Escaping the Relapse Paradigm
Motivational Interviewing for AddictionNow here's a thought that you may find challenging. How should we think about the recurrence of a behavior? How should we think about a return to alcohol use or drug use or whatever it is? In the addiction field, The term relapse got fastened onto. And I really encourage us to let go of the concept of relapse. Because it simply describes behavior. The very behavior that brought the person in the treatment in the first place, But it adds to it some moralistic baggage.
I mean, relapse sounds like you did something really bad, and it's your fault. In addition to that, the term relapse has the assumption that there are only two possible outcomes. One is perfection, and the other is disaster with nothing in between so that any recurrence of the previous behavior is a disaster. And even we seem to think you're back to zero. You have lost all the progress that you made.
Well, that's just not so. We don't do that with any other chronic illness, and we don't really shame the person for it. But in the addiction field, we've taken that as normal. And language matters. We convey assumptions and expectations with the words that we use.