Quotes About Relapse

there is no one circumstance in which the distempers of the mind bear a more exact analogy to those which are called bodily, than that aptness which both have to a relapse.

I chose a rehab center for Nic that was recommended by a friend who had sent her son there. The program lasted 28 days, after which he relapsed. Over the next six years, he was admitted to six residential treatment programs and four outpatient programs. He would do better for a while, but then relapse. Each relapse was crushing.

recidivism is human nature.

Listen, friend, I've known a lot of drunks in my time. You look at four, five months being sober and think it's eternity. But me, I see a man still brushing the puke from his clothes. A man who could get knocked right back down.

He had some taste for romance reading before he went to the university, where, we must confess, in justice to his college, he was cured of the love of reading in all its shapes; and the cure would have been radical, if disappointment in love, and total solitude, had not conspired to bring on a relapse.

Once a junky, always a junky. You can stop using junk, but you are never off after the first habit.

Lo he dejado varias veces. Dejarlo y volver a picarse es como ir a la cárcel. Cada vez que vas a la cárcel, disminuye la probabilidad de que alguna vez estés libre de ese tipo de vida. Es igual cada vez que vuelves al caballo. Disminuyes tus posibilidades de ser capaz de prescindir de él algún día.

If I quit all the things I loved cold turkey, I knew it would only be so long before I went back to my old ways.

Before, one needed God as the agent of recovery, the divine dispenser of grace. Now this need is developing into a love for God as God's self. This is a beautiful happening, but it brings with it a new relinquishment that can feel deeply threatening. Along with the sweetness of emerging love comes a certain shakiness about recovery. Recovery is no longer the single most important thing in life. Something else has taken its place, and the fear of relapse grows.

there is a saying used in twelve-step programs and in most treatment centers that Relapse is part of recovery. It's another dangerous slogan that is based on a myth, and it only gives people permission to relapse because that think that when they do, they are on the road to recovery.

If those underlying conditions aren't treated, the return of those symptoms may cause us so much discomfort that we'll go back to using addictive drugs or alcohol to obtain relief. That's the primary reason there is such a high rate of relapse among people who have become dependent of alcohol and addictive drugs. It has little to do with alcohol and addiction themselves and almost everything to do with the original causes that created the dependency.

After writing about addiction in a pair of books, I frequently hear from addicts and their family members about serial relapses followed by treatments followed by more relapses. It's not uncommon for addicts to go through a dozen treatment programs.

while you're laying off the hooch and working the program, your disease is doing push-ups and waiting for the day you slip. You can ease back into the dirty boogie or hit the floor running, but I promise you, the electric tiger, or your version of it, will come back with a roar.

Folks, I've been straight for seventeen days... Not all in a row.

It is kind of a strange thing when you face things in your life, you know like addictions, that often you will find that you will deal with it a little bit but then you will slip back into old ways.

If you can stop using substance or stop your addictive behavior for extended periods of time without craving, you are not dependent. You are dependent only if you can't stop without physical or psychological distress (you have unpleasant physical and/or psychological withdrawal symptoms) or if you stop and then relapse.

You think I haven't tried to quit?

Nobody who's ever gotten sufficiently addictively enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance and has successfully quit it for a while and been straight and but then has for whatever reason gone back and picked up the Substance again has ever reported being glad that they did it, used the Substance again and gotten re-enslaved; not ever.

We can either resist a drink, or we can't. And if we can't, then we precipitate back to square one.

What remains in diseases after the crisis is apt to produce relapses.

But darling, I am clean. Two years clean." "Cept the coke, weed, drink, pills . . ." "I said I'm clean, not a bloody Mormon!

Now don't say you can't swear off drinking; it's easy, I've done it a thousand times.

But she told me she was never going to drink again.

This stage [relapse] is hard because the behaviors people want to modify are embedded in the fabric of their lives; people with addiction issues (whether that addiction is to a substance, drama, negativity, or self-defeating ways of being) tend to hang out with other addicts.