The Nuts and Bolts of Sobriety

This is a post by Arthur Janov who writes a really great blog on what the true core issues behind various different symptoms are.

I kid you not when I say that the august journal Scientific American Mind, publishes some strange articles. This one, the “Nuts and Bolts of Emotional Sobriety” by Herbert Wray (March 2012), is about being sober. Persons must attain “emotional sobriety” before they get too far along; and that means—hold on!—you must learn to regulate negative feelings that can lead to discomfort, craving and ultimate relapse. The maxim is “Don’t think and don’t drink.” 

What the article goes on to say is that this is a lifelong effort and requires new ways of thinking. There are so many loose intervening variables involved, so many ill-defined notions that I hardly know where to start, except that this appears in an important scientific journal. But if we suss out the hidden text it is “thinking will make you well”. Oh yes, that is not exactly what they are saying but it really is. You need a new way of thinking and where does that come from? And by the way, where does thinking come from, in any case? Thinking is not so deep, not deep enough to change deeply embedded feelings that drive cravings. You can only agree with that notion if you do not understand where addiction comes from, and it is not, not, not from faulty logic, where you just need to change your attitudes, and voila. Ideas and attitudes are late arrivals in the brain and are never strong enough to combat feelings, instincts and sensations, which preceded them by millions of years in evolution. There was this life going on a long time before ideas came along. This is true in antiquity and in our personal development. And we hurt and imprint that hurt long before we have ideas to describe it. Read on