I can appreciate that people may learn from their relapses, but this was not at all the case with me.
I knew before I picked up a drink after twenty five years that living sober was better than living drunk. I knew that I'd end up in the same place, or worse, when I started drinking again, that my life would become unmanageable, that I could lose my job and everything else important to me, that it would screw up my relationships, compromise or ruin myself financially and that my drinking would usurp much of my freedom. I knew that there would be medical and psychological consequences, that I'd hate myself for destroying my personal values, and that I could possibly die.
This is only one reason why alcoholism is so confounding, and is something each of us knows -- we knowingly take part in an activity that can ultimately destroy us.
I learned absolutely nothing of value from what we euphemistically refer to as a "relapse." I may have been reminded of things I already knew, but there was nothing new for me to learn in the experience. I didn't see silver linings in drinking after being sober for a time, unless not dying during my relapse was some sort of twisted benefit from my drinking. On the contrary, getting sober after drinking was probably the most difficult thing I've ever done, second only to having gotten sober the first time, but only because there was a first time. I didn't need to "learn" that.
For me, there are no rewards or punishments in drinking or in getting sober. There are only consequences, consequences that I'd lived and that I was very much aware of long before I picked up the drink. Yet I still drank. And continued to drink for three years. My relapse was not at all a learning experience which, for me, would have represented nothing more or less than a version of retroactive denial. Searching for a silver lining in my drinking comes dangerously close to giving myself permission to drink. After all, if there's some important learning experience to be had in relapsing, then why avoid it? Why not learn more and more with each relapse?
I can't rewrite the history of my relapse. I can put it into a pretty box and put a bow on it to make it appear to be something other than what it was -- a choice to forfeit my freedom and self-destruct in the process -- but that would change nothing. And this is why I do not drink and will not drink. Because my drinking remains a horrific chapter in my life that never should have been written, and there's nothing at all left for me to learn from that. I don't need any more lessons.