In the midst of a relapse, it can be hard to live a “normal” life, let alone come to therapy or go to meetings. Finding our way back to therapists, sponsors, higher powers, and the concern of friends and family, however, will help us find our way back to quitting again. Calling a halt to the relapse and returning to a sober way of life demands not only action but also understanding. It is as if the relapse is not over until we have discovered its prompt and its sought-after reward. What was it that called us back to using that substance again after years of doing without?

To look beneath the behavior of drinking or using, we need to understand its intention and desired reward. What was it about that experience that we wanted to relive or those feelings we wanted to feel again? Typical responses to these questions include: to escape reality, to feel a rush, to really relax, to bond with friends and lovers, to lose inhibitions, to feel sexy, to deaden painful or uncomfortable feelings, to turn off the thinking head for a while, to alleviate boredom, to enhance pleasure, and so on. There are a million more.
As we explore the motives for falling back into an old behavior that we thought we had conquered, nuanced patterns can now emerge that were not so apparent at an earlier stage of our struggle to quit. This is the time to revisit our old answers and update them. Are there new feelings and situations that trigger a desire to escape? a need for a boost? etc. Where did we learn that by ingesting a substance—be it food, drink, smoke, or chemical—we could fix a situation and make ourselves feel better?

In the midst of a relapse, asking these questions opens the door for ending the relapse. In fact, the answers to these questions are not even necessary in order to crack the spell of the relapse. (The answers would be nice, mind you, and certainly will be helpful in the future.) Just asking these questions can force another level of thinking, and possibly guilt, but enough upset to call an end to the relapse. Upset can be a good thing. Ending relapse means the choice for a return to self-control. And self-control leads down the path to self-discipline.
To many people, self-discipline is negative compound word, its two halves seemingly warring with each other. To them, self-discipline implies pain, boredom, and stricture. Self-discipline, however, is only the practice of consistency, with the understanding that making yourself stick to your word to yourself is of immense value in itself. Self-discipline allows you to get the job done. Self-discipline may even include an incentive/disincentive system to keep things functioning. The acceptance of the need to control ourselves at times, to say “no” to ourselves at times and be consistent about it, is one of our earliest childhood teachings.

Self-control is usually taught to children in the context of getting along with others. Some of us, however, misread the lesson and conclude that when we are alone, self-control can be jettisoned. And, of course, the relapse itself proved just the opposite. With the help of others and some self-control, we can rejoin the living and benefit from the practice of a much feared but highly productive behavior, self-discipline

Photo by Jesse Bowser on Unsplash

Biochemical Addiction

Clients first deal with the biochemical addiction. When you’ve trained your brain to expect gargantuan doses of dopamine, you can be damn sure it’s going to be calling out to be fed when it feels hungry. Welcome to withdrawal! For those who have linked up crystal meth—a strong stimulant—with sexual release, the expectations of an orgiastic, sexual feast of a lifestyle have become normalized, and clients fear that life without crystal meth will be incredibly dull. Welcome to retraining the mind back to normal, human levels of excitement and sexual activity, including even (o horror!) periods of no sex!

Behavioral Addiction

Later, clients deal with their behavioral addiction. How to deal with life? Feel bad? Get high. Feel lonely? Get high. Feel horny? Get high. Crystal meth becomes the coping method of choice when dealing with life’s little (or big) unpleasantnesses. Unfortunately, while they were out there partying, the problems that were causing those nasty feelings were only getting worse and worse, and my clients’ avoidance of them, together with their muddled thinking when they did look at them, made them all the worse still. Do my clients have the emotional strength to deal with their issues without this avoidance mechanism? Not without a great deal of help from friends, family, therapists, sponsors, mentors, and entire communities. Addiction to crystal meth is an isolating process in the end, and many addicts have been so far removed from “normal society” that they have given up any hope of ever reentering it.

Belonging to Community

For many of us, “normal society” was never that much of a draw to begin with. For boys and men who have been traumatized or who feel “othered,” drugs provided a welcome relief to the painful and rejecting world. All this is well-trodden ground in the gay recovery community. So how do we provide hope? In therapy we try to help addicts change their perspective, stand back and look at life from a meta point of view, and examine their choices in terms of lifestyle and sense of purpose and belonging. Therapy alone isn’t a cure for addiction, but it helps clients see where the light might be, way down there at the end of the tunnel. And having sight of that is one more tool in fighting the good fight.

David Bowman LMFT is a licensed psychotherapist based in Los Angeles, California.

Photo credit: Nik Shuliahin UNSPLASH

Of course, in the throes of our relapse, it’s hard to keep appointments, let alone come to therapy or meetings. But if we can, hopefully together with our therapists, sponsors, higher powers, and/or the concern of friends and family, we will find our way back to quitting again, or rather, calling a halt to the relapse and returning to the sober way of life of our past few years. Here is where the psychotherapist goes to work: If we assume the cellular addiction in our body and brain chemistry has been extinguished by now, what was it that called us back to using that substance again after years of doing without? What was it about that experience that we wanted to relive?

Typical responses to this prompt include, to get high, to feel a rush, to feel relaxed, to bond with friends and lovers, to lose inhibitions, to feel sexy, to deaden painful or uncomfortable feelings, to turn off the thinking head for a while, to alleviate boredom, to enhance pleasure, and so on. You can come up with many more, I’m sure. As we explore these motives for drinking and using, old patterns can now emerge that were possibly not so apparent at an earlier stage of our struggle to quit. Now is the time to ask yourself, are there certain feelings and situations that trigger a desire for escape? Did someone once teach me that by ingesting a substance—be it food, drink, smoke, or chemical—I could fix the situation and make myself feel better? This can be a very old lesson indeed.

Even if none of these seem to apply to you, think about the simple fact that since prehistoric times, humans have always needed to escape reality for a while. Whether they made beer and wine, ingested herbs, danced around a campfire until they fell into a trance, found love and sex with others, created artwork, sang or made music, or just meditated in nature, these were all ways of escaping reality for a time. While the urge to escape is perhaps built into our psyches, the decision for a healthy escape versus a self-destructive escape is another thing. In fact, I’m convinced that for many sober people, the three-year or five-year relapse is due to this very reason: while we have paid attention to getting the substance out of our lives, we have not paid attention to the needs of the prehistoric human inside.

Remember that we can stay sober from our drug of choice and still find ways to get high. So sing, dance, make art, work out, run, meditate, recite poetry, do yoga—whatever is needed to keep your sanity without having to fall back into the trap of dangerous substances again.

David Bowman LMFT is a licensed psychotherapist based in Los Angeles, California.

Photo credit: Xan Griffin UNSPLASH