8 years wow!
I slipped two weeks ago after 3 years. Shows if you don’t work the tools you used to get sober it can creep in and hit ye before ye know it.
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I just talked with a friend today who went back out after over 10 years because he wasn’t working his program. He had some troubles come up and didn’t use his tools. Instead he used all his Covid relief money to buy drugs
Covid relief money?
That’s awful mate. Very scary shit. I’m trying to see my slip as a blessing. Nothing really bad happened and it taught me a very important lesson.
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That’s the key no matter how many days/months/years. You can have a great toolbox but it’s just shit if you don’t open it up.
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Once an addict always an addict.
Doesn’t mean you have to act and think like an active using addict.
You can still be an addict and just not using (a more “dry” approach to sobriety). Or you can be an addict in recovery, which is finding ways to change.
Finding new relationships with our addictive self, finding new ways of seeing this as a disease or just a past self, or seeing ourself as in control, etc., those are ways to recover.
But recovery last forever, because under all those plan we have, the program we follow and the mottos we creates, there’s the potentiality of loosing it all to the addiction.
Of course if we don’t drink we won’t wreck ourselves and total our car on a Monday’s evening. But there’s a part of ourselves that have this potentiality. We just work to build up new pathways to change to make sure we chat on Monday night Talking Sober threads instead.
I stand by the medical terminology for this: once we’re in a substance abuse disorder, there is active using, early remission or sustained remission/recovery. There’s no “ancient self addict”. There’s just sustained recovery.
So for me the phrasing isn’t wrong , it’s just incomplete.
Once an addict, always an addict, who, if in recovery, has learned to deal with this shit.
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