The Cutprice Guignol

Please note this article will contain discussion of eating disorders and substance abuse.

If you’ve been in recovery for any length of time, chances are, at some point, you’ve dealt with a relapse.

Whether it’s a backslide or a particularly heinous trigger or a spur-of-the-moment “fuck it” indulgence in something you want to leave behind, relapse is, as they say, a part of recovery – that’s certainly true for me, at least. In every bad coping mechanism or addiction I have tried to leave behind, there has been, at minimum, a half-dozen or so backslides before I landed on a path that has allowed me to maintain long-term sobriety. And hey, I can only speak for myself now – as well as I feel I’m doing with everything, that doesn’t mean that it’s going to stay that way forever, as much as I hope it does.

But, as much as relapse comes as a standard part of almost every recovery journey at some point or another, it’s also one that often carries with it a lot of shame. There’s this binary approach, in many recovery spaces, to the matter of relapse – either you are using or you aren’t, either you’re engaging in behaviours or you’re not, and there’s very little room to navigate the grey areas of harm reduction or improvement without sobriety. While such black-and-white ways of thinking can be useful for some people, they place an unavoidably heavy weight on the matter of relapse – you go from 0 to 1, the right path to the wrong, good to bad. Relapse and recovery exist in opposition to each other, in this line of thinking, a direct contradiction in terms.

And that’s an approach I took to relapse for a long time – that it served as proof of total failure, and that any progress I had made up until that point blinked out of existence the second I had a drink or engaged in a binge-purge cycle or something similar. Either I was on track or I was off, and if I was off, it was all too tempting to dive back into the deep end and make the failure “worth” it – if I was going to fuck up, then I might as well fuck all the way up, a cycle that often led to far worse relapses than I might have gone through otherwise.

It wasn’t until, in fact, I tweaked my view on relapse and recovery existing on different planes entirely that the cycle really started to change. When I relapsed, I realised, it didn’t equate to losing every inch of progress I had made up until that point – a hundred days without drinking, for example, was still a hundred days without drinking even if I got pissed off my tits on the hundredth-and-first. The time I accumulated in recovery, sober from certain substances or refraining from certain behaviours, didn’t vanish when relapse happened – rather, the knowledge and self-discovery during that period made the next round of recovery easier to get into, easier to maintain, and easier to stick with over a longer period of time. Nothing is thrown away, nothing is lost. Every time you make the active choice to recover, however briefly that choice lasts, you’re proving to yourself that it’s possible, adding to the collection of tools you have to continue your recovery.

Recovery takes on different forms for different people, and, if a more binary view of relapse versus recovery is something that has worked for you, long may that continue, and I mean that. But, for me, untangling the black-and-white thinking around recovery and relapse has made longer and longer streaks of recovery more sustainable than they ever were before. With that said, I would be really interested to hear your takes on relapse as part of recovery, and what approach has worked best for you, so, if you’re comfortable, please let me know in the comments below!

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