The Work Follows Me (But in a Good Way!)

I never expected to become a recovery coach. 

Maybe more accurately, I never expected that becoming a recovery coach would have so much to do with my own recovery. 

I came into this work from a pretty stable place. I wasn't looking for other people's experiences to fix me, and I didn't become a recovery coach because I thought helping someone else would heal whatever was unfinished in me, or because I needed to provide some sort of testimony or “give back.” I felt steady enough to sit beside people while they worked through their own stuff without needing their recovery to do something for mine. 

Recovery coach training gave names and structure to things I thought I already understood: mutuality, curiosity instead of fixing, intentional self-disclosure, letting someone remain the expert on their own life. 

Then I started actually doing the work. 

Recovery coaching asks me to show up as a person, not as an expert standing on one side of a problem. I listen to people make sense of themselves. I ask questions. I get curious about the things they believe about themselves and where those beliefs came from. Sometimes I share pieces of my own experience when they're useful. We talk about fear, shame, identity, relationships, boundaries, change, and all the weird ways we learn to survive things. 

And apparently, if you spend enough time asking other people thoughtful questions about why they do the things they do, eventually your brain starts asking them back. 

Rude, honestly. 

I've found myself doing a lot more internal work since becoming a recovery coach. Not intentionally, at first. I just started noticing things. 

Why do I react that way? 

Why does that particular thing make me feel threatened? 

Do I really believe this about myself, or have I just believed it for so long that it feels like a fact? 

There are parts of us that we build for a reason. Ways of thinking, reacting, protecting ourselves, keeping people at a particular distance, staying in control. They can become so integrated into who we are that we stop recognizing them as adaptations. 

They're just me. 

Until suddenly one of them isn't. 

Or maybe you realize it doesn't need to be anymore, and that possibility is actually kind of terrifying. 

The other day, I had one of those moments. 

I wasn't just understanding myself better. I was changing my relationship with a part of myself that had been there for a very long time. 

It wasn't even new material. These were things I'd talked about in therapeutic settings, things I'd unpacked with people close to me, things I thought I understood pretty well. 

Apparently, understanding something and changing your relationship to it are not the same thing. 

My nervous system was not interested in celebrating this breakthrough. 

It panicked. 

You can be ready for something and still be scared by it. You can choose growth and then have some deeply embedded part of you yell, “Absolutely not, we have a SYSTEM. Don't mess with it now!” 

I know how to sit with that when it belongs to somebody else. 

Talking with other people about their stuff has made it easier to talk to myself about mine. I've practiced curiosity so many times with other people that I'm getting better at extending it inward. 

I've also watched people say things out loud that they have carried silently for years and seen what can happen when another person doesn't flinch. 

Every time someone says, “I actually have never said this out loud, but…” I feel genuinely honored. 

And I understand the relief in it more than I used to. 

There are things I have historically been perfectly content to process alone. I can analyze myself. I can intellectualize with the best of them. I can identify a pattern, figure out where it came from, build a lovely little conceptual framework around it, and call that processing. 

Recovery coaching has made it harder for me to pretend that's always the same thing as healing. 

Because I keep witnessing what happens between people. 

Not when one person fixes another. Not when someone has the perfect advice. 

Just when one person gets to say, This is what's happening inside me, and another person stays present. 

Their story still belongs to them. Their growth belongs to them. Mutuality doesn't mean making someone else's recovery about me. It means I don't stop being a person simply because I'm the one sitting in the coaching seat. 

So I notice things. I learn things. Sometimes I recognize myself in a feeling even when the circumstances are completely different. Sometimes a question I ask someone else hangs around long enough that I eventually have to answer it too. 

And sometimes I accidentally dismantle an internal coping mechanism and give myself a panic attack. 

I still don't know exactly what my own healing will look like from here. I do know I'm more open than I used to be to the possibility that I don't have to do all of it privately. 

I thought I was learning how to sit with other people while they figured things out. I didn't realize I was also practicing a way of being that I would eventually turn back toward myself. 

The questions come home with me. The curiosity does too. 

Which, in hindsight, feels like something somebody could have warned me about. 

The work follows me. 

Turns out I don't mind. 

Interested in Becoming a Recovery Coach?

Join us for an upcoming Recovery Coach Academy© - CCAR’s signature 5-day training for people who want to support others in or seeking recovery from addiction.

This immersive training introduces the core skills of recovery coaching, including how to build trust, listen with intention, support without taking over, and walk alongside people as they define recovery for themselves.

Recognized across the United States and beyond, Recovery Coach Academy© helps prepare participants to serve as peer recovery coaches in a variety of community, treatment, healthcare, and justice-related settings.