When someone relapses after something terrible happens, I can understand how the thought of drinking gets there. Someone dies. A marriage falls apart. You lose a job. Life gets painful, and alcohol starts looking like a way to change how you feel.

But what about when nothing is wrong? What about the person who has been sober for years, has a good job, a good relationship, people trust them again, and life is better than it has been in a long time? Why would someone pick up a drink when everything is going great?

I think one of the dangers is that recovery can work so well that I start convincing myself I don’t need my recovery as much anymore. But I didn’t know that’s what I was doing when it happened to me. I just thought, I’ve got this.

I suppose you could call that complacency in recovery, but I wasn’t walking around thinking I had become complacent. From my perspective, my life was getting better and I was doing what people do when life gets better. I was living it.

Things Were Good When I Started Doing Less

There was a period in my sobriety when things really were good. I had a good job, I started dating the woman I would eventually marry, and the relationship was going well. I wanted to spend more time with her and see where the relationship would go.

There was absolutely nothing wrong with wanting that. I didn’t get sober so I could spend the rest of my life sitting in AA meetings. I got sober so I could have a life. A good job, a relationship, a family, and all the other things alcohol had made difficult or impossible were good things.

But as the relationship became more important to me, I started going to fewer meetings. It didn’t feel dangerous. I wasn’t making some conscious decision that AA didn’t work anymore or that I was done with recovery. I wasn’t planning to drink. I had been sober for a long time, my life was going well, and I thought I had this.

That’s the part I see differently today.

My recovery was working. My life was getting better, and because my life was getting better, it became easier to give some of the time I had devoted to recovery to other things. The change wasn’t dramatic enough that I recognized it as drifting away.

Eventually I was going to about one meeting a week. I still had a sponsor, but I had stopped calling him. So technically I could say I had a sponsor, but what did that really mean if I wasn’t talking to him? I still prayed, although that decreased too.

More importantly, as I moved away from meetings, I moved away from the recovery community that had helped me get sober and stay sober. Meetings were where I connected with other alcoholics. They were where I found sponsors, found opportunities to be of service, and surrounded myself with people who understood what I was trying to do because they were trying to do it too.

I didn’t consciously decide to walk away from any of that. It happened gradually while I was busy living the life I had gotten sober to live.

The Danger Doesn’t Always Show Up Right Away

One of the things that can make this kind of drift difficult to recognize is that nothing necessarily happens when I start doing less. I don’t go to a meeting tonight, and I don’t drink tomorrow. I don’t call my sponsor this week, and my life doesn’t fall apart.

I pray less, spend less time around other alcoholics, and maybe stop doing some of the service work I used to do. I still go to work. I still pay my bills. My relationships are okay. I’m still sober.

If that goes on long enough, it’s pretty easy to start looking at the absence of consequences as proof that I was right. Maybe I really don’t need to do as much anymore.

That’s where I see two different ways this can go.

The first is that life eventually gets hard.

That was closer to my experience. What started while things were good didn’t suddenly reverse when my life became more complicated. By then, doing less for my sobriety had become normal. When problems developed in my marriage, I convinced myself that spending more time at home might somehow fix the marriage and fix her. I knew I wasn’t doing much for my sobriety, but I had reasons for it that made sense to me at the time.

I eventually learned that I couldn’t fix another person.

The bigger lesson for this conversation is that what I stopped doing when life was good turned out to be exactly the kind of support I needed when life got hard.

When my marriage eventually ended and I knew I was headed into a difficult period of my life, meetings were the first thing I went back to. I needed to get plugged back into the recovery community. Through those meetings I found a new sponsor and became more involved again. I knew I needed to protect my sobriety, and being there for my daughter was a huge motivation for me to make sure I did.

I didn’t relapse during the years when I had drifted away. I don’t look back on that period and conclude that I must have been strong enough to handle sobriety on my own. I had thoughts about drinking, but they were thoughts, not serious temptation. I wasn’t hanging around bars, my then-wife didn’t drink, and there wasn’t alcohol sitting around our house.

The only real reason I can pinpoint for why I didn’t drink is that I believe my Higher Power kept me sober. Even my prayer had decreased, but I never stopped praying. I believe God didn’t want me to drink, and I don’t take credit for something I believe He did for me.

But What If Life Stays Good?

There’s another direction this can go, and in some ways I think this one is even harder to understand.

What if I start doing less for my recovery and nothing bad ever happens?

I’ve been sober for years. My job is going well. My relationship is good. My finances are okay. People trust me. I’m not waking up shaking and sick. I’m not apologizing for what I did last night because there was no last night.

Meanwhile, I’ve been doing less and less for my recovery, and I’m still sober. Eventually that can become evidence in my own head. Maybe I really do have this. I’ve been sober a long time. I’ve changed. My life is completely different now. Maybe my drinking wasn’t as bad as I remember it being.

And eventually, maybe having a drink doesn’t sound like such a crazy idea anymore.

Maybe I could handle it now.

That thinking is familiar to me. Before I finally got sober, I spent years believing I could somehow control my drinking despite all the evidence that said otherwise. I wrote about that in Why Do I Keep Relapsing?.

I think that’s part of what makes relapse when everything is going great so baffling. It isn’t necessarily that having a good life suddenly makes me want to destroy it. It’s that when life stays good long enough, I can forget how I got here and why I needed recovery so badly in the first place.

There is a larger conversation about Why Relapse Starts Long Before the First Drink. The drink is the obvious part everyone sees. There can be a lot that happens before someone actually picks it up.

For this question, I think it’s enough to recognize that the two paths can look very different. Life can get hard and I discover I’ve drifted away from the recovery I need, or life can stay good long enough that I start believing I don’t need recovery anymore.

The Good Things Aren’t the Problem

I don’t want the lesson from my experience to be that relationships are dangerous, careers are dangerous, or enjoying life is dangerous. Those are some of the reasons I wanted to get sober in the first place.

The problem for me was making more room for the good things in my life by slowly making less room for my recovery, without recognizing what I was doing.

That’s why today I still have a sponsor. I still go to meetings. I still pray. I still work with other alcoholics and try to be of service. I stay connected to the recovery community whether life is going well or life is difficult.

I don’t do any of that perfectly. There are days when I don’t feel like going somewhere or doing something I’ve committed to do. My head can come up with perfectly reasonable excuses. I’ve been sober a long time. I’ve done plenty. I can do it next time.

I’ve learned to be careful about resting on my laurels.

So when somebody asks why they would relapse when everything was going great, I can’t tell them exactly why they drank. I can only tell them what my experience has taught me.

Sometimes the question isn’t only what went wrong?

It may also be worth asking: What had I stopped doing while everything was going right?

For me, the good things recovery gave me weren’t a reason to need recovery less. They were a reason to remember what had helped me get there in the first place.

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Related Video

This video looks at some of the phases I’ve experienced in sobriety, including what can happen when life starts feeling stable and I slowly stop doing some of the things that helped me get sober in the first place.