I am sharing what I have learned about my own relapse, a nine-year meandering in the desert that ended last April when I returned to the 12-step program and its peer-support meetings.

Over the past five months, I’ve spent many hours in deep deliberation, trying to understand why I left recovery in 2014. It is difficult to recall where my head was at, so I’ve had to refer to any notes, emails, or journal jottings from that period.

My first question to myself was, “When and how often did I relapse?”, going back to when I first went into recovery back in 2001. I had ‘slips’ (relapses that don’t last long, followed by a return to a recovery program) but my exit from recovery in 2014 was a completely different matter altogether.

At the time, I thought I was making the best decision for myself. I felt like I was stagnating in the recovery world, that the people around me were not well, and that maybe I either outgrew the program or that I might have even recovered from alcoholism. I was reading all kinds of material that was critical of my recovery program and popular beliefs about its efficacy.

I tried to explain my newfound perspective to those around me, and here are some excerpts from my rationalizations:

To a friend who left the program before I did:

I realized I needed to deprogram to get more well, perhaps to even truly recover. After all those years, I came to question whether I was even an alcoholic, and certainly had read enough to question the disease concept of addiction…. Not even sure how I feel about spirituality, power, social bonds and community….seems like the program really did a number on me.

To a friend in the program:

I’m breaking free of the cycle of addiction/recovery, and, although it’s not been easy to also break free of 15 years of daily programming, I believe I’m in a better place and have a more honest and objective understanding of where I came from. I went through some periods of trying to enjoy casual drinking. I stopped when I realized it does nothing for me. I don’t identify as an alcoholic or as a person in recovery now. I miss the fellowship that comes with the program, but I can’t have one without the other.

And of course I thought so highly of my own path, that I wanted to do a masters degree from it. The following I sent to a professor in a university counselling program, as part of my statement of intent:

I am interested in diverse ways of knowing, conceptualizing, and healing addiction and trauma. My own experience has taught me that the dominant, paradigmatic model of addiction treatment, while effective in some cases, can be oppressive for those who diverge from the worldview in which it finds its roots. I intend to take my own experience in healing and apply it to gaining a proper academic foothold in the diverse processes that affect personal development. I also intend to focus my work on holistic processes of development and growth, as well as group therapy, drawing upon my community work in healing and ecology. My goal is to acquire the theoretical knowledge and practical skills necessary to counsel others as my vocation.

Clearly, I had made a break and was entering into, what was for me, uncharted territory. But eight years later, I was suicidal and in another few months would come crawling back to the same program of recovery I had left those many years before.

What happened in the interim? Well, I didn’t do a masters degree in counselling. I ended up leaving every community with which I had become a part of. I moved back home and only my family knew I had returned. I moved in with my father, lived off of savings from my scholarship, and isolated. For 13 years I had identified as a recovering alcoholic, and now I saw myself as neither an alcoholic nor recovering. I tried controlled drinking now and then, but while I had some measure of success in the controlling part, I experienced no satisfaction at all from it.

I was in deep emotional pain and didn’t want to face it. I was stuck.

While in recovery, I was hurt deeply by people I allowed to get close to me. I put myself in emotionally risky situations, and I had close friends who relapsed and died from their using.

Pain that doesn’t receive healing festers and turns into resentment, bitterness, and, eventually, anger. That anger gets directed everywhere, especially inwards. When my father died, after 18 months of my caring for him, I settled his affairs as his executor. I was already planning my own end. Almost everything that was of value to me went straight to the dump. I was grieving, but I had no one to turn to, having cut off my friends and being without community.

Looking back now, my attempt to emancipate myself from the world of recovery was in fact just me giving up. All my hopes and dreams had gone sideways, and my last refuge was my recovery community. Instead of allowing myself to be vulnerable and share my pain, I decided that my peers were not to be trusted anymore. I effectively sabotaged my last lifeline.

In denying and burying my own pain, I had lost touch with reality.

I was angry at people for failing me, hurting me, and in every case not living up to my expectations of them! Did the woman I moved across the country for turn out to be difficult to deal with? Did my academic supervisor put his own welfare ahead of that of his students? Did the woman who rejected me defy God’s will for her? And what’s the deal with this God entity anyways? For an omnipotent, omniscient being, it sure screws up my life a lot!

When I am hurt, I sabotage instead of reaching our for help. I blame, then I prepare to leave the scene of the accident. Life has failed to deliver, so therefore I must be standing in the wrong stream. I get out and go searching for a new stream—but I bring my pain with me.

The great expectations I put on those whom I rely on are a projection of those I put on myself (as explained in a previous post, ‘saved for a purpose’). My core programming from early childhood has always told me that the universe was going to deliver me into self-actualization. This was a belief that ruled over me from my unconscious mind.

The problem with magical thinking is that, when I believe ‘everything has a purpose’ and those put in my path are here ‘for a reason’, it feeds into that core program. But encounters aren’t miracles and people aren’t saviours – we’re all imperfect beings, each with our own set of problems, and things happen by chance. One important early warning sign is when I look at new relationships through a magical lens of ‘it was meant to be’, ‘serendipity’, or ‘was put in my path for a reason’. This applies to any kind of new connection.

A similar problem infected my spirituality during recovery. Belief in a higher power can be a slippery slope to despair. Whatever good fortune I experience ends-up tied to a self-centred belief that ‘life owes me’. That’s simply entitlement. My dependence on God was a me-first kind of relationship: I may have prayed “Thy will be done, not mine”, but I acted and behaved as though “My will be done, not thine.” If I was hurt, I would get angry at God. When life gave me lemons, I sought out the lemon tree with axe in hand.

The root cause of my relapse, therefore, was my lifelong blind spot: the core belief that life owes me. When people hurt me, when places disappoint me, and when things don’t go as planned, I feel betrayed by life. The pain would be severe. I reached for a drink or drug to blot it out.

My first addictions counsellor, over twenty years ago, told me that addicts relapse for two reasons: (1) losing sight of what’s important, or (2) just not caring. Having a blind spot is a way to lose sight of what should be important. I needed to see how my core programming impacted my ability to live life on life’s terms, but I could not.

Because of my blind spot, I couldn’t see the cause of my pain: it was not the person, place, or thing in itself but how I responded to it. I felt betrayed because of a mistaken belief that life owed me. I have since learned that the presence of this blind spot is not my fault – I acquired it in early childhood. Now that I have gained understanding, it will always be in my field of view.

Today, now that I’m back in recovery and immersed in the peer-support program, I’m not expecting anything from life that I don’t put into it. I am working under the philosophy of what can I give to life?