Understanding Relapse: Nourishing Attitudes That Help Us Learn from Relapse

Relapse is a common characteristic of the chronic disease of addiction.

All nourishing attitudes and beliefs we may hold about a relapse are grounded in accepting that we suffer from a chronic illness and therefore haven’t failed. We pick ourselves up, learn from our experience, get back on track, and stay sober. So let’s look at some of the attitudes and beliefs to understand a relapse and develop a more solid program of recovery.

A relapse means that I need to be more supportive of myself and my needs in recovery.

A relapse tells us something is missing in the way we are coping with a problem, a feeling, or some other issue that is causing us anxiety or concern. Therefore we need to do something different. Often we need to learn to soothe ourselves instead of turning to alcohol and other drugs to regulate our emotional discomfort. Self-soothing is one of the core skills needed for emotional sobriety. The earlier we focus on emotional sobriety in our recovery journey, the more likely we are to reap its benefits and see it as essential for our long-term well-being.

Why I relapsed isn’t as important as what I do about it.

Focusing on the solution is more important than getting lost in the whys. Too often, why questions send us off looking for someone to blame (which is irrelevant and focuses our energy on the wrong issue), or they point us toward fruitless intellectual searches. When we see relapse as an opportunity to change, we begin to empower ourselves to take responsibility for our choices and come to grips with who we are and what we need. This is what taking responsibility is really about: response-ability, the ability to respond. For example, many of us drink and use partially out of social anxiety, to ease debilitating fears about who we are. If we are unable to find satisfying ways to meet our needs for belonging and acceptance, then we will continue to turn to alcohol and other drugs (or other external solution) to solve a problem that only we can solve.

I may have made a mistake, but I am not “a mistake.”

Relapse is a common characteristic of the chronic disease of addiction.

All nourishing attitudes and beliefs we may hold about a relapse are grounded in accepting that we suffer from a chronic illness and therefore haven’t failed. We pick ourselves up, learn from our experience, get back on track, and stay sober. So let’s look at some of the attitudes and beliefs to understand a relapse and develop a more solid program of recovery.

A relapse means that I need to be more supportive of myself and my needs in recovery.

A relapse tells us something is missing in the way we are coping with a problem, a feeling, or some other issue that is causing us anxiety or concern. Therefore we need to do something different. Often we need to learn to soothe ourselves instead of turning to alcohol and other drugs to regulate our emotional discomfort. Self-soothing is one of the core skills needed for emotional sobriety. The earlier we focus on emotional sobriety in our recovery journey, the more likely we are to reap its benefits and see it as essential for our long-term well-being.

Why I relapsed isn’t as important as what I do about it.

Focusing on the solution is more important than getting lost in the whys. Too often, why questions send us off looking for someone to blame (which is irrelevant and focuses our energy on the wrong issue), or they point us toward fruitless intellectual searches. When we see relapse as an opportunity to change, we begin to empower ourselves to take responsibility for our choices and come to grips with who we are and what we need. This is what taking responsibility is really about: response-ability, the ability to respond. For example, many of us drink and use partially out of social anxiety, to ease debilitating fears about who we are. If we are unable to find satisfying ways to meet our needs for belonging and acceptance, then we will continue to turn to alcohol and other drugs (or other external solution) to solve a problem that only we can solve.

I may have made a mistake, but I am not “a mistake.”

Though in my personal life I am not a religious person, I love the line from a song that says “God don’t make no junk.” If only I could have internalized this attitude early in my life, I’d have been better able to forgive myself for my wrongs and accept the love and support that were available to me. The culprit here is shame, the internalized sense that “I am a mistake.” And shame comes from internalizing an idealized notion of who we should be. How do we come to grips with the power of this notion and get free of this shame? One way is to make the claim explicit. For example, in dealing with my own idealized notion, I had to declare out loud, “I must do everything perfectly,” because that’s exactly what my idealized self believes. Oddly, once I said it, I could hear just how foolish the belief was. This declaration started to set me free. This simple action is related to the paradoxical theory of change discussed earlier. We change when we own what we are doing.

For example, when we quit pretending that we are in control of alcohol and admit that we are powerless, paradoxically, we begin to reclaim our personal power. Similarly, when we quit pretending we’re honest and admit that we lie to suit our wishes, then, paradoxically, we are free to become more honest. We will continue to feel like a “mistake” until we admit our crazy, unrealistic expectation to be perfect. That’s because if you have no room to make a mistake, you’ll end up feeling like a mistake every time you make one.

My relapse doesn’t define me, but what I do about it does.

We are much more than our behavior suggests at any point in time. How we respond to our relapse defines us much more than the relapse itself. Remember, the “problem” is never the problem; the real problem is how we’re dealing with it. The quality of our sobriety is determined by how we interpret and respond to our experience, not by the experience itself. In fact this attitude—that our response to a situation is the most important factor—is the hallmark of emotional sobriety.

As you can see from the theme of these nourishing attitudes, they are based on authenticity and accepting reality as it is. Shame has come up several times in our discussions of both toxic and nourishing attitudes. In my decades of helping people deal with addiction and recovery, time and again I have seen shame sabotage great progress. So let’s turn our attention to a brief discussion of shame, and then I will provide you with a few suggestions to help you unpack a relapse.