mistycshore

Hi gneiss. Funny because I was watching Dr. Phil this week (not my fav, but he's sometimes entertaining). He said that relapse is normal and part of the recovery process for alcoholism. Kinda blew me away because the only other time I've heard that was at a meeting in Canada. It's not typical of U.S. attitudes of recovery, fer sure.

I think addiction is part of a cluster of disorders that includes obsessive/compulsive disorders, eating disorders (anorexia, chronic over-eating), etc. To expect that there will never be a step backward is as unrealistic for chemical dependence as it is for those other disorders, IMO. Maybe spontaneous and permanent abstention happens in all those disorders, but I suspect that it's very rare. I guess I'm uncomfortable with the norm of pass/fail perception in addiction recovery that is flatly unheard of in closely related conditions. It's not helpful, IMO. A relapse of cancer means something very specific, and it's NOT part of the recovery process - it means tumors are growing. As you've noted, in addiction recovery the word "relapse" is not terribly meaningful.

A lot of the terms that float around recovery are problematic, IMO. Since the existence of those words is not my problem, I don't fret much about defining them.