1. Emotional relapse
2. Mental relapse
3. Physical relapse
The potential to relapse is part of the nature of addiction,
Recovery from the disease of addiction like other chronic illness is a daily affair.
If we don’t take the right measures to address our recovery on a daily basis,
if we don’t adjust our lifestyle in accordance with the requirements of our disease,
then we are bound to go back to ACTING OUT because that is how we cope with life.
In the disease of addiction, a relapse begins before we physically ACT OUT again.
Relapse is a process that goes through EMOTIONAL and MENTAL phases before we finally find ourselves in a place where we think we have no choice but to ACT OUT again.
When we go back to our old attitudes, old feelings, and old behaviors, when we stop working our program and ignore the support of our Fellowship then we go back to doing what we have done for a lifetime —
we ACT OUT to deal with or escape from life.
As they say in the Fellowship, by the time we ACT OUT, we have already relapsed in our minds!
Our emotions and thinking patterns require our vigilance, if we hope to maintain our recovery.
If we become aware that our attitudes and feelings are slipping back to our old and destructive ways, we can then take healthy ways to employ coping mechanisms and recovery tools to stop the process from disintegrating into a final physical relapse.
For these are the phases where we still have power of choice and control to stop our disease from sabotaging us into ACTING OUT again.