Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

Author: Tian Dayton, Ph.D.,TEP

Love is both the cruelty and the cure.

When our hearts are wounded through disappointment or loss, love restores us to comfort and balance.  Fear triggers us into self-protective responses like anger, rage, dissociating, or withdrawing, while love and caring soothes us and brings us back to a state of equilibrium.

We are in a constant state of healing small and large insults to our sense of self, our sense of relationship, and our sense of personal and worldly order.  These wounds, unfortunately, don’t necessarily disappear on their own, particularly if they occurred before our own age of reason; that is, during early childhood.   If we can’t seem to live comfortably in adult relationships, we may be re-creating familiar patterns that carry the echoes of hidden pain from the past.

What we need to do in understanding these emotional traumas is to be willing to feel our sore spots long enough to attach words to them, develop emotional literacy, and process them with our thinking minds.

We also need to identify the problematic patterns that we’re repeating and work through the pain and confusion that are driving them so we can learn new and more successful patterns of relating to become what we might call ‘adept livers,’ studiers of life, people who learn and grow from adversity and turn it into strength.

We have nothing less than a medicine chest inside of us that is designed to regulate body rhythms, moods, and emotional health – if we can learn to use it.

With this book, anyone who wants to understand the mind/body impact of what Dr. Dayton refers to as ‘relationship trauma’ in whatever form they have experienced it –  emotional, psychological, or physical – will be able to do so.   And anyone who wants to turn their life around will have a sense of what actions they will need to take in order to do that.

This book will not in and of itself heal you, but it tells you what steps you need to take in order to heal yourself.