Our Team

I’m Noelle Williams, a Licensed Mental Health Counselor and the Clinical Director of Recovery Bay Center. Most importantly, I am a grateful and recovering alcoholic happily married to the love of my life and mother of two handsome boys. There is no shortage of autobiographical stories that describe the horrors of addiction, many of which also depict people’s journeys into recovery. I grew up in a family with loving and caring parents, along with being given a wide range of advantages throughout my life. There was no horrific or overt abuse, but emotional wounds inflicted by hurtful messages, bullying, and ongoing criticism that created an accumulation of low-level traumas. My injuries may not have been visible on the outside but most often they were internal and hidden. Over time and beginning in my mid-twenties, I began to deal with the pain of my wounds, as well as other life stressors, through the use of alcohol. Ironically, while my addiction was active, my education and professional experience obstructed my ability to see it for what it was, to admit to it, and seek help despite mounting personal and professional consequence. Ultimately the damage to the most important areas of my life gifted me with enough clarity to admit that my addiction was well beyond my ability to control it, and I needed treatment.

My personal recovery has enriched my professional knowledge, and my professional frame of reference has in turn deepened my understanding of recovery as an ongoing process of learning, growth, and healing. To change how I relate to myself, to others, and to the world was an extraordinary undertaking, requiring no small amount of mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual renovation. It is my firm belief there are multiple pathways to recovery, and because addiction is a disorder of increasing isolation, the antidote for me was and is abstinence, an essential component of my success. I now have a healthy mutually supportive connection—with others and restored interpersonal relationships with those who love and care about me. My mission for those in treatment at Recovery Bay Center is for individuals to come to an understanding that recovery is not just a possibility, but the opportunity for a homecoming to one’s true self.