E-Book Overview
Do you use substances or engage in compulsive activities to regulate your mood? Do you reach for something sweet, a couple of drinks, or a pack of cigarettes after a difficult day because you can't unwind without them? Do you race to the stores to spend away the day's frustrations or run around in circles taking more time to get less done? If these self-defeating habits sound familiar,<em>Emotional Sobrietywill shed light on why and how these coping mechanisms threaten your health and impact resilience. When we manage the stresses of the day by turning to outside 'mood managers' such as food, sex, work, shopping, gambling, drugs, and alcohol rather than healthier forms of 'self-soothing, ' it is because we lack emotional sobriety--the state of processing our thoughts efficiently to bring our emotions into balance, says bestselling author and renowned addictions psychologist Tian Dayton, Ph.D. In her latest book,<em>Emotional Sobriety, Dr. Dayton shares<strong>compelling, honest tales of her life experiences and case studies of those she has counseled. Illustrating that emotional sobriety is a mind/body phenomenon, Dr. Dayton includes ideas on how to attain emotional literacy--the skill of translating feelings into words so that we can use our thought processes to understand and bring our emotions into balance--<em>and how tocalm the limbic system so that we can actually experience what we're feeling. The limbic system processes our emotions and governs our mood, appetite, and sleep cycles. Repeated painful experiences, in childhood or adulthood, over which we have no ability or sense of control or escape can oversensitize us to stress andderegulate our limbic system. Dr. Dayton shows you through concrete examples how to bring your emotions and thoughts into balance and learn healthy ways of 'self-soothing' to relieve symptoms of depression, anxiety, rage, and the desire to self-medicate.
E-Book Content
“In Emotional Sobriety, Dr. Tian Dayton explains in helpful detail how our hearts, minds, and spirits are wounded and what is needed to recover. She describes neuroscience in lay terms so clinicians, recovering people, and families are able to understand how and why our inner selves struggle to find balance and peace. Her understanding of the connections between mind, body, heart, and spirit are what have been needed in the recovery field for a long time. We now have scientific evidence as to why ‘recovery’ works. This is a masterful piece of work. “When I wrote Another Chance and introduced the roles within the addicted family system, we were in the beginning stages of truly understanding the devastating effect that addiction and other serious forms of dysfunction had on the entire family system. What we were looking at was emotional imbalance that led to both personal and familial imbalance. Today, neuroscience is ‘proving’ that the mind/body treatment approaches we have been taking for the last three decades are indeed evidence based.” —Sharon Wegscheider-Cruse, M.A., author of Another Chance, Founder of Onsite Workshops “Bill W., cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935, took eighteen years to realize the importance of our emotions for a total and balanced recovery. In the article ‘The Next Frontier: Emotional Sobriety’ he wrote that once he addressed this aspect of his life, he was ‘given a quiet place in bright sunshine.’ He had no scientific basis for this. As the founding medical director at the Betty Ford Center, I taught that our emotions are our ‘sixth sense’ and must be given great credence in our decisions. I had no basis for this. Cellular memory studies and the field of psycho-neuroimmunology are providing the basis for many of our metaphors regarding the heart and our emotions. Dr. Dayton has proven once again that she can interpret, apply, and lovingly teach new knowledge to us in