It is often said that relapse is part of recovery, but it doesn’t have to be. Of course, it takes all facets of the healthy mind working together smoothly to conquer addiction, and continued sobriety requires attending meetings frequently and working through all 12 steps with your sponsor. Addiction is a disorder of conditioning, of habits learned by repetition, and old habits are hard to break. However, there are some signs and symptoms that indicate that someone needs a relapse prevention plan.
20 Signs Someone Needs a Relapse Prevention Plan
Relapse prevention is a crucial aspect of addiction recovery, focusing on identifying triggers, developing coping strategies, and building a strong support system. It involves recognizing high-risk situations—such as stress, social pressure, or emotional distress—that could lead to substance use and implementing healthier responses. Here are some signs that someone needs a relapse prevention plan.
Mental Health
Depression and anxiety, unmitigated by treatment through therapy or medication or both, can trigger relapse. As mood disorders spiral, an addict may fall to the familiar disorder of his or her former lifestyle. Luckily, many tools now exist to circumvent a range of disorders before they begin – many therapies and many newly refined antidepressant medications. Some of the signs of depression may include exhaustion, hopelessness, boredom, inhibited cognitive function, memory loss, speech difficulties, and physical distress.
If you feel yourself verging on a depressive episode, please consult with both your physician and your therapist, as your medication regimen may require some adjustment.
Excessive Spending
From recent studies into the new field of neuroeconomics, researchers from Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, and MIT have found that spending money mutes the brain’s pain processing centers, impairing a person’s ability to form sound judgments. In fact, according to social and decision sciences professor George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon, making purchases can “effectively anesthetize the pain of paying.”
Seeking solace from the morass, the common addicts among us will sometimes revert to the cold comfort of compulsive behaviors, which may manifest in newfound ways. Because drug use is costly, many of us have become acquainted with spending large amounts of money on fleeting joy. Through indulgent spending, an addict who is fresh to recovery risks transferring his or her formerly destructive behaviors with drugs onto other activities like shopping, seeking satisfaction from tangible luxuries which in the past he or she could not afford. Of course, this is understandable and, if tempered with caution, fairly innocent.
Gambling
An especially ruinous form of compulsive spending is gambling, the nature of which is defined by risk-taking. Gamblers Anonymous meetings are organized worldwide to address the very issue. Aside from indicating the likelihood that an addict will relapse, gambling itself is an addiction whereby many people overshoot their luck in life and incur debt by arch degrees that become impossible to repay.
For people contending with substance use disorder, the risk of developing a cross-addiction with gambling increases 23-fold, and at least 750,000 people aged 14 to 21 suffer from a gambling addiction. Dostoevsky described the problem gambler’s logic best in his novella The Gambler, writing: “True, out of a hundred persons, only one can win; yet what business is that of yours or of mine?”
Isolation
Because drug users deep into the throes of their substance use disorder tend to avoid healthy relationships—whether by inadvertence or by choice—part of recovering from a downfall entails building ties and connections to a community of like-minded, similarly situated individuals. Treatment is an ideal setting in which to build some of these ties.
Forming a support system of healthy recovering addicts—who can stand with you in solidarity through the up-and-down stages of recovery—is essential to healing. Find a support group of friends you trust, who may love you until you can learn to love yourself; you just might find that friendship can be currency of sanity.
Romance/Sex
Rehab romances often are doomed to fail miserably, in the fashion of Syd and Nancy or perhaps Kurt and Courtney. Intimate relationships in early recovery usually devolve into codependence. The limits on relationships that AA and NA old timers suggest newcomers observe stems from the logic that feelings, hormones, and belief systems in the beginning stages of recovery from alcoholism and drug addiction are chaotic and messy, free-flowing and volatile, and breakups are even messier.
Two people who have converged at the lunatic fringe of romance do not split up gracefully, and sometimes, couples, when they separate, will use drugs and alcohol to cope with the emotional fallout. A healthy relationship requires equal give-and-take measures. A person in despair, who is just beginning to wake from a strung-out stupor, is not yet whole. 12-step dictums encourage that newcomers remain abstemious from sex and romance for at least the first year of recovery.
Complacency
A major risk factor for relapse—whether into drug use or depression—comes along in the form of complacency. After having achieved a modicum of stability, a recovering person’s memory may fade of the painful impression which years of drinking and drugging to excess wrought on his life. Believing that he has beaten his addiction, that treatment has cured him of the disease, or that he perhaps never truly had a problem, his meeting attendance suffers, he stops participating in his therapy sessions, and he fails to take his medication as prescribed.
Lying
The moment an addict begins to deviate from an honest program, he puts his recovery in a precarious place. Even small lies harken back to the days of denial—when we told ourselves that we could have just one more or that we had used for the last time. And just one more was all the time. When one resolves to get clean and sober, it happens in steps; the gradations through time lead to change, step-by-step. Likewise, the backsliding begins by little lapses. And small omissions lead to major untruths.
Manipulation
Like fish to water or human beings to land, addicts become adept over time at manipulating the world to their whims in brilliant ways. Such behavior is problematic, as a deviance and a risk factor, to the extent that it fuels selfishness, dishonesty, and disregard for human life. To manipulate others, to use them as tools, as means to an end, is to distance oneself from genuine connection—and establishing healthy relationships is the cornerstone of healthy recovery.
Exhaustion
Often a byproduct of depression, exhaustion can impair cognitive as well as physical function, making it a major risk factor for relapse. Sometimes exhaustion can result from good intentions—enthusiastic about sobriety, an addict may overexert himself before hitting a wall. In fact, modern social science identifies the phenomenon as burnout syndrome: a state of chronic stress from prolonged emotional, mental, and physical activity without proper rest.
Burnout syndrome can cause one to feel overwhelmed and detached, cynical and unmotivated. Unable to meet high demands, an addict may turn to drugs either to relieve stress or to enhance performance.
Not Going to Meetings
Many of the aforementioned behaviors, which run counter to the tenets of the 12 Steps, emerge from slipshod meeting attendance. Meetings are useful for fostering a community for the recovering addict and alcoholic, which is important because addiction is an illness that isolates the soul. In the 1970s, Canadian psychologist Bruce K. Alexander of the Fraser University in British Columbia led an experiment into the nature of addiction, which he called Rat Park. Dr. Alexander proved his hypothesis when he made cocaine and morphine accessible to rats, which they could administer themselves with an auto injector.
After separating the rats into groups and housing them in different cages, providing the Rat Park colony with exercise wheels and food and a community of other rats with which they could socialize and mate, while keeping another rat in isolation, he found that the residents of Rat Park rarely indulged in the freely available drugs, while the rat in isolation dosed himself to death with cocaine and morphine. With this experiment Dr. Alexander posited that addiction is an essentially maladaptive social disorder. Viewed through the prism of the Park experiment, one sees how healthy social environments—such as what one finds in the rooms of AA and NA—can help people to sustain their sanity and sobriety.
Make a Relapse Prevention Plan
Creating a relapse prevention plan for drugs and alcohol involves identifying personal triggers, developing coping strategies, and establishing a support system to maintain sobriety. Start by recognizing the specific situations, emotions, or people that increase the risk of relapse. Then, outline practical coping mechanisms such as mindfulness, deep breathing, exercise, or reaching out to a trusted friend or sponsor. Incorporate healthy habits like regular therapy, support group meetings, and structured daily routines to promote stability. Additionally, create an emergency action plan detailing steps to take if cravings become overwhelming, such as contacting a sponsor or attending a meeting. Writing down this plan and reviewing it regularly can help reinforce commitment to recovery and provide a clear roadmap for managing challenges.
Call The Haven Detox Today!
Doing the next right thing is what we aim for, but doing just that can be easier said than done. Addiction fogs our notion of the difference between right and wrong, and recovery is a lifelong process of making better decisions in the hope of balancing the scales. A person who learns successfully to identify triggers learns also how to spot a relapse in the distance, before it happens, and thereby to pre-empt it. If you happen to notice any of any of these pre-relapse symptoms, you are not alone; reach out for help at Royal Life Centers at The Haven today.
