Originally Posted by
Aysha 
The definition of insanity in most recovery programs is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.
So I am guesing thats when a person keeps going out thinking that it will be different this time. They can handle it, just one wont hurt and so on.
So when a person goes into recovery over and over again expecting different results. Doing the same program or a different one. Isnt that basiclly the same thing?
Interested to see what you all think.
Doing the same thing..whatever that may be over and over expecting different results... Going back over and over or going back into recovery over and over..Keep coming back.
Great topic, since I have some experience here. I am assuming you are referring to the people that "relapse" over and over, and yet keep coming back to the same "program" and doing the same thing over and over again, right?
Let's not sugarcoat things. We've all seen them, the people going in and out of the rooms for YEARS, often DECADES, and yet with well under a year sober. I was the king of the 30-day chip, got a few 90 day ones, a few six month chips, etc, and I certainly wasn't alone in this. They would call these the "constitutionally incapables," as DayTrader illustrated in this post regarding someone who relapsed after ten years:
Originally Posted by
DayTrader I'll tell ya this Kelly.....he may have had 10 years since his last drink but the guy never got truly sober....
"Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program.......... they are (sic) incapable of being honest with themselves.......incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty...."
Every time you go back, it's always the same. Did you leave something out of your 4th Step? Maybe you were less than honest? Maybe you didn't fully accept Step 1? You need to concede powerlessness and go back and work the steps again, start your 90-in-90 again, do more service work, etc, etc. LexieCat's post above is a case in point.
So, to answer your question, which I also asked myself eventually, is:
YES! - THAT IS INSANITY.
Somewhat by accident, I ran across a book at Barnes and Noble titled
"Rational Recovery: The New Cure for Substance Addiction" by Jack Trimpey. I wasn't expecting much, since I had read a whole slew of "recovery" books before, and not one of them had anything in them about how to actually stay quit, but to my surprise, this one did. It described something called "Addictive Voice Recognition Technique" or AVRT, hence my handle on here.
Since then, I have been sober as a judge, although I did still hang around AA for a long time after that, passing along a copy of that book to other constitutionally incapables. This didn't go over too well in general, but many of those people have since stopped relapsing and have thanked me for letting them know about a different approach. I always tell them that there is no need to thank me, and to just spread the word to others in need.
My advice is, if you've been doing something over and over again and have gotten nowhere, don't listen to the people who offer the same solution and tell you that
YOU are the problem, because you may simply have a temperament that requires a different approach. You can't fit a square peg into a round hole, so to speak.
TRY SOMETHING ELSE INSTEAD - UP TO AND INCLUDING A DIFFERENT "PROGRAM"