Gately on Boston AA — "They neglect to tell you that…"
They neglect to tell you that after the urge to get high magically vanishes and you’ve been Substanceless for maybe six or eight months, you’ll begin to start to ‘Get In Touch’ with why it was that you used Substances in the first place. You’ll start to feel why it was you got dependent on what was, when you get right down to it, an anesthetic. ‘Getting In Touch With Your Feelings’ is another quilted-sampler-type cliché that ends up masking something ghastly deep and real, it turns out.
Context
The doctrinal setup for the reexperience passage: AA's omitted clause, in the second person. The Substance is renamed an anesthetic — which makes memory the wound it was numbing — and the sampler-cliché gets scare quotes the rest of the scene capitalizes into a technical term. Forgetting was the addiction's product; remembering is the bill.