Addiction Relapse

I have a friend, her husband is an alcoholic, she has lived in an abusive marriage for years and still loves the man. She almost begged me to go with her to an AA meeting to help her understand her husband. Through counseling, they made a conscience effort to try to take care of the problem. He went to AA meetingsand was doing fine for quite a while. Then recently she started to notice changes in his behavior.

Relapse is a process, it starts with a change in his attitude about recovery, and their thoughts return to the use of alcohol. There are at least three common phases of relapse. Relapse thinking, this is when the person starts thinking about how the alcohol felt, the fun that they had under the influence and they forget about the pain that it casued. The person falling into a relapse is sometimes convinced that the only way to feel better is to go back to using the alcohol. And as with my friends husband, he did not feel that he had a problem to begin with, even though it cost him his marriage and his family.

The second stage of a relapse is a laspe or slip, this is a period of time when the person returns to drinking or taking drugs. A full relapse isn't always the result but it can be if the person fails to return to recovery. And a third phase is a full relapse, this was a period in which he returned to using alcohol.

When we were at the AA meeting we learned some of the signs of relapse, they included depression, loneliness, anger, disappointment, boredom and loss of interest. We also learned that there were outside factors that could cause someone to relapse into alcoholism, outside stressors like financial problems, interpersonal conflicts, and life changes, like a new job, a promotion, an illness or a failure of a marriage.

Also recommended during the AA meeting were steps to help the Alcoholic in his efforts to stay sober, they told us to have him do something active, taking a walk, going jogging, cleaning a house or garage. They told us if the person was religious, then to offer them prayer or meditation. They also said that he should have made a list of reasons why they wanted to get sober and the list should have been kept in his wallet for him to look at when he felt the need to return to alcohol. The folks at AA also said that there were other methods that he could use, he could do something creative like drawing or writing, painting or playing music. They told my friend that it was not her fault that he fell back to his old ways and that she could be supportive but not to feel blame on herself.

During the meeting they also told her that victims of alcoholism should try to change their lives themselves, get away from and break ties of other users. Avoid parties or places where people will be using and to get rid of objects that reminded them of their addiction. All in all they told her to try to comminicate and talk to her husband, and if he could not help himself not to blame herself for his actions.