When Bill W. coined the term emotional sobriety and made it the ultimate goal of recovery in Step 12, he finally gave voice to an idea that until then had only been latent in the Big Book and the 12&12. Sobriety was more than not drinking, those books had intimated all along. But they hadn’t articulated what that was. Now it had been given a name.

Recognizing that it stood for an aspiration more than a reality, Bill later called it "the next frontier.”

As we argue in PTP, it remains that: the next frontier. The expression never caught on in the rooms, where it is seldom used. The reason is simple. Nobody knows what it means. It was never explained. The idea was never developed. . . .

Though much has been written about emotional sobriety in the secondary recovery literature, little of it has anything to do with the 12-Step program described in the Big Book and the 12&12. That’s where we have to look if we are going to gain an understanding of emotional sobriety that’s grounded in the Steps and the principles they embody and is thus truly representative of AA.

Since as we have noted the concept is not explained in either book, the only way we can do that is by inferring what is implicit about it in them. And we can only do that if we adhere to a close and faithful reading of those texts.

That’s what we do in Practice These Principles especially in chapter 2 of PTP123 and chapter 7 of PTP4, where the subject is systematically, discussed (including Bill’s take in the Grapevine’s article “Emotional Sobriety: The Next Frontier”) and ample illustrations are provided. We refer the reader to those chapters for a full understanding of the concept. .

Here we can only provide a synopsis. . . . .”

[Excerpt from "Emotional Sobriety: The Concept," posted 02/26/23 in "Emotional Sobriety" at https://practicetheseprinciplestheboo...
For full article, (including Bill’s take on the subject in “Emotional sobriety: the Next Frontier’) please click on link.