Hi everyone. I’m feeling pretty crappy today. I relapsed yesterday. I’m trying to justify it by telling myself it was a small amount, but a relapse is a relapse.
I’m going to an NA meeting tonight. I need to talk about it in person and get some advice. I just had my two months clean and I blew it by taking hydromorphone yesterday, It was only 4mg but the amount doesn’t matter. It shows that my addiction really was doing push ups in the parking lot and it kicked my butt this time.
I know relapse is a part of recovery, but again, I thought it wouldn’t happen to me. I once read in a Calvin and Hobbes comic after they got robbed the mom said “this is the kind of thing that you think will happen to someone else” and the dad said “we’re all someone else to someone else” and that always stuck with me.
I’m just someone else to most people. And if it can happen to them it can happen to me.
Just wanted to post an update and be honest about what’s going on right now. No point lying about it or trying to hide it.
Great job owning up to it and not giving up I also have struggled with getting over-confident about my sobriety.
I think one of the biggest things I learned in my relapses was that I must keep it green as they say. As soon as I start thinking I have it under control I know I’m in a dangerous place mentally. I need to remember the why I got sober in the first place and how far I have come.
What works for me is staying grateful, saying statements of how grateful I am to not be in the place I was or could have been with my addiction.
“I’m grateful I woke up today and don’t want to drink”
“I’m grateful I’m not in jail”
“I’m grateful I have a working body that hasn’t been destroyed by my addiction”
Staying grateful for the redemption that sobriety has given me. You are still here and trying, you can do this! Prayers for you
I tell myself that because i am in recovery, relapse just isnt an option for me and so whatever life throws at me i have to find another way to deal with it
This is a good one. Relapse is indeed something that happens to many addicts trying to get sober, but that doesn’t mean it is inevitable or something to be taken lightly. Lean hard into your program, and make this the last time .
What’s important is that you learned something and that you’re willing to start over. Your honesty says a lot because at the end of the day, we’re just lying to ourselves. There’s nothing wrong with falling, that doesn’t mean that we have to stay there.
I cannot emphasize this enough. I don’t know where or how it started that we normalized relapse as part of the recovery process, but it sets up the most dangerous justification. Plenty of people stay sober and never relapse.
Plenty of people relapse and die - sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly.
I often say I never had a relapse, even though I was in and out of AA for 18 years before I got sober. I say that because I had always planned to start drinking again at some point. I was hiding out in sobriety, putting on the good boy act for the judge or the boss or the spouse. And in my heart of hearts, I knew I would return to drinking again. This is not the time or place to discuss how it’s different now, but just know that it is. I consider myself permanently sober, and I know now that if I return to drinking, it will be because relapse is part of addiction, and I will have let addiction get ahead of my sobriety. Relapse, indeed even a return to drinking, starts with thought patterns, attitudes if you will, that are disordered. Eventually those attitudes lead to behaviors leading to thoughts leading to feelings leading in a spiral back to behavior, the picking up of the drink.
Relapse is not part of recovery. Never has been, never will be.
I also have struggled with getting over-confident about my sobriety.
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