Emotions: Moral, Spiritual, Defective. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
Emotions as Concern-based Construals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .101
Negative vs. Defective Emotions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .102
Right Emotion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .103
The Self-help View: Emotional Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
The AA View: Emotional Sobriety . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .110
Spiritual Source . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
Bill’s Emotional Awakening . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .114
Emotional Sobriety Defined . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
“In the last two chapters of Part I we discussed at some length how our spiritual disease distorts the way we view and value things, how these distortions manifest themselves in defects of character and emotion, and how these defects in turn exert their own distorting effect upon our perceptions and concerns, creating a vicious cycle of disease and disorder in our lives.
In Part II we narrow that discussion to focus directly on the emotions. We flesh out the understanding of them we have gleaned from the Big Book and the 12&12, differentiate it from alternative understandings, and apply it in concrete and practical terms to taking inventory of some of the emotional handicaps most of us struggle with. This is the business of the fourth component of our inventory, column 4 in our guide. The need for such an inventory is established by the Big Book sample, which concentrates as we have seen on three emotions: anger, resentment, and fear. We revisit these three and add six more to our analysis: anxiety, guilt and remorse, shame and humiliation, and regret. Additional emotions will be taken up in a discussion of Step 10 in a future work.
The reason for taking inventory of our emotional defects is explained in the 12&12, which states that, by discovering the nature of our emotional deformities, we can work toward their correction (S4, p. 43). Indeed, their “correction” is both the short- and the long-term goal of our recovery, as that text also makes clear. In the short term, our objective is to diminish their negative impact on us so that we can stay physically sober. In the longer run, our objective is to be free from the control which they exercise over us and achieve emotional sobriety.
EMOTIONS: MORAL, SPIRITUAL, DEFECTIVE
The first thing we need to face in a discussion of emotions is the fact that there is no consensus on what constitutes an emotion or how it arises in us. Different schools of psychology posit different understandings, as do different schools of philosophy and thinkers and researchers in other fields. We will find, among others, anthropological, biological, conceptual, evolutionary, neurological, psychoanalytic, and sociological views on the subject.
This lack of agreement should not discourage us from our task, however. There is no consensus on what alcoholism is either. Nor does AA privilege its own understanding (of a threefold disease) as being final and applicable to everyone. Yet it offers us a series of Steps that have helped millions to stop drinking and relieved many more millions of other addictions. Likewise, AA doesn’t claim to have all the answers to our emotional handicaps. What it does suggest is that the same Steps can relieve us of them and restore us to emotional health.
The second thing we need to face is the fact that the AA view of emotions and of emotional sobriety is not explicitly stated anywhere in the Big Book or the 12&12. It is nevertheless implied in its discussion of them in those texts, and it can therefore be reasonably inferred from them. This requires the type of close reading we have been attempting. Logically, their view of emotional sobriety should follow from their view of emotions. Thus, we must begin our inquiry with the latter.
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Summarizing what we have said so far, the view of emotions as concern-based construals explains what they are, how they arise, what differentiates one emotion from another, what makes some positive and others negative, their relative strength and its varying impact on us, how they become defective, what distinguishes the defective from the negative, the ways in which some can be said to be spiritual and moral and why the first is the basis of the second, and how, as we take inventory, we can assess their material, spiritual, and moral fit to the situations to which they respond. We will expand on each of these points as we examine specific emotions in the chapters that follow.
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Emotional Sobriety Defined
We now come to our seventh and final point about the explanatory power of the view of emotions as concern-based construals. This is its ability to provide a reasonable and common-sense explanation of what might constitute emotional sobriety and how we could achieve it. On this view, emotional sobriety is an established disposition to experience right emotion in any given situation. “Established disposition” references a stable, consistent, and habitual tendency to so experience emotion. “Emotion” references a concern-based construal of the situation. “Right” references that construal’s rational, moral, and spiritual fit to its situation.
Applying this threefold understanding of “right” to Aristotle’s criteria for right emotion, we may say that we have achieved emotional sobriety to the extent that we are able to experience emotions naturally and consistently for the right reason (cause), toward the right object (people, places, and things), with the right motive (purpose), at the right time (occasion), in the right manner (not too quickly or too slowly), to the right degree (no excess or deficiency of intensity), and for the right duration (not too short or too long).
Aristotle famously remarked that attaining such rightness “was not easy.” He made this observation in connection with anger, where it may perhaps be the hardest, but he clearly meant it to apply to the other emotions as well. Though not easy, however, he considered such rightness achievable. He saw it as the product of a life-long growth in virtue, and particularly in the growth of practical wisdom, the chief of the cardinal virtues. As William C. Mattison notes, practical wisdom disposes us to see rightly, the way things really are in the world, and to act out of that truthful vision in the interest of the good.7 Aquinas called it right reason in action because it enables us to assess situations accurately, determine the best way to proceed, and set about doing it. Plato called it the “charioteer” of the virtues because it leads all the other virtues in the right pursuit of their proper ends or goals.
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How then can we consistently experience right emotion and thus grow in emotional sobriety? Through the reshaping of our emotional dispositions, of the ways we tend to respond emotionally to people, places, and things. Our ability to do this lies in practicing the principles which over time will result in new habits of seeing, valuing, and acting which affect our emotional responses to the situations that tend to elicit them: to their material, moral, and spiritual fitness. This starts by examining our emotional handicaps as we make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. We undertake this task in the next six chapters.”
– From Part II: Emotions, Chapter 7: Emotions, pp. 99–100, 106, 117–118, 119
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