.” But unfortunately, what we don’t know can hurt us. What we can’t consciously feel or remember can still have great power over us. As children from families that contain trauma, we may find ourselves moving into adult roles carrying unconscious or only partly conscious burdens that we aren’t fully aware of, that interfere with our happiness. In other words, unresolved pain from yesterday gets transferred onto the relationships and circumstances of today without our knowing how or why. Part of what gets us into trouble is that our honest and genuine reactions to previous painful events may be unavailable to us, hidden even from ourselves. Consequently, we may be unable to trace back to their origins our strong reactions to the circumstances in the present. In other words, we don’t know that we don’t know.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“When we can use our thinking mind to make sense and meaning of our limbic mind, we develop a feeling of mastery and self-confidence, knowing that we can find a way to deal with what life throws in our direction. We feel we have the skills necessary to cope with our lives, and at those moments when we can’t, we know how to ask for help.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“If we cannot tolerate our strong emotions and the physical sensations that accompany them, we will want to somehow get rid of them, to make them go away. When we can tolerate our powerful emotions and sensations without blowing up, withdrawing, or self-medicating, we can use the information that we gain from them to inform our thinking. Simply stated, if we don’t know what we feel, it’s hard to make sense of ourselves and make sense of another person. And it’s hard to communicate what we feel and tolerate listening to another person communicate what they feel.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“Emotional literacy is the ability to translate our emotions into words so that our feelings and thoughts can be held out in the intellectual space between two people, shared and reflected on, so that we can think about what we’re feeling. It is a natural outgrowth of sound emotional development. To attain and maintain emotional sobriety, we need to learn to tolerate our strong feelings and translate those feelings into words.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“Trauma affects the internal world of each person, their relationships, and their ability to communicate and be together in a balanced, relaxed, and trusting manner. It affects their emotional sobriety or ability to self-regulate. Due to the trauma-related defenses of dissociation and numbing, and the active avoidance and denial that characterize addicted or dysfunctional family systems, family members may not attach words to the powerful emotions they’re experiencing. Consequently they often have trouble talking about, processing, and working through the pain that they are in. In this way they lose one of their most available routes to processing pain and developing emotional balance and sobriety. Individuals in addictive or abusive systems may behave in ways consistent with the behaviors of victims of other psychological traumas; in other words, they are traumatized by the experience.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“They may adopt elaborate defenses designed to look good or seem normal, withdraw into their own private world, or compete for the little love and attention that is available. In the absence of reliable adults, siblings may become parentified and try to provide the care and comfort that is missing for each other, or they may become co-opted by one parent as a surrogate partner, filling in the gaping holes and massaging the sore spots of a family in a constant low level of crisis. This is on-the-job training for codependency.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“Simply bringing up the family’s problems causes other family members, who cannot and will not see their own pathology, to want to kill the messenger. Again, the message—the truth—threatens their survival as a system. WHEN”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“Those in the system who have the clarity or courage to act as whistle blowers, who attempt to reveal the truth of the family pathology, may be perceived by the family, which is steeped in denial, as in some way problematic. Naming the dysfunctional behavior becomes the sin, not the dysfunctional behavior itself. These members may be cut off, humiliated, or even hated if they get too close to the truth, though much of this may be unconscious.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“Naming and talking about the problem is crucial. While the problem sits unspoken in the emotional underbelly of the family, it affects everyone, but no one is really sure what they are feeling or why they’re feeling it. Nor do they necessarily understand why they have an impulse to act out, withdraw, or self-medicate. Family members feel crazy inside. They see one reality being shown on the surface, but they sense and pick up on a very different one that is denied. “No talk” rules and the family’s need to look good and present a “normal” face to the world may make pain denied and off-limits.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“They may become what family systems theorists call the “symptom bearer,” symptomatic on behalf of the whole family. Children who act out, for example, can have the effect of getting warring parents to pull together in order to address what’s going on for the child; thus, the family buys some more time, the focus is diverted from the parent’s or the family’s underlying problems, and homeostasis, albeit a costly one, is again achieved.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“Otherwise, we may not understand how yesterday’s experiences are driving our behavior today. One-to-one therapy, 12-step programs, and group therapy are all places where this repair can occur. I have found the role-play techniques of psychodrama particularly useful here. Being able to momentarily inhabit the role of the confused, wounded, or even elated child, for example, allows the child within us to have a voice while the adult in us looks on.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“Our experiences combine together forming a brain/body template, from which we operate throughout our lives. This may be one of the most important understandings we can have. Our early experiences literally weave themselves into our neural systems, becoming a neural basis for self-regulation and emotional sobriety.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“The same taboos against genuine feeling that were in place in his childhood will clamp down around him all over again and he’ll become what we might call emotionally illiterate. He won’t put words to his feelings, much less talk them over. So the more frustrated his wife becomes, the more he’ll withdraw or blow up or freeze. In this vicious circle, a past issue comes to life in the present.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“Our bodies don’t really distinguish between physical danger and emotional stress. The natural fear response associated with our fight/flight apparatus causes the body to react to physical or emotional crisis by pumping out sufficient quantities of stress chemicals, like adrenaline, to get our hearts pumping, muscles tightening, and breath shortening, in preparation for a fast exit or a fight.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“But all of the rest was in me, absorbed a day at a time through living in a world where people were denying the reality that was all around us, denying it with the best of intentions, because that was what people in the 1950s were supposed to do with problems. Put on a happy face. Buck up. In our family, we didn’t have an emotional language in place for handling the losses and the incumbent pain and confusion we were experiencing. So we did what anyone does who visits a country where they can’t communicate. We scanned each other’s faces for information and a sense of what was going on. We spoke in short phrases. We used sign language. We developed antennae for reading people without words, and when the frustration built and we had no words to give civilized voice to what was going on inside of us, we burst open like hot water pipes or we turned off the water at its source. We disappeared.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance