How One Crazy Suggestion Finally Helped Me Stop Relapsing
Read This if You Feel Lost In Recovery
After five years of working hard in recovery, doing my darndest to stay sober and clean but failing miserably, I finally gave up.
I resigned myself to this never-ending nightmare cycle of relapse and recovery.
Working as hard as I possibly could in recovery, sometimes up to six hours a day, only to destroy it all in a senseless relapse later that night.
The situation had become hopeless.
My finances and health were already in freefall, but now I didn’t care.
Even though I was still trying to show up for life, I was just going through the motions.
My therapist was at a loss and recommended strong medication to ‘zombify me’ in a desperate attempt to keep me away from relapsing.
My psychiatrist prescribed me strong anti-depressants to get me through each day.
And then, amid this utter turmoil, unexpectedly, everything changed.
Albeit slow at first, but it changed.
The Most Counter-Intuitive Advice Ever
I met someone on an online twelve-step meeting who became my new (seventh) sponsor.
The first thing he instructed me to do was completely left field and highly unusual.
He told me to stop everything I thought was keeping me sober and clean and do nothing.
‘No meetings, prayers, meditation, phone calls, gratitude lists. Take a break from it all,’ he said.
This sent shivers down my spine. I couldn’t understand the logic. Do nothing?!
And I had good reason to be worried. I could barely make five days sober before relapsing and going missing for four days.
‘Why do you want me to stop everything I’m doing?’ I asked.
‘Because it’s not f*cking working!’ came the reply.
I had to concede he was right on that.
But despite this, I still wanted to defend all my daily recovery work drilled into me from the start of my recovery journey.
Defiant, I explained the problem was me. I wasn’t working the program hard enough.
My new sponsor didn’t disagree or argue.
He simply listened and said,
‘Just try it. What do you have to lose?’
Again he was right, so reluctantly, I did try it.
To my astonishment, I didn’t relapse at the usual one-week mark or second week.
In fact, I was clean for more than three and a half weeks, doing absolutely nothing.
But moreover, I saw something for the first time come to light.
All the positive recovery work I was doing that I believed was helping me stay sober and clean actually had no power over whether I stayed clean or not.
What was being told to me about why I couldn’t stay sober and clean wasn’t, in fact, why I couldn’t stay sober and clean.
Why I couldn’t stay clean and why I kept on ‘going’ and relapsing had nothing to do with me.
Rather it was something that was happening to me, independent of what I was doing.
Regardless of how many meetings and therapy sessions I attended.
Or how many daily prayers I said, gratitude lists I wrote, amends I made or how much service I did.
I wasn’t changing my mind when I went and relapsed. My mind had already been changed for me.
You’re probably thinking,
‘But Darren, how can you be so certain that these relapses were happening to you?’
Well, immediately after my revelation, I conducted a simple experiment that confirmed it.
We Awaken By Writing It Down
I began to closely observe and record my experience of relapse, paying close attention to the actual facts leading up to, during and after a relapse.
And to ensure I was objective in this process, I kept a diary of my relapses.
After each relapse, I noted down in my diary a detailed factual record of what happened as soon as I was conscious and fully out of the relapse.
I wrote down what I was doing before I relapsed and, to the best of my ability, what I was thinking before every relapse.
I asked myself the following questions:
- What were you doing just before you relapsed?
- What were the reasons that you gave yourself for relapsing?
- Or were there no real thoughts?
- Was there a complete lack of consequences and perspective?
No matter how bizarre or silly my reasons for relapsing sounded, I wrote it down.
And again, I didn’t create plausible reasons and backstories for why I relapsed. I just wrote honestly what happened.
After I reviewed my diary entries, my underestimation of my relapses immediately became apparent.
Naturally, the passage of time skews everyone’s perception, but my recollection of events was basically a denial of the truth of the situation.
For one, the potency and intensity of each relapse were generalised, often minimised, sometimes dismissed, and on one or two occasions, completely forgotten.
But secondly, my preconceived ideas of why I thought I’d relapsed were erroneous.
The Inconvenient Truth
Addicts are very predictable. And this condition is progressive.
The pattern I saw from my diary entries with clarity was that the frequency, duration, quantities and money spent grew considerably over time.
And the lack of thinking and absence of any common sense proceeding a relapse was more drastic and obvious with each relapse.
But my blaming and shaming reasons and the resulting course of action I took after each relapse never changed.
A clear, consistent pattern presented itself in black and white.
And I was caught unknowingly in this endless futile relapse and recovery loop.
But, when I added all the recovery work I did in my diary, the evidence became irrefutable.
On each day, I wrote:
- Recovery meetings/therapy sessions attended
- Outreach phone calls to other addicts/sponsors/therapists made
- Step and therapy work done
- Prayer and meditation rituals completed
- Service and sponsorship done
With all the daily work I was doing, I shouldn’t have been relapsing.
I was diligently working a program, doing what I was told and being of service.
It quickly became apparent blaming myself for not doing something was misguided.
I was doing more than enough.
Those facts in my diary entries were the reality whether I liked it or not.
Staying Awake To Stay Alive
Asking these questions and noting my experience in my diary entries began a process of coming into an awareness of the answers.
I started to wake up.
But if I was to stay awake, I knew I needed a new experience with the recovery process. If these relapses, by in large, were just happening randomly and I was powerless to stop them, I realised I was doing recovery the wrong way around with the wrong focus.
Focusing on fighting the problem and trying to stay sober and clean as if I had the power to change it brought me nothing but struggle.
It made me more willful and result driven instead of letting go and having faith in another power.
As contradictory as it may sound, I realised my focus had to be on something other than being sober and clean.
When I told my new sponsor this, he nodded and went further,
‘Now you get it. There’s nothing you can do about staying sober and clean, but there’s everything you can do about everything else.’
‘There’s everything you can do to help someone else.’
When I took the focus off of myself, my problems and my self-seeking desire to be sober and clean but placed it on how I could make a difference regardless if I’d relapse or not, everything changed.
I began to live in the land of the solution.
When we really get out of ourselves and focus on others, something else can happen, and that something else is a spiritual experience.
From that moment on, the relapses stopped.
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