About AA and AA Grapevine

Preface

      In 1958, the Grapevine published an article by AA co-founder Bill W. about the ongoing challenges of recovery that he faced long after he stopped drinking. Called “The Next Frontier: Emotional Sobriety,” the article describes Bill’s insight that his struggle with depression was due to overweening dependencies on other people and outside circumstances. Bill explains how he had found peace of mind by letting go of his expectations and practicing what he calls “outgoing love” — a love less concerned with what one gets and more with what one gives. It was, as he put it, the St. Francis Prayer in action.

      For some, the next frontier in recovery from alcoholism may be letting go of faulty, unrealistic dependencies; for others, it may mean illuminating persistent character defects or the “Now what?” malaise that can afflict the long-timer. The stories in this book show that when we have the willingness to find solutions rather than stay stuck in problems, we can let go of fear, selfishness, and resentment, put aside selfish demands, practice outgoing love, and become more connected to our Higher Power and our friends, family, and fellows.

      This book does not represent a final definition of emotional sobriety. Growing up in sobriety means different things to each of us, and one’s own idea of it may change over time. But one thing seems true: the rewards for reaching for emotional sobriety are serenity, emotional balance, and an increased joy in living.

      — The Editors

The Next Frontier:

       Emotional Sobriety

      January 1958

      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