No matter who you are, no matter how low you've gone, no matter how grave your emotional complications -- even your crimes -- we still can't deny you A.A. Very deep, sometimes quite forgotten, damaging emotional conflicts persist below the level of consciousness.

By discovering what our emotional deformities are, we can move toward their correction.

No adult man or woman, for example, should be in too much emotional dependence upon a parent.

They appear to be in the nature of huge emotional displacements and rearrangements.

If at these points our emotional disturbance happens to be great, we will more surely keep our balance, provided we remember, and repeat to ourselves, a particular prayer or phrase that has appealed to us in our reading or meditation.

In all times of emotional disturbance or indecision, we can pause, ask for quiet, and in the stillness simply say: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. Thy will, not mine, be done."

These emotional "dry benders" often led straight to the bottle.

No individuals have been more buffeted by such emotional gusts than those A.A.'s bold enough to accept employment with outside agencies dealing with the alcohol problem.

They need to be as sure as possible that no deep-lying emotional handicap in either will be likely to rise up under later pressures to cripple them.

That is the emotional hangover, the direct result of yesterday's and sometimes today's excesses of negative emotion -- anger, fear, jealousy, and the like.

In many instances we shall find that though the harm done others has not been great, the emotional harm we have done ourselves has.

But the moment our mental or emotional independence is in question, how differently we behave.

Common symptoms of emotional insecurity are worry, anger, self-pity, and depression.

The most common symptoms of emotional insecurity are worry, anger, self-pity, and depression.

Anger, that occasional luxury of more balanced people, could keep us on an emotional jag indefinitely.

Alcoholics Anonymous (Big Book) and Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions (12 & 12)