Recovering from Relapse: Embracing Grace Instead of Catastrophizing
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”
Catastrophizing: A process where obsessive thinking, compromised rationality, cognitive bias, and a sense of impending doom collide like a four-way, head-on car crash — unlikely to happen, but paralyzing in the idea’s destructive power and ability to cripple a healthy, neutral mindset.
Cutting to a sharp, painful, but necessary point: I self-identify as an addict. The entirety of this bleeds, in dribs and drabs, into my poetry, lyrical work, short fiction, and other avenues of expression. Now it’s surfacing here. And if you’ll indulge me, I’m going to explore my most recent relapse, and how I’m doing back on the wagon, wheels creaking, frame groaning, mind throbbing, soul covered in bruises mercifully going from purple to yellow-gray.
It’s been forty days since I last put hard alcohol into my body, hating myself as I did so, due to a fistful of factors. Terrified to quit once the ball was rolling, due to the “kindling effect,” which is a phenomenon whereby the body and brain of a long-time alcohol abuser become resistant to homeostasis after the latest relapse. Acute Alcohol Withdrawal Syndrome (AAWS) kicks in once you’re out of the woods, initial withdrawal-wise, but the shakes, fever, nausea, cramps, delirium, and hallucinosis have largely abated. Hellish fun fact: I hear babbling semi-human conversations and the ghost of a radio tuned to 1980’s New Wave music when I’m near a fan or a freeway (my brain is a haunted house), while titrating off of alcohol.
Before this recent deviation, I had lived just shy of fourteen months without a single drop. I hope to illuminate here, by the end of this article, how someone in my position can reclaim their integrity as a person in serious recovery, cutting the self-destructive noise of guilt and shame, to focus with renewed strength on the path I have carved from world-weary pain, hard-won joy, and blood-deep purpose.
Forgive yourself for destructive thinking
Recognizing that I was conflating dangerous patterns with comforting lies, and spreading over that a layer of serious health issue denial, was the complicated key to snapping open these recent shackles. I had to carefully unpick the pile where shame, self-righteousness, fury, timidity, knowledge, superstition, bravado, and loneliness had congealed into a boulder I was throwing myself against, repeatedly, to cause enough of a concussion for poison to seem like plausible medication.
There are layers… You feel wronged: show them who’s boss by torpedoing your common sense more egregiously than that person ever could. A promise was broken or forgotten: grab the limb of whatever trust remains and yank it out of the socket. They don’t recognize your talent: trash the latest canvas, delete a promising draft, scream (without warming up) and destroy your voice right before a show.
These are the kinds of self-destructive things we do when our addictive thoughts are allowed free reign. If we wish to reach the next decade of our lives, but hopefully live far longer, we must recognize our triggers and retrain our fingers. Where is the safety? How does it work? Why do I have access to this weapon in the first place? What else can I reach and do harm with, in my personal orbit, right this moment, and how do I neutralize that potential threat?
Everyone, and I am not hyperbolizing, everybody on planet earth, feels self-destructive at one time or another. I believe that our silly, reckless playtime as children has a seed-kernel of danger to it, and we are testing limitations with our bodies and emotions—I climbed trees less often after my childhood best friend leapt from one (yes, of course we were playing Superman!) and broke his arm. Gravity, collisions, flesh meets earth at a rate of speed, and suddenly, I was not indestructible anymore.
The outcomes of self-destructive thinking and self-destructive action are myriad and impossible to fully predict. However, what we do have control over is how we choose to view ourselves, having survived the ordeal. Beating yourself up for a lapse in judgment only makes a valuable lesson difficult to recognize. Fixating on the “could’ve”, “would’ve”, and “should’ve” creates unnecessary friction and can lead to actual panic, when grace is what might best salve your wounds.
We mess up, all of us do. But if you’ll allow me to borrow from the Big Book, I offer that “We claim spiritual progress, not spiritual perfection.” And in tandem, a quote for a quote, via His Holiness the Dalai Lama: “When you lose, don't lose the lesson.”
Honesty without penalty
What you need is to be honest with yourself, without heaping on more punishment. You can take stock, find accountability, begin the walk to self-forgiveness, but first you must get stabilized. Use the emergency hotlines in your part of the world, and say the three most valuable words we have:
I Need Help.
Later, when you are stable and out of physical danger, look at where things stand. Have you injured yourself? Will you need ongoing treatment? Were friends or family members casualties of your negative behavior?
My hope is that what was damaged can be repaired, replaced, or left where it lies. My wish is that you will give yourself grace, along with the time and space to heal. My intention is that you remember what we’ve talked about here, and leave the catastrophizing to others.
Learn from what happened and take appropriate actions to amend your mistakes, but please do your best not to dwell upon them. As Shakespeare’s aging Lear says in a rare moment of reflectivity: that way madness lies.
Grab hold of your own agency
This is largely a practical exercise, and I am deadly serious about it. Once, while in a psych ward on an involuntary hold, a guard decided to start describing ways I could turn books and toiletries into lethal weapons. I needed to blot him out, to deflect —in real time— the poison he was pouring into my ears. It was difficult, because the environment was effective at making release seem elusive, comfort feel impossible. But I beat him and his cruel words, writing this today from a safe place, with full awareness of my own agency.
There are, unfortunately, large swaths of people working in recovery and mental healthcare communities, who should not be there. When I was a client in rehab several years ago, I watched counselors at my dormitory try and turn us against one another in order to gain personal information, or to manipulate us outright, seemingly for perverse entertainment or to make “power moves.” It was disheartening and enraging at the same time, especially when many of us were trying to run a clean program without backsliding or breaking any house rules.
Agency. What a megaton warhead of a word. Every single one of us possesses it, but so very few grab hold and wield it maximally. That was something I strove to communicate to callers during a recent stint at a crisis center. I believe that agency is akin to insight, to seeing oneself from the outside looking inward, an objective appraisal of one’s own psychological and emotional terrain. Yes, you may be in a repressive home, an abusive relationship, an institution where you are physically or chemically restrained much of the time, but the opposition can never rob you of who you are and what you believe about yourself. Ever. Like energy, agency cannot be destroyed. It is elemental, and in desperate times, serves as the ladder out of Hades.
For those of us with intimates that take even the most positive critique as an assault on their personalities or life choices, it is a “cold war” of sorts. We were learning to navigate a discussion where only one of the parties is interested in honest discourse, while the other is turtling like a boxer losing every round, and the losses (even if illusory) lead to a bizarre dynamic where one person is trying to remain engaged, and the other is running from potential hurts that are entirely imagined. Agency gives us the ability to construct a robust self-image, one that can absorb negative comments or insinuations, while remaining flexible and always able to act, in cases where a healthy self must be actively protected.
We have so much more control than we realize or are comfortable with, and applying healthy, non-destructive pressure to the levers of our lives is what we deserve for outlasting the wars within and without. Those that love you want to see you get better; my parting prayer is that you join their ranks, and love yourself back to life.
