Recovery is talked about as if getting sober is the destination. You do the hard part and get clean, and everyone around you exhales because the crisis is over. But for you the crisis has just changed. The substances are gone and everything they were holding at bay is right there waiting for you, with nothing left to dull it.
At Centered by the Sea, we work with people who are in recovery and discovering that sobriety has surfaced pain that predates the addiction. The alcohol or drugs were how you coped with something you didn’t have the tools to face at the time. This is where we help you face it.
How Life After Addiction Shows Up
You expected sobriety to feel like freedom and in some ways it does. But it also feels like being exposed. Emotions you haven’t felt in years come flooding in and you don’t know how to regulate them because the only tool you ever had for that is the one you can’t use anymore. Small things make you disproportionately angry or sad and you don’t understand why everything is so intense all the time.
Your relationships are in uncharted territory.
Some of them didn’t survive the addiction and you’re grieving those losses while trying to rebuild the ones that did. The people who stood by you might be walking on eggshells, terrified of a relapse, and that fear creates a distance between you that neither of you knows how to close. You want them to trust you but you’re not sure you trust yourself yet either.
You might be going to meetings and doing everything you’re supposed to on the outside while internally feeling like you’re coming apart.
The structure of recovery is keeping you sober but it’s not touching the deeper reasons you started using in the first place. And those reasons are getting harder to ignore now that you don’t have anything standing between you and them.
There’s also an identity question that nobody warns you about.
You spent years being defined by the addiction and now that it’s gone you don’t know who you are without it. The old friends are gone and the routines that structured your days revolved entirely around using, so everything needs to be rebuilt from the ground up at a time when you’re more emotionally raw than you’ve ever been.
What’s Underneath
Addiction is almost always a response to something that was too painful to sit with.
The substances worked because they made the unbearable bearable, and that’s why you kept going back even when it was costing you everything. But now that you’re clean, the thing it was managing is still there and it needs attention.
Recovery programs focus on keeping you sober and that focus saves lives. But staying sober and understanding why you needed substances in the first place are two different things.
Most people relapse because something surfaced that they didn’t have the tools to handle, and nobody had helped them build those tools yet.
Our Approach
We work with people who are already in recovery and focused on what comes after getting sober. The addiction’s job was managing something you didn't have another way to cope with, and our work together is about understanding what that was and helping you develop new ways to carry it.
We go slowly because the impulse to numb is still close to the surface and pushing too hard too fast can be destabilizing.
We pay attention to what's happening in your body when difficult material comes up because your system spent years outsourcing its regulation to a substance and it needs to relearn how to do that on its own.
We also work on helping you to rebuild the relationships around you because addiction doesn't happen in isolation and neither does recovery.
The people in your life have their own version of what happened and their own wounds from it, and helping you navigate those dynamics without sacrificing your sobriety is an important part of what we do.
And we help you figure out who you are now.
The version of you that existed before the addiction was already in pain and the version that existed during was in survival mode. This work is about building a new life that you can be present for instead of one you need to escape from.
You've Been Treading Water For Too Long
Recovery gave you your life back. Centered by the Sea can help you figure out what to do with it.
Reach Out
Call us 516-123-4568, email hello@centeredbythesea.com, or fill out the contact form and tell us what's going on.
Find Your Fit
We'll check your insurance and match you with the right therapist for what you need.
Start the Work
Meet your therapist in person at our Long Beach office or online from wherever you are.