People often find their distress increases when they begin working the 12 Steps, because recovery uncovers the pain the addictive behavior was managing. This phase is common and it is temporary. Pairing step work with trauma-informed therapy helps people process what surfaces rather than relapse on it.
Uncover, discard, discover, heal
The 12 Steps are used by AA, SA, and many other fellowships as guiding principles for recovering from compulsive and addictive behavior and restoring some manageability to life.
Step work is often summarized as a simple pattern: uncover, discard, discover, heal. It sounds straightforward enough.
What most people actually find, once they start working the Steps in earnest and engaging in other healing activities, is that more pain seems to arrive rather than less. Sobriety can become harder to hold. Many people are genuinely bewildered by this — they did the right thing and things got worse.
It is worth understanding why that happens, because a lot of people quit at exactly this point.
Why does the pain increase?
Recovery is a major undertaking, and it asks for consistency over a long stretch of time. But the specific reason for the early increase in distress has to do with what the behavior was doing in the first place.
Compulsive behavior very often develops around pain that was pushed down and left there — hurts that a person had no capacity to process at the time, usually because they were young or had no one to help them. Those hurts do not disappear. They callous over. Walls get built so the person does not have to encounter them daily.
Trauma, though, tends toward release. It wants out. And in the absence of any other way to handle it, the addictive behavior becomes the way it gets managed — which soothes the surface and deepens the underlying problem at the same time.
Which means that when you take the behavior away and begin looking honestly at your own history, the walls come down. What was behind them arrives, and it frequently arrives with more force than it had when it was first buried.
What that phase actually looks like
It rarely arrives as sadness. More often it comes as eruption — anger, rage, resentment, frustration that seems disproportionate to whatever triggered it.
For someone who has never learned to sit with strong emotion, this is dangerous ground. It is where relapse tends to cluster, sometimes for months, occasionally for years. Not because the person lacks commitment, but because they are being handed feelings they have no tools for and no prior experience surviving.
This is the honest reason the early phase is so hard: you are being asked to feel things you organized your entire life around not feeling, before you have learned how.
What gets you through it
Two things, mainly, and neither is willpower.
The first is other people. Most of us spent years convinced this was ours to handle alone, and that conviction is part of the problem rather than a strength. Working the Steps in company — with a sponsor, in a group, in a fellowship — means learning that you can move through difficult emotion while being loved and valued at the same time. For many people that is a genuinely new experience, and it is the mechanism doing the work.
The second is trauma-informed treatment alongside the step work. The Steps are extraordinarily good at uncovering what is there. They are not designed to treat trauma, and they do not claim to be. When step work surfaces something significant, a therapist trained in trauma can help you process it rather than simply endure it. In practice this often means EMDR or Brainspotting alongside ongoing group and step work.
It does end
This is the part worth holding onto during the months when it does not feel true.
The initial phase of healing hurts, and it is temporary. People who keep at it consistently — using the tools, staying connected, not doing it alone — generally find that the eruptive feelings give way. What tends to replace them is described in remarkably similar terms by people who have been through it: serenity, peace, and something that eventually resembles joy.
Not everyone's timeline looks the same, and nobody can promise you a particular one. But the pattern is common enough that it is worth knowing about in advance, because the people most likely to quit are the ones who thought the increase in pain meant they were doing it wrong.
If you are in that stretch right now, or approaching it, you do not have to navigate it without help. Our CSAT-trained therapists work alongside step programs in Orem, Murray, and online across Utah. Start with a free 30-minute consultation: 801.272.3420, text 801.997.8760, or book online.
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Learn more: Sex & Porn Addiction Therapy.
