commitment

I Can’t Believe What I Just Did!—Relapse

“Slowly I began to recognize that many of the boxes I found myself in were boxes of my own making.”— Melodie Beattie

Relapse isn’t a reality for every addict. Yet, for most, it has happened. Once sober you tell yourself ‘never again’ and you mean it. You’ve tasted the sweetness of sobriety and you shake your head wondering how did you ever think acting out was a better life? Yet, it happened! At first, it seemed like it was out of the blue. You had been doing so good. Then it felt like someone pulled the rug out from under you. Cravings hit you like a big Mac truck. It didn’t come out of the blue but it just as well had. You were not prepared nor paying attention to the details of your recovery life and there you were—acting out again!

The taste of acting out is bitter. There are times it makes your mouth dry as cotton. There is a sick feeling in your stomach. Sometimes you wonder how it could possibly have happened. Yet it did. There are cascading self-accusations that rattle in your brain like a machine gun. You feel overwhelmingly down and discouraged. The hangover from acting out leaves you feeling dull with brain fog. You walk through life activities hollow inside feeling dreamlike about the experience. You know you have to tell on yourself but you want to lie and keep it all a secret. How do I ever rebound from such an awful place?

Here are steps back to center that you must consider:

1. Admit the obvious. Addicts learn from their family of origin to embrace the improbable and ignore the obvious. They are great at pretending. When you relapse you must tell on yourself and be accountable to your support group including your partner. This is where you wobble. You can tell people in your 12-step group but my partner?! Are you kidding me? Secrets and dishonesty are breeding grounds for addiction behavior to flourish. Best to tell support people in 12-step recovery before you disclose to your partner so that you don’t minimize what you did in relapse. To do otherwise risks creating a disclosure disaster. Hold your feet to the fire and tell on yourself.

2. Do the next right thing. This is obvious but bears underscoring. The next right thing is to get yourself out of harm’s way. Address vulnerability to continue acting out by reaching out in a 12-step meeting and/or recovery friend. Lay it out in living color exactly what happen. Don’t piecemeal your truth. Let the love and acceptance of the group or support person become a shroud you wear. You have hurt yourself and are wounded. It doesn’t mean that you don’t need to face consequences. It is important that you surround yourself with love, support, and genuine care in the presence of white hot truth-telling.

3. Do an autopsy on your relapse behavior. Once you’re out of harm’s way and surrounded by support, figure out how relapse happened. If you don’t, be prepared to do it again. Examine program neglect: (1) stopped going to meetings: (2) isolated—not telling on yourself to group/sponsor or support; (3) stopped doing the steps because of busyness; (4) procrastinated facing a truth that you don’t want to face; (5) wallowed in shame, resentment, loneliness, anger, hate; (6) marinated in mistaken beliefs that block intimacy and sabotage recovery. Do the work of unpacking how you put yourself in the box that led to your relapse. If you can figure out how you got into the relapse box, you can figure out how to get out.

4. Fortify your commitment to recovery: Once clear about why you acted out, fortify taking the next healing steps. Create filters that will keep you from porn and acting out. Don’t just put a cork in the bottle, get rid of all alcohol in the house. These are examples of next right steps. How many times have I heard addicts confess to relapse with no plan for next right steps. When you fortify your commitment to recovery, next right steps become obvious.

5. Act on positive self-affirmation regardless of how you feel. When you relapse and feel like all hell has broke loose, it’s hard to take yourself by the nape of the neck and pull yourself from the mud hole you created. You can only do this with determination to act on treating yourself as you hope to be. It is painful but you must forgive yourself and let go of the negative feelings that accompany relapse behavior. These steps are always painful. As you act in the way your destiny beckons, the painful shameful messages will fall away in time. You will become congruent merging your behavior to positive beliefs about self.

6. Don’t let the little boy/little girl run your inner life. You cannot expect a small child to figure out addiction. Shame dominates in relapse behavior because we empower the little boy/girl to make adult decisions about recovery. Put in charge, the inner child will conclude that you are a piece of shit who is destined to never get it right so why try. This is because a little child is unable to navigate the narrows of addiction recovery. However, when you take the reins of responsibility and place them in the hands of the powerful adult in you, the results are dramatically different. As an adult, you can face consequences of destructive choices, choose to care for self, and hold your feet to the fire of bringing yourself back to center. It will require the adult-you to fend off the negative shameful messages and to embrace and act on positive affirmations that will fulfill the destiny of sobriety.

Relapse is always found in the box of your own making. Hopefully, these steps will help you step out of the box and take steps toward solid sobriety and deepened serenity.

A 5 Tool Relapse Recovery Plan: Tool #4

Coroners do autopsies when they think it is important to determine the cause of death. Autopsies can be very sophisticated and detailed. They determine the cause of death, the time the individual died, and a host of other specifics that are important. Sometimes performing an autopsy gives resolution and sanity to love ones while they grapple with the unknown. Answers to questions like “What and why did this happen” are often clarified from the results of a thorough autopsy. Science uses autopsy results to assist in the cure of disease. Healthcare workers utilize autopsy results to create protocols to keep others safe from toxic and high-risk infectious diseases. 

Millions of people suffer from the disease of addiction. Admitting that your life is powerless and unmanageable because of your drug of choice is a tough step to take. However, admitting relapse failure after getting into treatment is also difficult. Most addicts who relapse either don’t tell anyone or admit it to support people and try to distance themselves from the painful relapse as quickly as possible.

A lapse autopsy around addictive relapse is crucial to long-term sobriety. Admitting the relapse and moving forward with determination to abstain without insight into the build-up behaviors that triggered relapse is a guarantee to repeating destructive behavior. A lapse autopsy is a powerful tool to identify what happened that created relapse and what needs to change to avoid chronic failure. Consider the following steps toward completing a lapse autopsy. 

  1. Write out or tell someone what happened in complete detail. It is important to turn over every stone of your relapse behavior to help you see clearly what happened. When you minimize and gloss over thoughts and behaviors leading to and engaging in relapse behavior, you will miss what is needed to establish a strong intervention.
  1. Identify environmental influences. The environment you live in makes a big difference toward relapse prevention. Think about the relationship conflicts, stress factors, and physical experiences that contributed to your vulnerability to relapse. Unresolved tension in a partner relationship can trigger mistaken beliefs that lead to relapse. Stress build-up from relational, financial, sexual, physical, and parental struggles all influence the possibility of relapse. Take stock of the environment that encompassed you leading up to and including the time you relapsed. Assess the experience of deprivation that fuels entitlement. What were you deprived of? Were there successes that you experienced that were uncomfortable and triggered undeserving thoughts of self-sabotage? You will need to go slow and carefully examine the environment to learn of its influence toward your relapse.
  1. Examine your thoughts leading up to the time you relapsed. What you think about expands. It is critical to examine the mistaken beliefs that marinated in your mind before acting out. If you tell yourself that you are not enough or that you are a failure etc, then in time you will create the data to support that belief, which will convince you to produce more of the same behavior to support your inner thoughts. This is why it is crucial to be aware of negative cognitions so that you can change your thoughts which will help you change your life. 
  1. Be aware of the progression of thoughts and behaviors that lead you to acting out. When you anticipate someone rejecting you it triggers a victim-posture attitude. A mask is needed to hide your shameful thoughts and you seek to emotionally isolate to avoid the uncomfortable build-up. Fantasy helps you vacate discomfort which eventually triggers inappropriate addictive fantasy. Optimistically you begin to select a strategy to pursue your addiction while grooming yourself and others in ways that enable you to pursue your secret desires. After you relapse you tell yourself that you need to stop and misplace the responsibility for acting out on some person or force outside of your control. You then reconstitute with behaviors that would indicate to others and yourself that you are not the kind of person who would addictively act out. These steps toward relapse can happen as quickly as the snap of a finger. It is necessary to utilize the lapse autopsy to slow your thinking and to be aware of the negative progression of behaviors that gave birth to relapse. 

Map out what you will commit to doing differently to avoid relapse. This includes consideration at every level of activity. Some people think that it is necessary to go back and do all the steps again or to attend 90 meetings in 90 days because of their relapse. Maybe so. However, a lapse autopsy will help you clarify where you got off track so that you can specifically target interventions that will help you return to the space of relapse prevention. 

After you complete your lapse autopsy it is helpful to sit down and review each misstep with your sponsor or support friend and clarify what you will commit to do differently with each misstep. 

The lapse autopsy is necessary to create clarity in the presence of chaotic relapse behavior. It helps to create grounding and bring you back to center to continue your recovery journey. 

Essentially, a lapse autopsy is what every sports team does when they study film from a previous game. This is the way they learn and improve. It is true for businesses that take time for quarterly and yearly reviews. The lapse autopsy has proven to be an excellent tool for long-term sobriety.