From Relapse to a Lifestyle of Recovery

How backtracking drives future growth - by Dean Perry 

The Phoenix Program at Las Vegas Rescue Mission met in my office every Thursday morning for two hours of mutual encouragement, support, and accountability. Membership was for those who had experienced the heartbreak of relapse either just before or after program graduation. They were our prodigal sons and daughters who had returned home to be restored and to repair their recovery plans. All had completed the Genesis Process, a relapse prevention curriculum, and were able to use their previous work to learn from their relapse and return to transition or aftercare within two to four months.

One spring morning our newest member began to share about his relapse with alcohol. It wasn’t his first time, and he started calling himself a failure. Words are important; so, I interrupted him and pointed out that Jesus never called his followers failures. Instead, he used times of failure as teachable moments. His grace in relationship and penetrating questions for the heart provided a means to move beyond guilt and shame toward growth and maturity.

By definition, a relapse is a personal failure, but it is also an opportunity. How you see it is how you will treat it. If we only see the poor choices and bad behaviors, then we can treat it with shaming words and punishment. But if we can see the person behind the actions then, like Jesus, we can speak to the heart. To do this effectively requires understanding what a relapse is, diagnosing what went wrong, and retooling the recovery plan.

Relapse: A failure in the heart and the brain

All of the Phoenix members had made a commitment to never use again . . . so what happened? Why did they do the very thing they didn’t want to do? The answer to this mystery is found in understanding the spiritual and clinical components of a relapse.

Spiritually, it is a sin and the cure for sin is confession and repentance. One of God’s healing promises for dealing with sin is found in James 5:16, “Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.” We practiced this verse every Thursday morning. Confession and prayer were big parts of our agenda. But I’ve also learned how important it is that the “righteous person” of James needs to be a safe person — to have Jesus’s heart of grace so that the repentant one can be vulnerable and confess with fearless honesty. Michael Dye, author of The Genesis Process, called this a person of grace who had “a relationship with a person’s heart and not with their behavior.”

The clinical component is just as important as the spiritual. What all relapses have in common is a unique emotion called a craving. Catch and cut a craving; prevent relapse. A craving is triggered by the region of the brain tasked with survival known as the limbic system. Regarding Process 4 of the Genesis Process, Dye writes, “When faced with situations that feel threatening or unsafe, the limbic system creates a craving for any behavior or substance that has been associated with survival or relief in the past. It is so fast and powerful that it overrides the region of the brain that thinks through consequences and morality. When the limbic system senses danger — emotional, physical, relational, or spiritual — it takes over. It does not care about long term goals, values, or commitments. It cares about survival. And it will reach for whatever brought relief in the past.”

Repairing a relapse begins with the understanding that a craving is more than the problem; it is a warning light. What’s it trying to warn us about? When we find the root issue that triggered it, we can create a plan to manage it in the future. But finding the initial problem requires doing the detective work of backtracking through pre-relapse behaviors.

Backtracking a relapse: Discovering what went wrong

After the initial trigger, it can take a few weeks to a few months before the relapse happens. A summary of this descent from recovery is: an unresolved problem or fear > a change in priorities > getting energy from anxiety and anger > speeding up > stuck in resentment > exhaustion > relapse. Throughout this period there are subtle, observable shifts in thoughts, feelings, and coping behaviors. The Faster scale by Michael Dye is a measurement tool that can show where a person is at each stage of pre-relapse. By using this worksheet as a personal inventory, a person can identify all the thoughts, feelings, and initial coping behaviors that were part of a relapse pattern.

Joe had stopped going to church and meetings. But as he learned, those problems were symptoms. For recovery he needed to be talking with his support and accountability people about the root issue that was happening with his family members. After backtracking with the Faster scale, Joe had a lot more data and understanding about why he relapsed and what he needed to do to prevent it from happening in the future. Now he had something new to work on in the Phoenix Program, and it was time to begin retooling his recovery plan.

Retooling the recovery plan: Making a plan on a good day for a bad day. 

After the backtracking session, Joe met with his Genesis coach to start working on his struggles with codependency, family boundaries, and resentments. Loneliness was another problem he needed to address, since loneliness can lead to saying “yes” to people who aren’t healthy. With the help of his Genesis coach and other members of Phoenix, he retooled his recovery plan to include the new pre-relapse behaviors. He met with his community-based support to let them know of his new warning signs. Now they had better questions to ask him regarding his thoughts, feelings, and changes in behaviors. Joe now saw that his relapse was no longer something that “just happened” or a moral failure. Now that he could see the triggers and behaviors, he could manage them.

Building a lifestyle of recovery

Recovery is hard work, and what we practice today is what we become tomorrow. When it comes to substance misuse, it takes three to five years before living in recovery feels normal. Until then, it is easy for many to slip back into old thinking and behaviors. It is important to have appropriate policies, procedures, and guidance in place when relapse occurs, helping individuals process what
happened, identify underlying issues, and take their next steps forward in recovery. It will happen. I chose to create the Phoenix group to be that place of healing, support, and accountability. Here, it was safe to be brutally honest, learn from mistakes, and find support and accountability to take the  new steps of faith.

Relapse is not the opposite of recovery; it is often part of it. When programs cultivate a culture of grace — where honesty is rewarded, vulnerability is safe, and staff know the right questions to ask — relapse becomes a doorway to deeper grounding in recovery.

Dean Perry is the executive director of the Genesis Process, owner of Dean Perry Consulting, and president of the nonprofit Genesis Process International. Previously he served as recovery director
for programs in Las Vegas, Nevada; Everett, Washington; and the United Kingdom. He can be reached at [email protected].