The depth of this experience we call life keeps me surrendering over and over again into new vast expanses of who I am.

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Simply put emotional sobriety is knowing what you feel and knowing what your needs are and being able to be responsible for that. On the other side of the scale of emotional sobriety we have emotional enmeshment. That is when your own feelings and needs are being covered or entangled with other peoples feeling and needs. Not knowing what you feel or who you really are is often a consequence  of addiction. Why addiction arises and how in a person is widely discussed and there is a lot of information on the subject. I believe addiction emerges out of a childhood in an environment where we are not allowed to feel what we feel and to express ourself freely. The caretakers in the childs life can not reflect accurately what he or she is feeling but instead projects there own dramas, fears and shortcoming on to the child. The detrimental solution of addiction to a painful upbringing can escalate to a point where the one suffering from it will lose all of what represents a dignified life and possibly to a premature death. Addiction and or emotional enmeshment and confusion is passed on from generation to generation in dysfunctional families. 

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Addiction and codependence can be explained as 

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• an attachment disorder

• a strategy for survival

• when you adapt to others so much that you don't develop your own sense of who you are. 

• a way to survive pathologic circumstances like violence and physical and emotional abuse. 

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Addiction is a way to ignore, escape, twist, change, lie and violate our feelings and innermost truth . . . . 

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We did this to survive.

We learned fast and easy as the vulnerable child we were how to escape our intense feelings of pain, despair, fear, confusion, hate, abandonment, neglect, disrespect and humiliation.  

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Why do we stop feeling and what happens

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We learn that there is something wrong with what we feel. We know by the way we are treated that to be vulnerable is not safe. Maybe we expressed what we wanted and needed and got humiliated instead of meet and respected. we learnt that when we cried or were angry we were threatened because the adults had not processed there own feelings of sorrow and fear and therefore could not stand a childs crying and raging.  

because we don't know  how to harbor our feelings of pain, despair, anger, frustration and sorrow. 

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Addiction is a way to run away from what is really happening in our lives and inside of us. Our feelings become distorted. As a result of how we are treated and what we live through we learn to shut down and suppress what we feel. Sometimes all of our feelings get locked in deep inside. 

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