The Confusing Relationship with Love
One of the cruelest ironies of recovery is this, many people who crave love the most are also terrified of real intimacy. They’ve survived loneliness, shame, and isolation, but when someone finally gets close, truly close, it feels unbearable. They want connection, but they don’t know how to stay once they find it. They reach for love the way they used to reach for substances, urgently, obsessively, as if it’s oxygen.
But love, real love, isn’t a high. It’s not the rush, the rescue, or the escape. It’s slow, grounding, often uncomfortable. And for people in recovery, those used to extremes, control, and chaos, that kind of love feels unnatural.
This is the paradox of connection in recovery, you can crave closeness while fearing it at the same time. You can want to be seen but panic when someone actually looks. You can talk about honesty, but still hide behind your own self-protection. Because when you’ve built your life around survival, vulnerability feels like danger.
Addiction as a Substitute for Intimacy
Before recovery, addiction often plays the role that love is supposed to. The substance becomes the partner, predictable, comforting, always there. It never judges, never leaves, never asks for emotional truth. It fills the silence, mutes the anxiety, and gives the illusion of connection. When that’s gone, the void it leaves is enormous. Suddenly, you want human connection to fill it. But addiction didn’t just numb your pain, it numbed your ability to relate. You forgot how to trust, how to share, how to need someone without trying to own them.
That’s why many people in early recovery swing between extremes, total isolation or emotional enmeshment. You either shut down completely or fall too hard, too fast. You mistake intensity for intimacy because that’s what you’re used to. You chase connection like a fix, not a feeling.
But love can’t survive in the same conditions that addiction thrived in. It doesn’t live in control or fantasy, it lives in honesty. And that’s what makes it so terrifying.
The Fear of Staying
For the recovering addict, falling in love feels familiar, the rush, the dopamine, the obsessive thinking. It mirrors the high of using. Your brain lights up the same way. You feel chosen, alive, validated. But once that rush fades, when the relationship becomes ordinary, consistent, and calm, panic sets in.
You start to feel trapped, restless, critical. You pick fights or pull away. You tell yourself they’re “not the one,” or that you need “space,” when in truth, you’re just uncomfortable with stability. Love, in its healthy form, lacks the drama your nervous system has been trained to crave.
So you sabotage it, not because you don’t care, but because it feels too real. Too exposed. In addiction, you controlled how much of yourself the world could see. In love, you have no such control. You can’t script how someone sees you, or what they’ll do with what they see. That loss of control can feel like free fall.
Intimacy isn’t for the faint-hearted. It asks you to stand unguarded, and for those who’ve lived behind walls, that can feel like standing in traffic.
When Love Becomes Another Fix
In recovery, the same brain that once chased highs through substances can start chasing them through people. Love addiction looks glamorous from the outside, the romantic gestures, the intensity, the devotion. But beneath it lies the same compulsion that drove you to the bottle or the needle, the need to escape yourself.
You use the relationship to regulate emotions, to avoid loneliness, to quiet the inner noise. You make your partner your new substance. They become the thing you can’t function without.
But dependency isn’t intimacy. Love addiction replaces drugs with dopamine, the rush of texts, the validation of attention, the comfort of belonging. The relationship stops being mutual and becomes medicinal. You’re not building a partnership, you’re building a refuge. And like every refuge built on fear, it eventually collapses. Real intimacy requires two whole people. Love addiction builds from two half-healed ones trying to become whole through each other.
The Fear of Being Known
For most recovering addicts, the idea of being known, truly seen without filters or performance, is terrifying. Addiction was, at its core, a relationship with secrecy. Lies, denial, pretending everything was fine. That pattern doesn’t disappear with sobriety, it just gets quieter. When someone starts to get close, the old instinct kicks in, hide, perform, retreat. You start managing their perception of you, saying what you think they want to hear, downplaying flaws, curating honesty. Because you’ve learned that being known can lead to rejection.
That’s why intimacy feels dangerous. It requires trust, and trust is something you lost, both in others and in yourself. You spent years proving to the world that you couldn’t be trusted. Now, even when you’ve changed, that belief lingers like a scar. True connection begins the moment you stop performing. But for someone used to control, authenticity feels like exposure. And exposure feels like risk. So you run, even when you’re desperate to stay.
The Wounds Beneath the Love
Many people in recovery grew up in environments where love and pain were intertwined, affection that came with conditions, attention that came with chaos. The nervous system learned early that love meant anxiety, not safety. So in adulthood, you unconsciously recreate what’s familiar. You gravitate toward people who trigger the same emotional turbulence you grew up with.
It’s not sabotage, it’s repetition. You’re trying to rewrite the story, to finally “get it right” with someone who resembles the people who once broke you. But you can’t heal old wounds by reopening them. You can’t find safety in the same kind of chaos that hurt you before.
That’s why healing relationships start to feel boring. They lack the intensity your trauma associates with love. But that calm you’re mistaking for dullness is actually security. It’s what healthy connection feels like before your nervous system learns to trust it. Love doesn’t have to hurt to be real. It just has to be safe, and that safety takes practice to believe in.
Intimacy After Numbness
Addiction numbs everything, pain, fear, pleasure. It dulls both the good and the bad. When you get sober, you start feeling again, but feelings don’t come back in moderation. They flood you. Every touch, every word, every emotion hits harder than it should. Love feels overwhelming because you’re still learning to regulate what you feel.
In early recovery, intimacy often triggers old trauma, the fear of being abandoned, judged, or controlled. Physical closeness can activate emotional flashbacks. You’re not reacting to your partner, you’re reacting to the ghosts of the past. That’s why patience is essential, both with yourself and with anyone who loves you. You’re not broken for struggling to connect. You’re relearning something that addiction stole, the ability to be present in connection without needing to escape it.
Intimacy, like sobriety, is a process of learning to stay when everything in you wants to run.
The Myth of “Fixed” People
Many people in recovery believe they need to be fully healed before they can love, that they must reach some imaginary state of perfection before being worthy of intimacy. This belief keeps them isolated. They mistake readiness for worthiness.
But love doesn’t require completion, it requires honesty. You don’t need to have every issue solved, you just need to be willing to face them. Relationships in recovery aren’t about being “fixed.” They’re about being willing to grow together, to communicate instead of retreat, to apologise instead of deflect.
Waiting to be “ready” for love often becomes another form of avoidance. Healing happens in connection, not isolation. You can’t learn trust in theory, you learn it in practice. You can’t heal intimacy wounds alone, you heal them by letting someone get close enough to show you it’s safe this time.
Learning to Love Without Losing Yourself
The key to healthy connection in recovery is balance, learning to love without disappearing into it. Codependence and avoidance are two sides of the same coin, both stem from fear. One clings to control, the other to distance. Both avoid vulnerability. You can’t find intimacy until you stop seeing love as a fix. Love isn’t supposed to complete you, it’s supposed to complement you. When you no longer use people as painkillers, relationships stop being rescues and start being partnerships.
The paradox begins to dissolve when you realise that real intimacy isn’t about being unbreakable, it’s about being honest enough to break open together. You stop chasing highs and start choosing depth. You stop trying to be perfect and start being present.
Choosing Connection
Connection is a risk, but so is isolation. The difference is that one offers healing, the other guarantees stagnation. Learning to connect after addiction is messy. You’ll get triggered. You’ll overthink. You’ll push people away. And sometimes, you’ll reach for love the way you used to reach for escape. But over time, you’ll learn to recognise the difference.
Love rooted in fear says, Don’t leave me. Love rooted in healing says, I’m here. The former comes from panic. The latter comes from peace. And peace is what recovery slowly teaches you, that connection doesn’t have to cost you yourself. That intimacy isn’t a threat. It’s the reward for surviving the loneliness addiction once promised to cure.
