If you’ve been sober and consciously decided to drink again, I consider that a relapse.
If you’re asking whether one drink is a relapse, the number doesn’t matter to me. Whether you had one drink or twenty, calling it a slip doesn’t change what happened, and calling it a relapse doesn’t make you a bad person or erase everything you learned while you were sober.
There is an obvious exception. If you’re at a party, accidentally pick up somebody else’s drink, take a sip, realize there’s alcohol in it and stop, I don’t consider that a relapse. There was no conscious effort to drink.
But if you made the decision to drink and now you’re asking whether one drink really counts, I think there may be another question underneath the question:
Is there some way I can make what happened count less?
I understand why someone would want the answer to be yes, especially if they had years of sobriety. But I’m not interested in beating somebody up because they drank, and I’m also not interested in helping them minimize what happened.
Why I Don’t Like Minimizing It as a “Slip”
My problem isn’t that slip is a bad word or that relapse is some kind of derogatory label. My problem is when the softer word is being used to avoid looking honestly at what happened.
It was only one. I didn’t get drunk. Nothing bad happened. Nobody knew. I came right back.
All of that may be true.
You still drank.
Calling it something softer because I don’t want to acknowledge what happened doesn’t change what happened. It may just make it easier for me to avoid looking at it honestly.
This is one of those places where I can be very direct with somebody. Alcoholism can kill you. I’ve known people who relapsed and didn’t make it back. I’m not going to sugarcoat what happened just to make you feel better about it when telling you the truth might help save your life.
That doesn’t mean I’m going to berate you. It means I’m going to call what happened what I believe it is.
You relapsed. Now let’s do something about it.
Yes, Your Sobriety Date Changes
I’ve heard versions of the same argument over the years. Someone had five years sober, or eight years, or twenty years. They drank one night, came right back, and now they don’t understand why all those years should disappear.
They don’t disappear.
But the continuous sobriety clock does reset.
If you had eight years of continuous sobriety and drank, you no longer have eight years of continuous sobriety. There was drinking in the middle. That’s not punishment. That’s simply what the word continuous means.
If you’re my sponsee, I’m going to tell you it’s time to pick up a white chip, and if you want to continue working with me, we’re going to start back through the Steps.
If I don’t sponsor you, I’m not going to run your recovery for you. I may ask whether you’re going to pick up a chip or whether you’ve talked with your sponsor about what happened. Generally, I don’t give unsolicited directions to other alcoholics. A sponsee has specifically asked me to help guide them, so that relationship is different.
But if somebody asks me whether I think their sobriety date changes after they consciously drank, my answer is yes.
Because they drank.
Your Clock Reset. Your Experience Didn’t.
This is the part I don’t want somebody to miss.
Time is time. That’s just a clock.
Suppose you had eight years sober and six of those were good years of going to meetings, working the Steps, praying, helping other alcoholics, talking with a sponsor and being part of a recovery community. Resetting your sobriety date doesn’t erase any of that experience.
You know what taking those actions can do. You’ve experienced the changes they can produce in your life. You know what it feels like to build a routine around recovery and see your life get better.
Somebody coming in for the first time doesn’t know that yet. They’re being asked to take actions based largely on other people’s experience and trust that life can become different. In some ways, not knowing how good things can get makes those first actions harder.
You’ve already seen it. And now you may have another piece of experience you didn’t have before: you may know what can happen when you stop doing some of those things.
Your recovery experience didn’t disappear. Use it this time.
Don’t Let Pride Keep You From Picking Up the White Chip
I understand why someone with years of sobriety might not want to walk into a meeting and pick up a white chip. Yesterday everybody thought you had ten years. Now you’re telling them you drank and have a day.
Pride can make that difficult. Shame can make it even harder. You may want to quietly change your sobriety date and hope nobody asks questions, or convince yourself that one drink shouldn’t really require you to start the clock again.
But I think the people in that room need you.
They need people with thirty days, one year, ten years and twenty years. And sometimes they need the person who used to have twenty years and has one day today.
We all need the reminder that long-term sobriety doesn’t make any of us immune to drinking again. We also need to see that somebody can relapse, come back, own what happened and start again.
Hopefully the relapse doesn’t kill you. That’s a very real possibility, and I’ve known too many people who didn’t make it back. If you did make it back, don’t let pride keep you from being honest about it.
Stop Debating the Word and Start Investigating What Happened
Once we’ve established what happened, I don’t think spending another three hours debating whether slip or relapse sounds better is going to help much.
I’d rather start looking at how you got there.
That investigation can go back days, weeks, months or longer. Everybody’s progression is different. What I’m looking for is where their actions started to change and how far they eventually slid.
Maybe meetings went from four times a week to three, and eventually to one. Prayer became inconsistent. Calls to a sponsor became less frequent. Maybe a meeting that never bothered you before suddenly became filled with people who irritated you, even though nothing about the meeting had really changed.
When did those changes start?
With a sponsee, some things are easier for me to see. I know when they stopped calling me regularly. I know when we stopped meeting as often. But there may be other changes I can’t see until we start walking backward together.
That’s why I think reviewing a relapse with somebody else matters. I wrote more about those gradual changes in What Are the Warning Signs I’m Heading Toward Relapse?. The progression can be subtle enough that I don’t recognize it while I’m living it.
Afterward, I have an opportunity to go back with somebody else and look at the whole thing.
You Didn’t Lose Everything
I’ve had people talk about everything they lost because of their drinking.
Sometimes my response is direct:
“You didn’t lose everything. You gave it away by your own actions.”
I’m not saying every bad thing that happens in somebody’s life is their fault. Other people have their own actions, circumstances happen that we can’t control, and life can hurt us without our permission.
I’m talking about the consequences that came from my own actions.
If I chose not to pay the mortgage and eventually the bank took the house, there’s more to the story than saying I lost my house. If I repeatedly didn’t show up for my children because drinking took priority and eventually they wanted nothing to do with me, I need to acknowledge my part in that. A marriage may end because of an affair, or a spouse may simply reach the point where one more drink is enough and they’re done. Either way, if my actions contributed to what happened, I need to be willing to look at them.
That isn’t about figuring out how badly I should feel about myself. It’s about telling myself the truth.
Powerless Doesn’t Mean I Have No Responsibility
There’s a fine line here that matters to me.
I believe I’m powerless over alcohol. I’m not telling another alcoholic that when life gets terrible they should simply make a better choice and not drink. If I could reliably control that choice through willpower, I wouldn’t need the recovery program I’ve relied on all these years.
But being powerless over alcohol doesn’t mean I’m powerless over every action in every area of my life.
I can be exceptional at my job while my marriage is falling apart. Then I can tell myself that the marriage falling apart is why I drank.
Maybe it was part of what led up to the drink. But what was my part in what was happening? What was I doing with my recovery while my life was getting harder? Was I praying? Was I talking with my sponsor? Was I staying connected to other alcoholics? Was I dealing honestly with what was happening, or trying to run everything myself?
That’s why those actions matter before I reach the point where the question becomes whether I’m going to drink.
I don’t take those actions because they give me control over alcohol.
I take them because I’ve accepted that I don’t have control over alcohol.
What I Hope You Learn From a Relapse
I don’t want somebody walking away from this believing their years of sobriety were worthless. They weren’t. I also don’t want them believing they’re a failure because they drank.
But I’m not going to tell somebody that one drink didn’t really count because that makes the situation easier to accept.
Your continuous sobriety clock resets. Your recovery experience doesn’t.
Now you have an opportunity to look honestly at what happened, own your actions, investigate the progression that brought you back to alcohol, and use everything recovery has already taught you.
When I came back in 1999, being done meant I was finally willing to stop trying to do this my way. That’s what I hope someone can ultimately take from a relapse—not shame, but surrender.
I am truly powerless over alcohol. No matter how much control I think I have over booze, I don’t have it.
And maybe now I’m finally ready to surrender my will to a different way of living.
Related Video
My own story included trying to control my drinking, getting sober for a short time, drinking again, and eventually reaching the point where I had to accept that doing things my way wasn’t working. In this video, I share that story and how I finally became willing to approach recovery differently. That experience is a big part of why I believe we need to call a relapse what it is without believing it erases everything we’ve learned along the way.
Leave a Reply