What really ails the chronic relapser.
After multiple relapses whilst working with my new (seventh) sponsor, one day, he casually remarked.
‘You know you really are a lot worse than you think.’
‘What do you mean?’ I said.
‘I mean, your situation is far more serious than you imagine.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ I said, nodding. ‘I could lose everything and eventually die.’
‘No we know that,’ he said, waving his hand dismissively. ‘That’s obvious! I’m talking baout what you’re dealing with, the condition.’
Those last words, ‘the condition’, froze me on the spot.
I had suspected something was bad because I could no longer keep an appointment with anyone or anything.
I simply didn’t know when I would relapse next and go ‘missing’ for three or four days.
It seemed I was powerless to stop once I started and powerless to stay stopped once I quit.
And all the will and desire in the world to not relapse made no difference whatsoever.
It was as if something else had slipped into my life unnoticed and was now running the show.
The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Played
Despite my ongoing relapses, I put on a brave face outwardly, but deep down, I was terrified.
I was on my knees every night, repenting regularly, praying and pleading for another sober and clean day.
But none of these worries, sleepless nights, or prayers changed anything.
Brief periods of sobriety momentarily renewed my belief I could stay sober, but in reality, the addiction was just laughing in the background.
I always found a way to relapse again, regardless of the solemn oaths and pledges I made or the painful remorse and disgust I felt.
I couldn’t see that I was caught in an endless relapse/recovery loop of despair, blame and misplaced hope and didn’t know I couldn’t see.
But above all, I didn’t know that this very cycle was the condition my new sponsor was eluding to, a relapse condition, better known as ‘alcoholism’ in the book of Alcoholics Anonymous (The Big Book).
And that this relapse condition was composed of two elusive features I would never see coming, even though I was told about them.
The Blank Spot
Once, after a particularly heavy relapse, convinced of my resolve, I called my new sponsor and declared,
‘That’s it, I’m done with cocaine! If I ever party with girls again, I will never use cocaine with them, that’s for sure!’
‘That’s not the issue,’ my new sponsor replied. ‘You’re not powerless over girls or cocaine. You are powerless over relapse. This is a relapse condition.’
‘Due to the blank spot feature of this condition, no matter what you say now, in the future or whenever, at certain times, you won’t recall any of it with sufficient force to stop you from relapsing.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, stunned.
‘I mean, it’s not what you’re thinking. It’s really a lack of thinking around partying and its consequences that’s making you go back to it again and again,’ he explained.
‘It’s not the presence of something,’ he continued. ‘It’s the absence of something, and that something appears to be the basic common sense of why not to do it.’
‘Your reasons for not doing it are not there!’
‘There’s a blank spot!’ My new sponsor cried. ‘And just like any blind spot, you can’t see it. When the idea of doing coke and partying comes up, there’s no real reason not to do it. So it sounds like a good idea,’ my new sponsor concluded before throwing in,
‘And you can’t argue with a good idea!’
I wanted to come back at my new sponsor but couldn’t; his annoyingly simple logic made sense.
If you had no reasons or cons why not to do something and all you were left with were the pros of why to do it, then why wouldn’t you do it?
My mind raced through the implications.
‘Insane thinking is a part of life,’ my new sponsor added. ‘We all have it, addict or not. Thoughts about doing a crazy and irrational action occasionally pop into everyone’s minds, but our common sense and reasons for not doing it are present.’
‘Those reasons keep us in check,’ he stressed, ‘They stop us from doing the absurd.’
The fog of confusion began to clear from my mind.
The fact is that most alcoholics, for reasons yet obscure, have lost the power of choice in
drink. Our so-called will power becomes practically nonexistent. We are unable, at
certain times, to bring into our consciousness with sufficient force the memory of the
suffering and humiliation of even a week or a month ago. We are without defense against
the first drink.~ The Big Book, page 24.
I mumbled something about doing more therapy sessions to stay in touch with my baseline feelings, but my new sponsor was having none of it.
‘This isn’t an emotional issue!’ he said, cutting in. ‘This is a memory issue that no amount of therapy you chose to throw money at will solve.’
He even suggested that the mental blank spot could be similar to a form of amnesia or dementia that science hasn’t picked up on yet.
‘But why hasn’t science picked up on it?’ I asked, holding the phone tightly.
‘Probably because this blank spot only happens at certain times. Most of the time, it lays dormant.’ he replied before warning,
‘And unfortunately, this dormancy feature gives us an illusion of power. We think we’ve got sobriety now because our memory and willpower function normally again. Until, the condition randomly comes back online, and we relapse, leaving us totally baffled as to why it happened.’
My new sponsor sighed deeply.
‘It’s heartbreaking,’ he said softly. ‘Especially if you’ve relapsed after being multiple years clean. But it is sadly needed to show you that you are genuinely powerless, regardless of how much you desire and want to be sober.’
My head was spinning. Every sentence felt like the jolt of an electric cattle prod.
Later that day, I looked back at my recent relapses. I found no real conscious memory of consequences before any of them.
It appeared relapse was happening to me, not by me.
As soon as I regained my ability to think, I went carefully over that evening in Washington. Not only had I been off guard, I had made no fight whatever against the first drink. This time I had not thought of the consequences at all. I had commenced to drink as carelessly as though the cocktails were ginger ale. I now remembered what my alcoholic friends had told me, how they prophesied that if I had an alcoholic mind, the time and place would come — I would drink again. They had said that though I did raise a defense, it would one day give way before some trivial reason for having a drink. Well, just that did happen and more, for what I had learned of alcoholism did not occur to me at all. I knew from that moment that I had an alcoholic mind. I saw that will power and self-knowledge would not help in those strange mental blank spots. I had never been able to understand people who said that a problem had them hopelessly defeated. I knew then. It was a crushing blow.
~ The Big Book, page 41.
A Belief That It Will All Be Alright
Sadly, the ‘blank spot’ wasn’t all that was happening.
My new sponsor later explained that something else was happening in my mind, a kind of twisting of my thinking that I couldn’t see either.
This is the other main feature of the relapse condition.
The Big Book explains it as follows:
But there was always the curious mental phenomenon that parallel with our sound reasoning, there inevitably ran some insanely trivial excuse for taking the first drink. Our sound reasoning failed to hold us in check. The insane idea won out.
~ The Big Book, page 37.
Anytime the ‘good idea’ of relapsing suddenly popped into my head, part of me would start to minimise the lunacy of this thought.
I would begin to rationalise this catastrophic idea with excuses and reasons why it would be, in fact, okay to relapse despite being in recovery.
No matter how insignificant and non-sensical those reasons were, they quickly became plausible and seemingly rational.
At the same time, the urge to want to relapse would start to surge.
A fear of missing out would relentlessly come crashing in like waves rolling in and out of my consciousness.
Thoughts and narratives of why it would be okay this time would dominate my thinking.
Finally, a tidal wave of justification would smother me into deep unconsciousness.
Convinced of my rationale, I would carry out my plan, only to revert back to type and do everything I said I wouldn’t do, and again, find myself powerless to stop once I started.
This twisted thinking was nothing more than a lie, but I believed the lie and didn’t see the flaw in the logic in light of my track record with partying.
To any average person, this kind of thinking and decision-making would be termed irrational, unsound, or even insane.
The Big Book calls this thinking an ‘obsession to beat the game’.
Whether it’s a vague idea that this time it would be different, that I would do it differently and party like a gentleman.
Or the well-loved excuse that this will be my last relapse. After this final time, I’ll be done for good. I’ll get on with my life.
But, it never was different and that last time never did happen.
My new sponsor would remind me often,
‘You aren’t changing your mind when you’ve decided to give in and party; your mind has been changed for you.’
It Centers in Our Minds
Of course, there is a body element for the addict.
Naturally, as a consequence of the constant extreme usage of powerfully addictive substances and processes that are designed by their very nature to make you want more and more, addicts have developed a sky-high tolerance.
But there’s this annihilation approach to our acting out and using once we start, which the Big Book describes as the ‘phenomenon of craving’.
In the Doctor’s opinion in the Big Book, Dr. Silkworth calls the phenomenon of craving an ‘allergy’, but my new sponsor wasn’t too keen on that idea.
‘If it’s an allergy, then why doesn’t the phenomenon of craving happen every time?’
Regardless of whether it is an allergy, the body part becomes irrelevant, as most people with a severe peanut allergy don’t tend to keep repeating the total lost cause of trying to have another peanut to see if they will react differently.
They don’t touch or go anywhere near peanuts because they remember how terrible it was last time.
Once or twice is enough.
Not so with the real addict because of the first two features of the disease; they will not only be back gorging on peanuts, but they will eventually take up residence in a peanut factory.
There is a complete failure of the kind of defence that keeps one from putting his hand on a hot stove. The alcoholic may say to himself in the most casual way, “It won’t burn me this time, so here’s how!” Or perhaps he doesn’t think at all.
~ The Big Book, page 24.
That’s why the Big Book says the real problem ‘centers in our mind’, not our bodies.
‘What will happen now,’ my new sponsor forewarned, ‘as the relapses get worse, the time between them will get shorter and shorter.’
This condition is progressive.
Therefore, the blanking and twisting will naturally grow in scope and reach until you can no longer differentiate the true from the false.
Turning To Something Else
If you believe in the disease concept of addiction, that this is a disease, a fatal illness precisely like any other life-threatening condition, then you have it for life.
There is nothing you can do to change that.
If you constantly can’t remember why or how you relapsed despite your honest desire not to.
Or if you continually relapse, believing some trivial reason or silly excuse to relapse while dismissing the genuine consequences, then you are a real addict.
You have this relapse condition.
You crossed a threshold where, at certain times, your inability to use reasoning and rational thinking won’t even register for you.
The tragic truth is that once that threshold has been crossed, you have no choice but to relapse.
A compromised part of your brain will always fire the thought of using or acting out. That will never change. It’s wired like that for life.
There is no cure.
Even this information won’t save you, as at certain times, you won’t be able to recall any of it when it matters.
So, let go of trying to change that.
Let go of any old ideas around fighting it and instead get out of the way and trust in something else.
After all, that’s all you’ve got.
There’s nothing you or anyone else can do to stop this relapse condition.
But there’s everything you can do about everything else.
There’s everything you can do about building a spiritual dimension to your life, by giving back, helping others, living in genuine faith and trusting in something greater than you.
There’s everything you can do to improve your awareness and intuition, raise your consciousness and develop another part of your brain.
And let this part of your brain grow bigger and stronger than that addictive part so that it can embrace and look after that compromised part.
Just like a bigger and wiser older sibling can care for and comfort a much younger upset sibling by giving that stressed child a big hug.
There’s everything you can do about deciding to take on a new attitude, direction, and way of life that will keep this condition dormant one day at a time.
If this article speaks to you, please follow, share and subscribe to me for more.
Darren James 