Data Point, Not Relapse — How I'm Learning to Recover Without Shame

As I've mentioned before in this blog, a lot of my writing comes from the This Naked Mind course I'm doing. It's a year-long course, with daily tasks and online group calls. There's an online community, where we're encouraged to share our troubles and our wins. It's mostly directed towards alcohol use disorder, but it deals with life in general.

One thing a lot of us in this community are collecting is "Data Points." In other circles, they're often called a relapse, a lapse, a setback, a bender — all words for falling back into old habits.

I've had plenty of them, in every form. Over time they became more troublesome, harder and harder to control. I'm starting to understand why.

Instead of giving yourself compassion and self-care, you give yourself harsh self-talk — how useless, worthless, stupid, weak you are, how you actually deserve the punishment alcohol is.

The new way is to take it for what it is: your brain has tricked you again, for a myriad of underlying reasons, to pick up an addictive substance. I have to try to be curious about why, and sit with the feelings instead of drowning them.

This sounds fairly straightforward, but for me it's not. I often don't know which feeling or thought to pick up, because there are so many. And often I find my willpower to stay strong just fails, wears out, or the sadness becomes so overwhelming I don't know where to hide. One place I've found to hide is at the bottom of the bottle.

So last night I had a data point, and that was what I was going to talk about. But I'm not quite brave enough yet. Practice what you preach, yep, I know. I'm working on it.