What is Relapse Prevention?

I don’t like relapse prevention.

Maybe that makes you think you should stop reading this article but let me explain. I don’t like the phrase “relapse prevention”, but I am really keen on not relapsing!

Why don’t I like it? I think it puts the focus in all the wrong places. It’s like relapse is out there, around every corner, and you have to use Marvel Superhero levels of skill and dedication to avoid it.

In short, it gives the power to the relapse. But, the relapse doesn’t have the power.

You are the one with the power. So, let’s not talk about relapse prevention, let’s talk about trigger management.

Trigger management suggests that there will be triggers, but that they are within your power to manage. It shifts the energy from the looming danger of the relapse, to your ability to manage the triggers that the world will throw at you.

And triggers are something you can manage, just like household bills or making sure you don’t run out of loo roll. Annoying but not that hard, not that scary and certainly not that powerful.

It turns out you have the power, you are a Marvel Superhero: Captain AF, Doctor Sober or Drypool, whichever costume melts your cheese.

The Key to Staying Sober

Triggers are something you can manage. Or not. If you don’t then, like as not, you’ll end up drinking again. You’ll have a relapse.

But what is a relapse?

In simple terms it’s drinking alcohol, but there’s drinking alcohol and drinking alcohol. Let’s create a distinction – Relapse versus New Facts – that will help us to get a clearer idea of what’s going on.

Relapse

A relapse is not simply any time alcohol enters your body. A relapse is when you return to drinking the way you were before you got sober. It is therefore dreadful and should be avoided.

There is a belief that having a single drink will result in you going on a five-day bender and ending up bruised, tattooed and married to someone whose name you can’t remember.

But that doesn’t always happen. Many people get back into drinking with a little less haste. They convince themselves that this time they have it under control, but slowly, over weeks or months, the drinking slips back to the previous levels.

New Facts

While some people view having a drink as a terrible sober date resetting nightmare, for some people it can be a lesson, even a necessary step on the road to recovery.

Now I want to be very clear, I’m absolutely not suggesting that having a drink is a good idea, it really isn’t. What I’m saying is that if you really look at the journeys of a wide range of successful sober people you will find a very specific form of lapse.

They’ve often experienced lapses that they learn something from. Sometimes it’s as simple as learning the lesson that Saki does have alcohol in it despite what your so-called “expert” friend says. Sometimes it’s about getting tempted and learning the hard way that it wasn’t fun, that the juice definitely wasn’t worth the squeeze.

What I’m trying to get at is that there is a wide spectrum of drinking events, some of them are terrible and some of them actually strengthen people’s sobriety. We should not treat them all the same – other than the fact that we are better off avoiding them.

Living Your Sober Lifestyle

Relapse or new facts, drinking again is not inevitable. Triggers, on the other hand, are.

There are people out there that say you can either avoid triggers or ignore them. Sadly, that ain’t going to work.

You can’t ignore triggers. That’s like trying to not think about white bears. Admit it, you’re thinking of white bears, even if you’re just wondering why I’m talking about white bears. If you don’t believe me, you can try this: set a timer for 60 seconds and spend that time trying not to think of white bears. Make a mark on a piece of paper every time you think of them. If after a minute your paper has less than 12 marks on it, you’re doing better than me.

You can’t ignore triggers, your brain is rubbish at not thinking of something that it has started thinking of.

Why not just avoid the triggers?

Because, my friend, the triggers are your life. The most extreme example I can think of is my wife. I find her quite triggering at times. The only way to remove that particular trigger from my life would be divorce.

And divorce is pretty triggering.

What else might be triggers? Children, parents, friends, household bills, work, traffic, I could go on…

How are you going to avoid those triggers? Live in a cave? Do you have any idea how hard it is to get good Wi-Fi in a cave? I imagine that the lack of high-speed internet would be quite triggering.

To paraphrase an obscure jazzman, a life without triggers is a life without life.

You can’t ignore triggers. You can’t avoid triggers. But you can manage them.

The Big Threat to Addiction Recovery

Before we begin to understand how to manage triggers, it’s worth getting to grips with what drives relapse, what’s the biggest threat?

It’s not triggers, not really. Exposing two people to the same trigger won’t have the same result. Let’s consider why one of them wouldn’t be bothered and the other gets plunged into a spiral of desire and recrimination.

The situation is exactly the same, it’s their reaction that’s different. What’s the difference between their reactions? On the surface one of them brushes aside the trigger and the other dwells on it. That seems like the first person has a better way of managing the triggers but again it’s a bit more subtle than that.

Triggers stop bothering you once you have changed your beliefs about drinking.

Most people are unaware how much our beliefs drive our behaviour. Let’s look at an example, why do so many sports fans continue to support the same woeful team? No matter how many times the team lets them down, they go on supporting them. Why is that?

Simple, they believe that sports fans can’t change their team. They hold that particular dictum dear. But if you think about it “thou shalt not change teams” isn’t a commandment, “if a team exerts a force on a fan, then the fan is unable to escape that force” isn’t one of the laws of physics.

Those poor fans are turning up on a windy and rainy Sunday, to watch subpar sport because they believe they have no choice. Once a fan, always a fan.

But it’s just a belief.

If you took that fan and forced them to watch another team, one that is more successful and vastly more enjoyable to watch, they’d be miserable. They’d be miserable because they believe they are violating the holy laws of the science of sport.

But if you managed to change their beliefs. If they came to realise that it is OK to follow another team, then they would begin to enjoy the obviously more enjoyable sporting performance.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

If you believe that alcohol was fun, that it helped you become a more interesting person, that it built friendships, that it enhanced creativity and transformed you into an honest-to-god sex machine, then you will be miserable when you see other people drinking. You’ll believe that you are missing out.

But, if you believe that alcohol squashes joy, causes you stress, ruins relationships, stunts your thinking and transforms you into a slurring, dribbling embarrassment, then it won’t matter what people do – there is no way you’ll want to drink.

The truth is that the triggers are much easier to deal with if you don’t believe that alcohol helps.

If you don’t believe alcohol helps you relax, stress is a lot less of a trigger. If you don’t believe that alcohol helps you to socialise, celebrations are a lot less of a trigger. If you don’t believe alcohol helps you when you're sad, your honest-to-god atrocious sports team is less of a trigger.

The Foundation of Alcohol-Free Living

Successful sobriety rests on believing that alcohol isn’t serving you. How do you get there? Where do you start?

There are three steps to changing your beliefs about drinking. Identify, Examine, Destroy. Let’s look at the first one, identifying your beliefs.

Many beliefs about alcohol are pretty deeply rooted in our culture. Alcohol holds a special, almost sacred place in society. It’s rarely questioned. Without thought, or indeed proof, many people will tell you that alcohol helps you to have fun, it helps you to build relationships, it helps you to deal with stress, it helps you when times are hard and that it’s an important part of who you are.

It’s no wonder that you’ve started to believe it. Yet, all drinkers have a slightly different slant on how alcohol works for them. You need to tap into your own particular take on the illusionary benefits or pleasures of drinking. You need to draw up a list of what you believe about alcohol.

Below is a list of words. For each one I want you to list what you believe the benefit or pleasure of alcohol is, in relation to that word.

Don’t make any judgments about what you come up with, just write it down however it comes. Especially don’t worry whether or not you should believe it, this is not what your mum, your boss or your teacher believes about drinking. Just write (at least) one sentence about what alcohol does to help in connection with each of these words.

• Celebration

• Identity

• Socialising

• Habit

• Stress

• Relaxation

• Sadness

• Stimulation

• Meeting people

• Sex

• Treat

• Loneliness

• Rebellion

• Boredom

• Business or work

• Creativity

• Routine

After you have finished you should have a pretty good list of what you believe about alcohol. Nice work.

Best Strategies for Maintaining Sobriety

Now you have brought to light what you believe about alcohol you can start to examine it. The first question to ask would be is it true.

There are two ways to approach this, you could either consider your own experience or you could do some good old-fashioned research. Let’s take the very widely held belief that alcohol relieves stress.

You could start by looking at your own experience. You would have to consider the overall effect of alcohol on your life. Did it cause problems with your relationships? Your health? Your job? Did it create stress in these areas? Because if it did, drinking it would have to remove all that stress before it started to help you to deal with the other stresses in your life. What you will almost certainly find is that alcohol was a major cause of stress in your life.

Or you could fire up google and try to figure out what the science says. You may come across facts about how alcohol increases your cortisol levels, that’s a significant stress hormone. Or you may find out about how alcohol is a depressant, meaning it negatively affects the balance of your brain, making stress seem bigger.

Just be aware that news outlets don’t always report things fairly. They want people to read their articles, and most people drink so they tend to skew things towards what they think readers want to hear.

Once you’ve asked if a belief is true, it’s time to move to the next step. Is it serving you? These are questions that only you can answer yourself. Take the belief that alcohol helps you to meet people, ask yourself if that’s moving you closer to where (and who) you want to be.

Are you meeting the kind of people that will help you along the road to success? Are you meeting people who are offering you interesting and exciting opportunities? Or are you just meeting other drinkers? Other people who are just as stuck as you are?

Once you’ve decided that a belief isn’t true, or it isn’t serving you – destroy it. Which is much simpler than you’d think, in fact, simply by going through the process you will destroy it – after all, why would you believe something that’s an unhelpful lie?

A quick note: you can do this on your own. But it’s probably easier with a bit of help. That little bit of objectivity helps to see things more clearly. In addition, someone else can help you stop getting caught in the trap favouring the information that you want to hear, rather than what you need to hear.

The sort of people that could help would be a coach, a mentor, a sponsor or a truly wise friend. Maybe you could find an accountability buddy – someone who’s in a similar position to you. Then you can help each other grapple with your beliefs. I bet you will find a lot of crossover.

But it doesn’t have to be one person. It could be done as part of a sobriety circle. Some group programmes do this well. If you can’t find one, you could start one. Just jump online and find a few people in a similar place to you and make it happen.

Understanding Sobriety in Social Settings

Getting to grips with your belief is a game changer. Occasionally it is enough to help people to radically change their behaviour. But often they need a little more. Because to understand how to stay sober in the face of triggers, you need to understand why they caused you to drink in the first place.

Think about it for a second, there really is no rule that says you should drink while watching sport or eating a good meal or at a party. It’s not etched into the fabric of the universe. Yet many former drinkers still think about drinking at sports events, restaurants and celebrations. Why is that?

The short answer is – you taught yourself to drink. I know that sounds like an odd way of putting it but bear with me.

How do you know that a square is called a square? Again, it’s not a universal truth. You weren’t born with innate geometric knowledge. After all, “square” is a random sound (or combination of random squiggles) that you associate with a random shape. You only associate the sound and the shape because you saw a lot of squares and people kept telling you they were called squares – the two things became connected.

Likewise, you weren’t born with innate party knowledge. How did you learn to drink at parties? You went to a lot of pirates and a lot of people kept telling you to drink at parties – the two things became connected.

You learn to drink at parties, just like you learnt to drink when you were sad, lonely or stressed. There is no real, unbreakable connection between these things, you just taught your brain that there was.

The answer is of course to teach yourself something else.

Real Addiction Support

Assuming that you have already stopped drinking, then you have already started to teach yourself something new. Every time you do something sober that used to involve alcohol, you are teaching yourself not to drink. Every day’s a school day.

What too many people do is go to the party and struggle their way through not drinking. They use their willpower to resist the booze. Which still helps you learn. But if it’s not enjoyable, there’s a real danger that you’ll avoid socialising and never really learn the lesson.

Of course, if you’ve dealt with your beliefs, then it won’t be as bad. You won’t be looking at the people drinking with envy because you’ll believe that a drink won’t improve the experience. But you will still think about drinking. Why? Because you taught yourself to think about drinking in situations like this. That’s what you must unlearn.

The good news is, there are some things you can do to make unlearning easier. This is where the trigger management bit comes in.

It’s important to realise that this trigger is not the party. The party is made up of lots of little triggers. Arriving might have several, people will be offering drinks around, asking you what you want, making jokes about alcohol. That could be three quick triggers in the space of a few minutes. You need to realise that you don’t deal with one and then you’re OK for the evening. You need to deal with each and every one.

What do you do? Disrupt the cycle.

Which is just a fancy way of saying stop the thought developing too much. If you see someone drinking, you might think, “I want a drink”. But you don’t drink, so you’d say to yourself, “I can’t have a drink”. That would make you sad. Which would probably make you want to drink even more.

That’s the cycle you need to interrupt. To do that you need to think something different. This is where mantras come in. Sure, the word mantra might sound a bit yoga and handpans, but fear not, manta are instruments of the mind.

It’s a way of interrupting that cycle and creating a more meaningful and positive experience. Let’s start with the phrase “free at last”, which isn’t even slightly woo-woo.

Imagine you’re at the party, you see someone drinking and laughing, you think, “I want a drink”. Instead of jumping into that downward spiral you say, “free at last!”. What will happen? You’ll smile because you’ve reminded yourself how great it is to be free from the poison that dragged you down for years.

That celebration is key to managing those triggers. You can turn them from a depressing downward spiral into a positive moment of joy. Best of all you can personalise that mantra to really fit with your life and your priorities.

Your Sober Inspiration

Creating your own mantra is easy. In fact, you probably already have one. You may well have a meaningful phrase that cheers you up or reminds you how far you’ve come. This is what you need to interrupt the cycle of miserable thoughts that come from triggers.

There are two things that make great mantras. The first is celebration. Because that downward spiral is, well, downward, you need something positive to interrupt it. Moreover, if your mantra makes you happy, you’ll continue to do it. If you enjoy using your new mantra, you’ll use it more and more. In short, you will get better at using it to manage triggers, so you’ll get better at managing triggers.

If you think about it, beating those triggers is something worth celebrating. Because not drinking is worth celebrating! So pick something that makes you happy and then be deliberately happy about it. You can do this by smiling when you say it or even doing a little dance (this one probably doesn’t work so well in public).

The other thing that makes a strong mantra is the idea of identity. Changing your behaviour is good but it's not a particularly deep change. It’s certainly not as deep changing the way you see yourself. Honestly, the trick of enjoying sober living is to embrace being a sober person. Too often we mistakenly hold on to our outdated view of ourselves. We think that we were a fun and outgoing person because we drank. The truth is we drank because we’re a fun and outgoing person to begin with.

A good mantra can help you see yourself as a new and better version of yourself. One of the mantras I use is, “I am a sober warrior”. It reminds me of the strength and power that alcohol-free living has given me, but moreover, it reminded me that at the core of who I am is sobriety.

Invest some time coming up with your own mantra, it’ll make managing those triggers so much easier. Think back to phrases that have been meaningful to you or look on google or the socials for inspirational quotes that make your heart sing. Here’s a few to start you off:

• Keep on keepin’ on

• I am becoming who I want to be

• The most gangsta thing I’ve ever done was getting sober

• I didn’t come this far only to come this far

• I am worthy of inner peace

• Sober as F”*$

• I am enough

• I refuse to give up on myself

• Even on the hardest days, life is so much better

• Thank you for staying sober

Top Recovery Tips

How do you put it all together? Here are the seven steps to total trigger management

1, Stop being afraid of relapse

Don’t start drinking but stop thinking of relapse as some bogey-man lurking in the shadows. There are triggers, yes, but you can manage them.

2, Accept that there will be triggers

You can’t ignore triggers or make them go away because life is triggers. The only thing you can do is learn to manage them – which is easier than you think.

3, Identify your beliefs about alcohol

Your drinking was driven by your beliefs. Your sobriety will be much more secure, and more fun, if you remove those false beliefs.

4, Question those beliefs

Look at your own experience, and the research, see if your beliefs are true. Then ask if they’re serving you? Are they helping you to become the person you want to be? If not, stop believing!

5, Accept that you taught yourself to drink

You learnt to connect many things with drinking; therefore, your problem is what you learned. But you can learn something different – no doubt, you’ve already started your re-education!

6, Create your own mantra

Find a meaningful saying or phrase that you can use to interrupt the thought process you have when you’re triggered.

7, Use your mantra to manage the trigger

Every time the idea of drinking crosses your mind, use your mantra. And celebrate! Don't forget to smile to reinforce that feeling of achievement.

That’s it. The complete guide to managing your triggers and ensure you never relapse. Once you’ve done the work you can go out there and enjoy the process of learning not to drink (or even learning not to want to drink).