Why Do I Keep Relapsing? What a Decade of "Field Research" Finally Taught Me

Why The Hell Do I Keep Relapsing?

Let me tell you about the eight years I spent in the first step. Not stuck there, exactly, because stuck implies you're trying to move and something's blocking you. I wasn't blocked. I just hadn't fully arrived at the level of concession required to actually mean it when I said I was done, and I didn't know that until I finally did. So I went back out. Over and over again, each time absolutely convinced it was the last time I'd ever drink or use, each time collecting a new data point I didn't yet know I needed. Eventually, I had enough of them to understand what I was actually dealing with: an unmanageable addiction that was always stronger, faster, smarter, and exactly one step ahead of me.

And oh boy did I try to control it! First I removed hard liquor and limited myself to beer and wine only. Then just beer, but I didn't like the bloat, so then just wine. I tried wine every other day, then wine just on Wednesdays, but neither cadence produced the controlled drinking experience I was looking for. So I opened the floodgates to alcohol of all varieties again, but with a new caveat: I would consume said alcohol only while camping, because surely the fresh air and the trees made it a fundamentally different category of thing! I couldn't be an addict in nature, right? Fail.

Then came my moderation attempts with ecstasy, a highly revered drug I had always quickly lost control with from a very young age. I made the conscious decision to reintroduce it into the mix, but with a very important and highly sophisticated condition: I would consume only when sleeping outside of my residential zip code. I was absolutely certain my addiction would agree to honor geographical boundaries, and I would be the genius to figure that out.

Ecstasy naturally led back to cocaine, which subsequently led to some disrupted sleep patterns, so I was left with no choice but to bring my beautiful and beloved benzos back down from the shelf. The idea was to consume them strictly and exclusively to facilitate a manageable comedown, while serving as a health-conscious sleep aid. This is really just responsible harm reduction if you think about it.

And then there's my personal favorite, the crown jewel of my entire scientific career, the moment I made the stunning intellectual breakthrough that drugs were actually manageable, and it was alcohol, in any quantity, that had been creating problems for me all this time! More specifically, it was red wine, not the meth I was consuming daily when I made this discovery.

My solution? Replace wine with meth altogether. My new definition of sober.

And I knew I would navigate this with great health and success so long as I could just stay away from the problematic wine during the comedown and accompanying psychoses. I even added an additional safety net (because I am nothing if not thorough) and moved my alcohol-free meth binging to a biweekly, weekend-only cadence, because the every-other-weekend version of anything sounds so profoundly reasonable, until it doesn't.

What followed within only a few short weeks of this last moderation experiment was the most out of control I had ever been in my entire life. Pure hell. A multi-month 24/7 blurry binge of meth and alcohol with no separation, no cadence, no safety net, no rules left to break. Every last boundary I had drawn for myself dissolved completely, and I was finally, and undeniably, out of ideas.

I half-heartedly attempted, then swiftly abandoned, more perfect formulas than I could possibly count. Each one was constructed with the full confidence of someone who was on the verge of cracking the perfect code. I tweaked every possible variable and searched relentlessly for the exact configuration of substances and environmental conditions that would allow me to keep using manageably without becoming the version of myself I was trying to escape.

I now know with every fiber of my being that no such configuration exists, that I was out there performing elaborate laboratory experiments on my own precious life, at the dire expense of my mind, body and soul. With the exception of crack and heroin (thank G-d), I quite literally had to bottom out on every single drug and variety of alcohol to produce the levels of pain and desperation that real change requires.

I had to fail at every single wacky and unhinged set of rules in this years-long experiment, before I could finally concede to my innermost self that the drugs were never the problem. I was, I always had been. And I was done. So FUCKING done. Not done with this substance or that one, not done with this formula or the next, but done with fighting an addiction that had beaten me, cleanly and completely, every single time.

So yes, I'm what some people would have called a chronic relapser. I however prefer to think of it as being a very thorough researcher who needed an unusually large sample size before drawing conclusions. Every single time I went back out, I came back with a new seed of understanding I didn't have before, and those seeds eventually germinated into a garden of earth-shattering awareness that I couldn't turn off no matter how badly I tried. That awareness of my own truth is what made the difference. Not willpower. Not consequences. Understanding and awareness.

What Relapse Actually Means, And What It Doesn't

And that awareness, compounded over six and a half years in sobriety, is also what has shown me how badly we've been misusing the word relapse. Collectively and carelessly, in ways that are doing real damage while contributing to a recovery industry with a vested financial interest in keeping us cycling. Keeping us sick.

Relapse is so thoroughly woven into the dominant recovery discourse that it functions almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy, and a particularly insidious one at that. In recovery rooms, they'll tell you things like "your addiction is secretly doing pushups in the corner," and "you'll pick up exactly where you left off." They suggest that while you're out here building your life, getting clear, doing the work, your addiction is quietly training, getting stronger, waiting to attack. And when it finally strikes, it'll pick up exactly where it left off, immediately progressing the moment you use after any period of abstinence. It's presented as fact. As wisdom, even. And it's ridiculous unhelpful.

What this narrative actually does is hand you a monster to believe in. And the subconscious mind is extraordinarily good at honoring its beliefs. Hear something enough times, believe it hard enough, and you will absolutely find a way to make it true.

If you got sober for four days, white-knuckled it through a long weekend, and then drank on Monday, I'm not calling that a relapse, and neither should you. I'm calling that abstinence-ending. That's a different thing entirely, and conflating the two is part of why so many people in early recovery carry around a level of shame around a slip that simply isn't proportionate to what actually happened. You stumbled. That's it.

My own personal working definition of a relapse requires a couple of very specific things to be in place first:

1. I believe you have to have worked some kind of program, whether that's a traditional twelve-step path, a relationship with a therapist, a coaching container, any form of structured outside support that is actively addressing the emotional architecture underneath the using. Something has to have physically changed in your life, real actions taken, not just intentions held and promptly forgotten.
   

2. And I believe you have to have maintained at least thirty days of complete sobriety before the return to use can honestly be called a relapse. For me, a month has always been the minimum threshold for any sort of real behavioral change. A month means something was genuinely built and then dismantled. I know I'll catch heat for this, and I don't give a shit.

Until those two conditions are met, I think you're just slipping up, learning a tremendous amount along the way, collecting new data points with each fumble. A relapse is a BIG fucking deal. Ending abstinence after two weeks is not. Sorry, dude. It's completely normal to go in and out, to play around with what stringing 24 hours together actually feels like, then two days, then two weeks. Call it a slip. Call it a mishap. Call it a new data point. Just don't call it a relapse, because the weight of that word will flatten you before you've even had a real chance to build something worth protecting.

I also want to be abundantly clear that my own working definition has zero medical or clinical backing whatsoever, and was formed entirely within my own psyche over years spent in the trenches of my own addiction. But I knew, every single time I hit a month, that I had a real fighting chance at everlasting change. By the month mark, pure abstinence had begun producing genuine cognitive shifts, the kind that viscerally felt different from anything the first couple weeks had offered. And I hit that month mark 5 times before I finally meant it.

Abstinence, by the way, is not recovery. Willpower is not a program. And white-knuckling your way through ten days without picking up and then picking up is not a relapse. It's just the natural conclusion of an approach that was never going to hold, because it was never actually treating anything. Or you just simply weren't ready! And that's more than okay. This isn't a judgment, but rather a distinction that matters enormously for how you understand your own 'I'm getting sober' story, and how much shame you decide to carry around it.

I also want to challenge one more thing here, the idea that we must perpetually live inside an identity of 'I'm in recovery.' If I'm still introducing myself as recovering addict or alcoholic, six and a half years after getting sober, we might have a problem. There is a difference between recovering and being recovered, and I think we've been so afraid to claim the latter that we've kept ourselves tethered to an identity that was only ever meant to be temporary.

Now, I want to be sensitive and inclusive here, because I understand that for some people, the consequences of active addiction are still very much alive, whether that's financial wreckage still being rebuilt, legal situations still being navigated, or relationships still being repaired. If that's you, I get it, and that recovery is very real, and ongoing. But that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking specifically about the active, all-consuming, life-swallowing addiction to substances. I consider myself completely recovered from that, without a single doubt in mind. The addiction complex, however, such as the patterns of thinking, the compulsions, obsessiveness, the intrusive thoughts, those are things I believe I will always contend with to some degree. But the actual substance addiction? I've closed the book on that.

What I'm doing now isn't recovering. It's growing. It's transforming. It's the ongoing, beautiful, occasionally maddening process of self-individuation, of excavating and rebuilding the parts of myself that addiction buried, and becoming someone I actually want to be. That's not recovery. That's just living. That's just being a human, ex-addict or not.

Lapse vs. Relapse: A Distinction Worth Considering

And while we're dismantling constructs and rewriting language, there's another framework I want to introduce, one the broader recovery world is badly missing, borrowed from an unlikely place: eating disorder recovery. Some treatment pathways in that world make a clear and deliberate distinction between a lapse and a relapse, and I think it's one of the most useful ideas I've ever encountered.

A LAPSE is defined as a single incident, or even a few isolated episodes of disordered behavior, a data point rather than a verdict.

A RELAPSE, on the other hand, is something far more sustained, typically defined as two consecutive weeks of returning to consistent old patterns, the full reactivation of the disorder rather than a momentary slip.

Two very different things, carrying very different implications for what you do next. I love this school of thought so damn much, and although I don't plan to consume another mind-altering substance ever again, I know this framework has the potential to save my life if I ever do. It's a paradigm shift that deserves a much bigger conversation.

I'm not a clinician and I'm not presenting this as medical guidance, but I find this distinction genuinely lifesaving for people in early recovery who are drowning in shame after a single use and interpreting it as proof that they can't do this. It's perhaps even more critical for someone who has slipped after years of sustained sobriety, because that's exactly the when the all-or-nothing mind kicks back in with full force. And most of us are masters of all-or-nothing thinking, the 'well, I've already had one beer so I might as well drink the entire fucking case' spiral is a mindset we know intimately and don't need much of an invitation to enter.

The lapse framework can be the direct intervention that interrupts that spiral before it becomes something much harder to climb out of. The word relapse carries enormous weight. It sounds like starting over, like failure, like evidence of something irreparably broken.

Lapse is softer, more accurate for a lot of situations, and leaves room for the possibility that you're collecting data rather than collapsing. If you can hold that frame, even briefly, you might be able to stay curious about what happened instead of immediately disappearing into full-on self-destruction.

This all matters so damn much because shame is the fastest route back to using, a direct portal to the addictedSelf, a concept I'll expand on in a future blog. From what I have seen, when a lapse becomes a relapse, it's often not because the lapse itself was necessarily insurmountable, but because the shame response was so overwhelming that using again felt inevitable, or perhaps even deserved. How you talk to yourself in the hours and days after a slip is not a minor detail. It might be the most important variable in what comes next.

Relapse as Reservation: What Your Using Is Actually Telling You

And if shame is the portal back to using, reservations are the door it walks through. Something I came to understand only after years of cycling was that every lapse and relapse is connected to a reservation that hasn't yet been fully busted and surrendered.

A reservation is exactly what it sounds like, a part of you that's quietly holding on just in case, keeping the option open, maintaining just enough doubt about your commitment to sobriety that when the right conditions arrive, the door swings open.

You can be 95% committed, but you bet your ass the doubtful you living in the remaining 5% is who will show up out of the blue to run the show when you're exhausted, grieving, lonely, sexually frustrated, or sitting at a family dinner that makes you want to jump out of your own skin.

My reservations were specific, and I held onto them for years longer than I'd like to admit. I was convinced I wouldn't survive the death of my mom sober, that grief on that scale would require something to help me survive, that I'd simply come apart at the seams.

I was terrified I'd never find love without substances lowering the threshold enough to let someone actually in, that I'd sit across from someone beautiful at dinner, stone cold sober, and have nothing but my own unmedicated anxiety to offer.

I genuinely mourned the idea of never sharing a glass of wine with someone while traveling, or on a date, as if that specific ritual was the only thing standing between me and real intimacy.

I held a reservation for the ephemeral perfect formula discussed in the first section of this blog, truly believing I just hadn't discovered it yet.

I worried I wouldn't know how to make friends, how to walk into a room and belong somewhere without something in my system convincing me I was enough, or wasn't too much.

And underneath all of it was the reservation I held most tightly and let go of last: I didn't trust my own brain. My natural, baseline psychiatric states felt unpredictable, dangerous even. If I was too up or activated I knew exactly what to take to bring me down. If I was in the slums, I knew the perfect concoction to yank me right out. If I was happy, which I always knew was only temporary, I could take something to try and hold it there a little longer. The idea of facing my own neurochemistry with no override button was, for a very long time, one of my greatest and most paralyzing fears.

I won't tell you I've solved all of that, by the way. I'm still unpredictable at times, chaotic even, still capable of getting in my own way. But what I can tell you is I've built life structures and safeguards that allow me to keep moving forward, consistently and with intention, even when my brain is being an unreliable narrator. Not perfectly. Just sustainably. And for someone who once needed a chemical override for every emotional state, that's everything.

What I know now is that the work of recovery is essentially the work of locating every remaining reservation and sitting with it until it transforms into something else, acceptance, understanding, genuine surrender rather than white-knuckled compliance. You don't argue your way out of reservations. You don't willpower your way past them. You have to actually look at what they're protecting, what using was doing for you that nothing else has yet replaced, and address that directly. This is the work that takes years and requires outside support, and it's also the only work that actually changes anything.

Every time I (re)lapsed, I was unknowingly chipping away at a reservation. Sometimes I knew exactly which one right away, while other times I only understood it in retrospect, weeks, months, or years later, when enough distance had accumulated to see clearly what I'd been trying to avoid, or what I hadn't yet been able to fully admit to myself.

The lapses and relapses were my addiction being honest with me in the only language it had, which was mostly impulsive substance consumption. And they continued until I had exhausted enough reservations to finally give sobriety a fighting chance.

You absolutely don't need to bust every single reservation before you get sober. You just need enough of them gone to tip the scales in favor of the new you. It took me about three years in sobriety to work through the ones that remained, and most of the time I didn't even realize they were being quietly transmuted into a belief that this new way of life could actually work.

Time does something that willpower never could. You accrue enough sober experiences, enough evenings out where you realize you're fully present and genuinely enjoying yourself, enough moments of intimacy so profound that no glass of wine could have possibly precipitated them, and the reservations just quietly dissolve. I can sit across from someone at dinner now and experience the entire thing through every one of my senses, fully there, not managing or medicating or bracing for impact.

The things I was most afraid of losing turned out to be the things sobriety gave back to me in a form I didn't know was possible. You won't feel each reservation leave, you'll just wake up one day and realize it's gone, and that the life on the other side of it is so much bigger than the one you were fearfully protecting.

The Moment You Actually Mean It

And when the last reservation that prevented you from obtaining sobriety finally burns, something happens that no one can fully prepare you for.

I know what it feels like to say you're done and not mean it at all, the words coming out because the situation demanded them, because someone needed to hear it.

I also know what it feels like to say you're done and genuinely mean it, completely, with full sincerity and conviction, and still not be ready. The sincerity was real but the readiness wasn't, and those are two entirely different things that can exist at the same time without either one being a lie.

And I certainly know what it feels like when you actually mean it, and you're fucking ready, because the last time I said "I mean it" was different in a way I can't fully translate into language, but that I recognized immediately as something I'd never felt before. I'm referring to my true surrender.

My surrender certainly wasn't quiet, and I want to be honest about that, because I think we romanticize the surrender moment in recovery spaces, softening it into something peaceful and cinematic when the reality is often so much uglier, so much more desperate, and so much lonelier than anyone lets on.

Mine happened on the carpet floor of an apartment, alone, in the middle of withdrawal, my body doing things bodies do when you've pushed them past every reasonable limit. No dramatic intervention, no concerned faces gathered around me, no one to witness it at all. Just me, the floor, and a body that had been pushed so far past its limit that it had stopped asking permission for what it did next. The shaking started somewhere deep, the kind that doesn't come from being cold, the kind that radiates outward from somewhere you can't locate or name. I was curled into myself, fetal position, knees to chest, the way a person gets when they are trying to take up as little space as possible, when existing in a full-sized body feels like too much to ask of the world.

And then I screamed. Not only from the physical pain, though there was plenty of that, but the kind of scream that comes from the absolute, irrefutable end of something. I screamed out at a G-d I wasn't even sure existed, begging with everything I had left, which wasn't much, for help from something, anything bigger than the version of me that had been running the show and running it straight into the ground for years.

I was sobbing in a way I hadn't since childhood, the uncontrolled, full-body kind where you can't catch your breath between waves, where your face does things you can't manage or hide. I was staring up at the ceiling with glassy, fixed eyes. I remember thinking that it wasn't hard to look upward, because anything at that point was above me. I had never in my life been so low. This was the bottom of all bottoms, the last trap door at the end of a very long hallway of trap doors I had fallen through every single time I thought I'd finally found solid ground.

I kept begging and pleading the same words into the empty room, over and over, like a prayer I was making up in real time:

I'm done. I'm really done this time. Please help me get through this night just one last time, and I promise I'm done. Please. I mean it this time. 

I was surrendering out loud to something I couldn't see, inviting whatever it was to come take over, because I had absolutely nothing left to bring to the fight myself. I still tear up writing this, not from shame, not anymore, but because that floor, that night, that trembling and unglamorous and completely private cry into the unknown, was the moment everything changed.

I don't know if anything heard me. But what I do know is that something shifted, something that felt less like a decision and more like a collapse so complete, so total, that there was simply nothing left to rebuild the old structure with. And for the first time in years, I didn't want to.

That surrender moment looks different for everyone and it can't be manufactured or forced from the outside. What I can tell you is that when it arrives, you know. It doesn't feel like a decision. It feels like a conclusion.

For some people it looks like what I just described. For others it's quieter, almost unremarkable, a simple choice made on an ordinary Tuesday with no drama, no withdrawal, no floor. Neither is more valid than the other. The spectrum is wide, and where you land on it has no bearing on what's possible from here.

Regardless of the shape in which your surrender takes form, it usually feels like a beginning.

What to Do After a (re)lapse: Tools That Actually Help

If you're somewhere in the middle of the cycle right now, I need you to do one thing before anything else, which is to get honest with one person within twenty-four hours. Not to be held accountable, but because staying alone with it is how it compounds, and isolation is where the shame builds to the point where using again starts to feel like the only available relief. One person. Twenty-four hours. That's it.

After that, get curious rather than self-punishing. Ask yourself what was happening in the weeks before the (re)lapse, not just the day of. What was eroding? What were you tolerating that you shouldn't have been? What feeling were you trying not to feel, or what feelings were you desperately trying to feel more of? Were you seeking connection? Fun? The kind of excitement that only comes with the unexpected? Novelty? This isn't about assigning blame. It's about data. Every (re)lapse is carrying information about where your recovery needs more support, more honesty, more structural reinforcement, and that information is genuinely useful if you can stay present enough to receive it instead of burying it under shame.

In the immediate aftermath, there are some specific things that actually help. Move your body, even briefly, because physical movement interrupts the neurological spiral that shame initiates. Seriously, get your ass into a gym if you can, even if you hate it. Change your physical environment if possible, because your surroundings are carrying the emotional weight of the moment and getting out from under them helps. Reach out to your support structure, whatever form that takes, your therapist, your sponsor, your sober community, your coach, or even the one friend who may or may not know about this double life of yours. And write down, even in just a few sentences, what you think happened and what you want to understand better. Not as punishment. As field notes.

Addiction is a pattern of thinking, a set of reactional behaviors, compulsions, and intrusive thoughts that don't stay in one lane. I always say we have two selves: our trueSelf, and our addictedSelf, two completely different operational systems running on completely different fuel. They collide across every area of life like a game of whack-a-mole, and no amount of isolating the substance addresses the pattern underneath it.

What recovery is actually building is a relationship with your trueSelf that's strong enough to hold when the addictedSelf, the one that runs on fear and compulsion and the desperate need to not feel what you're feeling, tries to take over. That relationship is built in community, with support, over time, through exactly the kind of honest reckoning that a (re)lapse, approached with curiosity instead of shame, can actually accelerate.

You're not starting over. You're not broken. You're somewhere in the middle of a process that is asking more of you than you ever expected to give, and the fact that you're here, reading this, trying to understand rather than just escape, means something real.

The floor I described, that carpet, that empty room, that unglamorous and private unraveling, that was not the end of my story. It was the first sentence of the one that actually mattered. Yours is still being written too.

Keep going, and fake it if you have to for now. The version of you that both means it AND is ready, is a lot closer than you think.