Removing the substance reveals the structure beneath it.

WHO THIS IS FOR

You stopped. Now what?

Getting sober, or seriously questioning your drinking or use, can stabilize your life and still leave you feeling unfamiliar to yourself. The substance was doing a job: quieting anxiety, loosening inhibition, managing pressure, making closeness or sex feel possible. When it’s gone, the job is still there.

Many of the people I work with are high-functioning men: thoughtful, capable, often successful on paper. They want private, individual depth work rather than groups or workbooks, and a place to think about what recovery is actually changing in them.

WHAT SURFACES

What emerges when the substance is gone

• Identity: who you are without the version of yourself that drinking or using made possible

• Relationships: partners, friends and family who knew someone different; rebuilding trust; dating and sex sober

• Feeling without anesthesia: anger, desire, grief, shame and boredom arriving at full volume

• Existential questions: meaning, ambition, aging, and what the years of using were protecting you from

These are not signs that recovery is failing. They are often the material recovery uncovers.

THE APPROACH

We don’t assume what the substance meant. We find out.

Psychoanalytically informed therapy treats drinking and drug use as meaningful: often a solution to a problem before it became a problem of its own. Rather than focusing only on behavior, we look at what the substance made possible, what it kept out of awareness, and what returns in its absence.

That means taking aggression, sexuality, ambition and shame seriously. It means noticing the patterns that repeat in your relationships, including the one in the room, and following the associations, dreams and slips that point to what is hard to say directly. The work is investigative, not just expressive.

In keeping with the name of this practice, we rule things out before drawing conclusions. Is this craving, or loneliness? Withdrawal, or grief? Relapse risk, or a relationship that hasn’t caught up to who you are now? Anxiety that came with sobriety, or anxiety the drinking was covering all along?

WITH OR WITHOUT A PROGRAM

Wherever your recovery is happening

Some people I work with go to meetings, have a sponsor or are working the steps. Others have never been to a meeting, or tried and it didn’t fit. Either way is fine.

If you’re already in AA or another program, therapy can sit alongside it as a private place for what’s harder to bring into a room: ambivalence, resentment, sexual and relational material, and questions about who you’re becoming. If you’re not, nothing about this work requires it.

WHERE YOU ARE NOW

You don’t need to be fully abstinent to begin

Some people arrive with years of sobriety. Others are newly sober, cutting back, or simply noticing that the way they drink or use no longer sits right. You are not required to be fully abstinent to start therapy. We begin with an honest picture of where you are and decide together what the work needs to address.

Sessions are individual and held by secure telehealth for clients in California, New York and Florida.

This is outpatient talk therapy, not detox or medical care. Stopping alcohol or certain drugs suddenly can cause dangerous withdrawal; if that applies to you, speak with a medical provider before stopping. In a crisis, call or text 988.

“The question isn’t only how to stay stopped. It’s who you are now that you have.”

QUESTIONS WORTH SITTING WITH

• What did drinking or using let you feel, say or do that you can’t yet do sober?

• Who were you before it started, and do you want to go back to him?

• What are you still using now that it isn’t a substance: work, sex, your phone, control?

• Which relationships were built around the version of you that used?

If one of these stayed with you, that’s usually where we start.