Relapsing is part of addiction and, some would argue, part of recovery too. Of course, that’s not an excuse to immediately run off and guzzle an entire bottle of rum, or refresh your day with yet another armful of methamphetamine or whatever, but it happens and it happens a lot. Few and lucky are those who can walk into their first AA or NA meeting and walk out, never to have a drink or a fix again. As for me, using AA, I found I was able to stay sober for weeks or months at a time, before falling victim to a series of increasingly brutal relapses, that end up, quite literally, face down in a ditch or being scraped off the floor of your expensive house by a paramedic that you don’t remember calling. A friend of mine told me that she came round in her car, half naked, head on the steering wheel, parked outside a police station, with zero memory of how she got there or why she had hardly any clothes on. I woke up once to find two police officers and two paramedics looking down at me with wry smiles. ‘Ooh it’s the coppers’, I remember saying. ‘I don’t remember calling you’. I can’t recall the exact reply, but it was of the laconic, ‘seen it all before’ nature. ‘You’ll be right mate’ is the usual Aussie expression of solace in the face of any given disaster, small or large, so I imagine it was something like that. And so it was that I found myself – again – in the back of an ambulance headed fast to hospital, there to be put through the merry rigours of detoxification. As for the police presence I later discovered that they try and attend alongside an ambulance if the emergency caller had threatened to commit suicide, which isn’t a thought I want to dwell on too much, but was probably the case.
Anyway, I found myself becoming that dreaded thing, a serial relapser. There are plenty of us about and, as noted above, it’s common enough. But a relapse isn’t just a case of breaking your sobriety by having a few drinks and regretting it. If only it were that simple and easy. A relapse comes at you hard and fast, blindsiding you with unforgiving brutality. It is almost always worse than the one before, involves more alcohol, hurts your body and mind in ways you didn’t think were possible, hurts those around you more profoundly and almost inevitably ends in hospital, where you end hooked up to lines, monitors and drips, heavily sedated and, in some cases, lucky to be alive.
Alcohol relapse statistics make for interesting reading. Stats taken from The Recovery Village rehab research centre, indicate that less than 20% of patients who receive treatment for alcoholism remain alcohol-free for an entire year. It goes on: ‘However, while the first years can be the hardest, the relapse rate does go down over time. For people sober for two years, 60% remain alcohol-free, and for people who have been sober for five years, they are very likely to stay sober, although the threat of relapse is always present’. So it’s a thing. But as a general rule, the longer you manage to stay sober, the better your chances are of avoiding a relapse. Of course, staying sober is the tricky bit.
The key to avoiding relapses is probably to be found in understanding your triggers and then trying to either avoid or manage them. And they’ll be different for everyone. For some it may be as simple as attending a sporting event where the beer flows freely and the empty cans are stacked high, or sat in a posh restaurant observing someone else, a ‘normal’, demurely sipping a glass of wine, while the alcoholic sits in a fevered sweat watching every precious drop slip down someone else’s throat. For me and many others, it’s generally an emotional setback of one kind or another that gets me going again. It might be something small or something catastrophic, it doesn’t really matter. It could be something you see on the news. For instance, the murder of the British Labour MP Jo Cox sent me, and any right thinking person I guess, into an intense depression which, for me, involved getting very drunk. An AA friend once pointed out to me that it’s natural for an alcoholic to drink anyway, so no wonder they reach for the bottle at the first sign of a crisis. ‘You’ll be right mate’, he said, of course he did.
Nonetheless, for the relapser, the feelings of guilt and shame at having ‘failed’ again are overwhelming and often dangerous, causing the feelings of suicide to run strong (hence the police presence at a suicide call). A friend here at rehab told me that Henry Ford said that ‘Failure is a reason to try again with more information’. It may not have felt like it at the time, but I’ve taken in a lot of that information during my various adventures in the drunk business, and that’s why I find myself at rehab today. I’m learning. We all fail sometimes, of course we do. There should be no shame in that. But if we know why we failed and try to do it differently it next time, or at least see it coming, then there’s a chance it can be avoided. And so, with a bit of help, we go on.
One day at a time.
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