What Used to Baffle Us
Reality Can Be Uncomfortable July 1971
The Great Art of Living June 1975
Got a Pain in Your Feelings?March 1950
Step Ten: Up Close and Personal October 2007
The Fire Has Gone Out September 1997
Section Four
More Will Be Revealed
Recovery is a Wonderland July 2010
Carrying the Message — Life! June 1966
Mail Call for AAs at Home and Abroad March 1949
God Didn't Follow Orders July 1984
Powerful Simplicity March 1984
Section Five
Rooms of Our Own
Consider the Old-Timers June 1949
Meetings in the Bank June 2009
Section Six
Steps to Serenity
Gratitude Turns the Key April 2010
A Bend in Recovery Road January 1986
What of the Last Half? October 1949
Confessions of a Reluctant Newcomer (Excerpt) March 2003
Step Three: From Sight to Insight March 2007
Section Seven
Finding Our Inner Adult
A Measure of Growth December 1975
How It Feels to Join AA Long Before You Have To November 1944
THE TWELVE STEPS
THE TWELVE TRADITIONS
The Next Frontier—
Emotional Sobriety
I think that many oldsters who have put our AA “booze cure” to severe but successful tests still find they often lack emotional sobriety. Perhaps they will be the spearhead for the next major development in AA—the development of much more real maturity and balance (which is to say, humility) in our relations with ourselves, with our fellows, and with God.
Those adolescent urges that so many of us have for top approval, perfect security, and perfect romance—urges quite appropriate to age seventeen—prove to be an impossible way of life when we are at age forty-seven or fifty-seven.
Since AA began, I've taken immense wallops in all these areas because of my failure to grow up, emotionally and spiritually. My God, how painful it is to keep demanding the impossible, and how very painful to discover finally, that all along we have had the cart before the horse! Then comes the final agony of seeing how awfully wrong we have been, but still finding ourselves unable to get off the emotional merry-go-round.
How to translate a right mental conviction into a right emotional result, and so into easy, happy and good living—well, that's not only the neurotic's problem, it's the problem of life itself for all of us who have got to the point of real willingness to hew to right principles in all our affairs.
Even then, as we hew away, peace and joy may still elude us. That's the place so many of us AA oldsters have come to. And it's a hell of a spot, literally. How shall our unconscious—from which so many of our fears, compulsions and phony aspirations still stream—be brought into line with what we actually believe, know and want! How to convince our dumb, raging and hidden “Mr. Hyde” becomes our main task.
I've recently come to believe that this can be achieved. I believe so because I begin to see many benighted ones—folks like you and me—commencing to get results. Last autumn [several years back—ed.],
