All In or All Out: Half Measures Threaten Recovery from Addiction

When you’ve overcome substance abuse and gotten clean and sober, you’re in new phase of your life that’s called recovery.  But recovery isn’t just one path for everyone, and it isn’t time-limited. In fact, once you’ve kicked your addiction through rehab, you’ll actually be in recovery for the rest of your life.

That is, you will be in recovery unless you relapse. Relapse, or falling back into addictive patterns and use, is the greatest risk during the first 90 days or three months of early recovery. It’s during this time that the newly recovered need to be most diligent. Telling it like it is: the truth is that you need to be all in or all out. Halfway measures will only threaten your recovery.

Early Recovery a Precarious Time

What those in recovery tell themselves at any given time is largely a construct of their minds. And we know what damage addiction to alcohol or drugs have perhaps done to our cognitive abilities. You could, for example, be all out of whack in your decision-making, your ability to delay gratification, to discern the right path to choose when presented with opportunities to use.

Sometimes it’s extremely difficult to gather your thoughts and figure out what needs to be done on a daily basis. Sure, you’ve heard the recommendations to go to regular 12-step self-help groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, but beyond that, you’re often stymied. Add to that the confusion, ambivalence, and the overpowering cravings and urges that sneak up on you and threaten to undo your hard-won sobriety and you’ve got a real dilemma on your hands.

Suffice to say that early recovery is a very precarious time. For some individuals, depending on how long they were addicted, what substances were their drugs of choice, and their general physical and emotional health, the first few months of recovery could be a nightmare. One of the most difficult addictions to overcome and one that has a high relapse rate is addiction to methamphetamine.

On the other hand, those who had only a relatively short period of addiction or dependence – let’s say they’d only been drinking heavily for a couple of months – may (stressing may) have an easier transition into recovery and be able to maintain their sobriety without too much distress.

It could also be that chronic heavy drug or alcohol users simply choose to revert to their addictive ways and that short-term drug users, otherwise healthy, also opt to drink or use again. Their motivation to use again, just like the uniqueness of each person’s addiction, is all over the place.

While it’s not possible to predict who will maintain sobriety and who will relapse, the statistics on relapse in early recovery are frighteningly high – when the newly sober individuals don’t actively work their recovery.

You only get out of recovery what you put into it. If you only do half-hearted measures, you’re sabotaging your chances for lasting sobriety.

Meeting Attendance Should Be Your Priority

When you’re no longer in rehab, no longer constantly monitored or supervised so that you attend your therapy sessions – individual and group – you have no one, really, except yourself to make sure you’re doing what’s been recommended for an optimum recovery.

Perhaps you thought that once you left rehab at the conclusion of your treatment program that you could just do as you please. Considered it a dry-out period, a mini-spa retreat where you got all the toxins purged from your system so you could go back to using and recapture that all-elusive high again.

Guess what? There’s bad news for you on that front. You’re never going to feel what it felt like that first time. Those incredible highs you once enjoyed on heroin or crystal meth or OxyContin or a combination of drugs and alcohol, or just alcohol, are never going to be repeated. Once you go back on them, you may think you’ll be able to get there again, but, the research proves differently. Your brain has been rewired, your tolerance amped up to the point where you need more and more of the substance only to receive less and less of the high.

Don’t think for a minute that pushing away thoughts of using are going to be easy. In fact, you might be in store to experience some rather prolonged and overpowering cravings and urges in the first few days and weeks following rehab.

[box] “When you’re in recovery, you’re very often your own worst enemy.”[/box] What can you do? Just give in and go back to using? That’s the coward’s way out, and it’s not what you signed on for when you made a commitment to being sober.

If all heck breaks loose and you relapse or fear you’re about to relapse, maybe you’ll need to go back into treatment. Sometimes it takes more than once in order for the coping strategies and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) or other psychological and/or motivational therapy to “take.”

But most of the time, when you’re in early recovery, you will be able to weather the rough patches – if you seek the support and encouragement of fellow members in 12-step support groups.

You simply have to put meeting attendance on your agenda and make it the highest priority. There’s a saying in the rooms about “ninety in ninety.” That means attending 90 meetings in 90 days. Does anyone really do that? Actually, many people who are having difficulty with staying sober do go to that many meetings in the first three months.

It could be several meetings a day in the first weeks, followed by going once a day every day, and then tapering off to several times a week. Of course, when you have a minor or major crisis, you can double up or go to as many meetings as you need to get through the rough patch.

What happens when you think you really don’t need to go to meetings anymore or cut back so drastically that you’re only going once every two to three weeks? This is what’s referred to as a half-way measure. You’re not really all in or all out. You’re just barely making your presence known in the rooms. What do you think is going to happen to your chances at a lasting recovery? Before you know it, something will occur that rocks your world. It could be a financial setback or your marriage falling apart. Maybe you lose your job or have a health emergency. Suddenly, that old craving rears its ugly head. Surely, taking that drink or using that drug isn’t really the solution – yet you may very well convince yourself it is.

Next thing you know, you’re back into your addiction. That’s the danger of thinking you don’t need 12-step groups.

Give Yourself a Chance to Heal

When you’re in recovery, you’re very often your own worst enemy. Not only do you feel like you’ve got to make up for time lost due to your addiction, you also don’t really hold out a lot of hope that you’re actually going to be able to maintain your sobriety. Most of all, if you’re like many in early recovery, you may not even like yourself very much. There’s been too much damage done already. You’re not worth it, that little voice inside your brain is telling you. You deserve to fail, it continues.

Rubbish. You do deserve to succeed, but it’s going to be up to you to give yourself the chance to heal. It’s certainly not going to happen overnight. It took you some time to wind up in the position you’re in right now (in recovery from addiction), and it’s going to take for your life to come together and begin to make sense again.

You’re not alone in this journey. Again, this is a strong reason to align yourself with people who have experienced or are going through the same things you are right now. They know what it’s like to question your ability to stay sober, to wonder if you’ve got what it takes to keep on going – especially when times get tough.

Giving yourself the opportunity to heal means also that you stop being so hard on yourself. You’re not perfect. Who among us is? Maybe it will take some trial and error for you to begin to feel more confident in your abilities, to gradually begin to make more sound decisions in your life of sobriety. This is all part of the healing process.

Look at recovery this way. The more you learn, the more you can act on what you learn. And you learn by acting. In this regard, recovery becomes a continuous learning journey. The more you learn, the more you grow. The more you grow, the better you feel about yourself and your life in sobriety.

Fill Up Your Days with Recovery-Oriented Actions

You can’t just sit around and expect that recovery will just happen. It never works that way. If it did, no one would ever relapse again. But, since there’s no magic pill or technique that will “erase” addiction forever – even though researchers are hard at work trying to figure out what causes addiction, what can stop it, or prevent its recurrence – right now, you just have to do the work to ensure your recovery works.

Get out of the house and end your isolation. When you remain by yourself, there’s nothing between your thoughts of using and using but a fairly unreliable track record and little experience in overcoming cravings and urges. The recommendation to fill your days with actions that are recovery-oriented is the only thing that makes sense in this situation.

You simply need to make a schedule that fits with your recovery plan and stick to it. Forget about whining that it’s inconvenient or that you’d much rather do something else, anything else. If you’re serious about recovery, you need to do the work.

Once again, going to 12-step meetings and hearing how others tackled some of the same issues you’re encountering can help in so many ways. Just when you think you’re about ready to give up, you’ll hear someone in the rooms recount how they felt just the same way – and then they set about doing this or that recovery-oriented task and somehow they were able to get through that confusing time without relapsing.

The more difficult it is for you to focus on keeping your recovery schedule, the more attention you need to pay to actually doing it. At this point in your recovery, you don’t want to have idle time. You need to stay busy – and be sure that whatever you do, your focus is on your recovery. There’ll be time enough later on to build up your finances or try to get a better job, a promotion, getting married or engaged. The first year of your recovery needs to be devoted to building a solid foundation.

You do that by going to meetings, working the steps, and doing everything possible to better understand your new life in recovery.

Worst-Case Scenario

What’s the worst that could happen if you only go half-way in your recovery efforts? There’s no great mystery here. If you neglect going to meetings, if you fail to get a sponsor, if you think that you can hang out with your former friends who are still using, if you constantly think about using and put yourself in harm’s way – you’re going to relapse.

Worst-case scenario is that you fall back into your old ways and you’re right back where you started from before you went into rehab. Maybe your spouse or partner leaves you. You could lose your job. You might seriously injure or kill someone as a result of drinking or drug use and driving a car or provoking a fight or attacking your spouse or children. You may wind up in jail, lose your house, go bankrupt, or develop serious health problems.

The picture isn’t a pretty one, and it is, unfortunately, too often the end result when people relapse and don’t do something to address their addiction.

Resolve to Make a Difference

Don’t allow yourself to consider half-way measures when it comes to your recovery. Being fully committed to your sobriety is the only thing you’ve got that gives you a leg up on actually maintaining it.

You can’t just give sobriety lip service. Recovery isn’t about words, it’s about actions. And it’s not someone else’s actions that count in your recovery. It’s yours.

Resolve today to make a difference. Go at your recovery journey with everything you’ve got. If you have doubts or are confused, anxious, depressed or can’t seem to figure things out, consider going for more therapy from a professional. Aftercare or continuing care, if it’s part of your overall treatment program, is something you should definitely take advantage of. If it isn’t part of your treatment program, or if you never went for formal treatment, inquire how and where you can receive counseling.

Remember this: if you are willing to do the work and are sincere about your commitment to being sober, you can find help. There are always avenues for you to pursue. It may take some research, but it’s worth it.

After all, you have your entire life ahead of you. You’re not in a race, sprint or contest. You don’t have to prove anything to anyone else other than yourself.  But it all does begin with you. What you do with your life from here on is, of course, your choice. Why not make your choice one of complete and total comm