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In this paper, the author addresses the problem of dissociation and intellectualization – an absence of affective centering – in the context of addiction treatment. In these scenarios, aversion of affect often becomes a way of life, such aversion itself unseen and de-registered even when patients are sober, in Alcoholics Anonymous or other programs. Such emotional “black holes” are difficult to address when they remain in awareness on the part of the analyst but not the patient; this can lead to the former’s potential alienation or frustration, in line with a patient whose longstanding dissociative distancing leaves them confused as to just what the analyst is seeking or asking of them. Here, the notion of disparate language games, a central concept of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, is employed to assist in examining the problem of disjunctive dialogue, with patients who have been discouraged or forbidden from identifying, let alone expressing their emotionality. Affective symbolizing and languaging are foreign tongues, so primal is their reflex to withdraw from or “manage” feeling-states, originating in grossly misattuned surrounds wherein the child’s traumatizations are disregarded and lost to words, and later in dyads. A vignette illustrates how frustration or anxiety emerging in the field can be analytic gold, when participants suddenly sense mutually “charged” moments: outlines of relationality. Here, therapists can disconfirm the intrapsychic nature of patients’ disavowal by modeling and examining their own subjective contributions, an invitation to a two-person world.