Relapse

So you just had a relapse, what now?

Relapses can be very risky. They have the potential to spiral you down deeper pits of despair. But whether they do or not depends on your current relationship with the habit, and what stage you’re at.

At first you’re prone to fooling yourself and exaggerating, in every direction. When you relapse, you go hard. When you’re done, you blame yourself and feel tremendous guilt. Whether, if judged from outside, that guilt would be deserved is irrelevant. Maybe it is, but what that person looking from the outside doesn’t know, couldn’t know, is that those emotions, deserved or not, keep you on the loop. We need to circumvent them and diminish them if we want to succeed, and thus not engage in the action that causes this grief to be born again.

At any stage that you’re at here’s my advice: be very observant and be impartial. With time your assessment of what will happen after a relapse will be more and more accurate. The point is to realize that the strong resolve not to let it take over your whole life again, that comes hand in hand with the guilt, is a theatrical knee-jerk response to the distaste that we feel. But most of the time it doesn’t map out into reality. It doesn’t matter how “it should be”, we must scientifically and impartially look at how it unfolds itself. When we relapse, do we tend to fall right back into it for entire months? Weeks? Are the relapses themselves occurring less frequently? Is there more time in between relapses?

All of these are data points that make themselves known only when you look at the big picture. And it is important to look at the big picture to pick up on the subtle more often.

At some point, the ratio of days when you partake, and days when you abstain, will be reversed. That is to say, you might have 2 weeks of freedom and one day of relapse.

Before you reach that point you’ll have perhaps a week of freedom, followed by a relapse, after which you know that the next day, and possibly the one after that, you won’t be able to resist again. You also know that no matter how strongly you wish it wasn’t so, it happens. Observe this clearly, and the difference between knowing and wishing, because at some point you’ll be able to know that after a relapse you won’t have more days in a row. That is to say, your relapses will be reduced to that one instance, instead of being day long binges. And it is important to recognize this knowing, for it will guide you, it is a much more consistent guide than wishing.

Wishing will lead you astray and let go of your hand very quickly. Knowing will stay by your side so long as you keep it present in your mind.

Once you can line up your expectations with the reality of what happens, the real work begins. You are ready to accept the fact that this can be overcome, that you can live without it.

Addiction is a cage, we’re trapped. At first we try really hard and we might find a tunnel that goes up, out of the cell. We begin to climb it and just when we’re out, we fall all the way down, hitting ourselves hard. We give up on the idea of escaping.

This is what relapses are like at the beginning.

Then one day we realize that all this time, all along the door was unlocked. We can simply walk out. And we do it. Relapsing at this stage is like willingly coming back into the cell, perhaps for nostalgia’s sake, perhaps because we happen to be nearby, or because fear has made us shrink into the familiar. Whichever the case, at this point we must look around us and realize we no longer want to be in that cell, and walk out again.

We know that it is there. We know we could walk into it at any time, and walk out again. But what for? Learn to live with the fact that you have access to it, but that in the process you’re shackling yourself.