One Resentment was Too Many and 1,000 were Not Enough

Emotional Sobriety

My name is Nick and I’m an alcoholic.” How many times have I said that at a meeting over the last ten years. Yes we have to keep it simple and there is nothing more simple than the statement “I’m an alcoholic’’ but how incomplete that statement really is.

It took a very large proportion of my time in Alcoholics Anonymous to realise I never knew how sick I was in a moral sense in the mind and in the emotions, In fact the alcoholic part is a very small part of the trouble it is merely the outward symptom of a very complex confused and deep inner disturbance

Fortunately for me I never had a drink from my first meeting of AA, but it was many years before I realised that there was a second sobriety to be achieved what I call emotional sobriety.

To paraphrase the physical teachings of AA I found the biggest emotional drunkenness was resentment and that “one resentment was too many and a thousand resentments were not enough”.

“one resentment was too many and a thousand resentments were not enough”.

However the physical part was easy to check on I could always know when I was having a drink it is quite a process. You have to order it, see the barmaid pour it into a glass pick it up and drink it. I am referring to the first drink. Quite a few of the later ones you never see at all.

But when it comes to a resentment unless you are spiritually alive, which I most certainly am not all the time, I do not always know I have had a drink of resentment, and most often first become aware of it after a violent outburst of speech or violent physical-outburst such as slamming a door, throwing a book violently on the floor etc I am not even aware of times I have taken a drink of resentment, when nothing violent happens, except when my wife remarks that I have been crotchety for several days,