Originally Posted by
janitorking 
i can't stop relapsing and it's scaring the life out of me. i feel doomed. i'm engulfed in pure terror. i don't know why i can't stop. it's all consuming.
That's me, exactly, at the end of my drinking. Pure terror. Despite a desperate desire and need to stop drinking, I could not. I lost every day I fought that fight.
You might think it's just semantics, but what you describe is not really relapse. It's the inability to quit drinking entirely. Just like my inability was. I did not have the power to do it.
When I gave up the lie (to me) that I had the power, and that some day I would get a grip on it, I started to recover. I surrendered and accepted the truth. I lacked the power to stay sober, and I was doomed as long as I believed I did.
Then it was a fairly simple matter of taking the necessary actions to find the power required.