Relapse Prevention: What Works (and What Doesn't)
Recovery Tools from Asana Recovery, April 12, 2023
One “old-timer” in a 12-step meeting talked about watching friends in early recovery relapse. After almost 30 years of sobriety, he had a theory about a certain pattern of behavior he’d seen repeated. He called it The I’ve-Got-Too-Much-To-Lose Relapse Prevention Plan.
Most of us have seen or experienced what he’s referring to: Flush with the energy and hope of early recovery, we work like industrious bees in a hive. We get jobs, we earn money, we commit ourselves to family obligations, we become the kind of people that others can depend on, so we take on more responsibilities. Usually, we feel pride and gratitude at having a worthwhile life that we have earned. Six months later, we’re too busy to go to meetings. A year later, we relapse and wonder, “what went wrong?”
While nobody actually decides “I’m going to follow The I’ve-Got-Too-Much-To-Lose Relapse Prevention Plan,” let’s look at what’s really happening - and what would work better for relapse prevention.
A Rewarding Life: It’s Great! And It Takes Time.
Most of us have a significant amount of work to “get our lives back” after our substance use dismantled them. Alternatively, some of us didn’t have much of a life or had lives we weren’t very happy with before addiction. And, now - thanks to the hopefulness of recovery - we set new life goals for ourselves. Repaired and/or more rewarding relationships. Career or educational goals. Financial stability. Maybe pursuing some lost dreams like home ownership or world travel.
We want to take it all on! And, now that we’re sober, we can! As long as we don’t use, we are free to choose our goals and pursue them.
This is wonderful! And, it helps reinforce why we got sober. It certainly wasn’t so that we could stay miserable and isolated.
However, there’s a limited amount of time in the day. Sometimes we feel we have to chose between the recovery work that keeps us sober and the life work that makes recovery worthwhile. And that’s where the trouble arises.
Recovery: It’s Great! And It Takes Effort.
Nobody - or almost nobody - thinks “now that I have a house and a job and got my family back…I can go back to blacking out at the bar and passing out on a stranger’s couch!”
Relapses happen for two reasons usually:
We’re doing so well, we feel like we’re “cured.”
We stop doing the things that kept us sober when we were new and desperate and full of fear. We go out with friends after work instead of taking a newcomer to coffee. We go to PTA and HOA meetings instead of our daily AA meeting. We don’t call our sponsor. We don’t take on new sponsees. We don’t do personal inventory or prayer. The list goes on and on. We usually have good reasons for slacking on our recovery work and, from time to time, that’s valid. But, then days turn into weeks, turn into months of not doing the “daily maintenance” required to treat this disease.
And, contrary to how it might seem, relapses rarely “sneak up” on us. If we’re honest, we can usually see there are advance warnings, symptoms and subterranean shifts that can’t be seen from the outside, but we can notice if we’re vigilant.
Relapse Prevention That Works
Here’s an exercise to help distill what’s working to keep you clean. It’s best to write it down so you can return to it frequently. Also, repeat it at different amounts of recovery time. See if your answers are different at three months sober, or 6 months. Or 12 months.
How much clean time do I have?
What things have I been doing that are working to keep me sober?
Is there anything I could be doing that I think would make a big difference in my recovery efforts? (Remember, none of us is perfect. We all have guilts nagging us about what we could do better, and this question is not meant to make you feel bad, just to gather info.)
Now, look at your list. What’s working now will most likely continue to work - with a little updating and freshening up - at every stage of recovery. So, keep doing it, and see if you can add in one of the items from your answer to number three.
It’s actually very simple, the only way to prevent relapse, is to keep doing the things that keep us sober. Every single day.