How I Help Clients Leverage the Relapse Experience. #relapseprevention #addictionrecovery

Hey y'all, how you doing? How's it going? Today we're going to talk about relapse and specifically how to leverage a relapse, how to get the most out of it, how to change your perception from this is the end of the world, I'm a failure, I'm starting over, I have to get a new white chip, to this is the best thing that's ever happened to me. So stick around. My name is Dr. Dallas Bragg. I'm a sobriety coach. I work mainly with gay men recovering from crystal meth. However, I can work with anyone and I have worked with other addictions or other type of coaching. Anyway, let's look at what I have come up with for my clients after a relapse, and then we use it in real time toward the next relapse. So everybody has addiction cycle. Mine is at 100 days. So 3 times a year, if you look at my journals and if you look at my behaviors, you can see that there is a— not a cycle, a spiral. I call it a spiral, and here's why. A cycle is you're going in circles. So if I were to imagine myself in a year going in 3 cycles, that means I've gotten nowhere, right? I've started back to— I stopped back where I started. And that isn't the case because each time in a span of time, your addiction cycle, you're going to make tweaks. You're going to do something new. You're going to learn. You're going to grow. You're going to get stronger. You're going to get wiser. You're going to use relapse as a study tool and a learning mechanism so that the cycle doesn't do this. It's a spiral up, right? So you're coming back around, but you're not repeating. You're going up, you're going up. So up all the way to sobriety, right? And so I have 3 of these spirals each year, and it's Kind of even calendar year. So it starts in January back over. Um, but everyone has that. And so most of my clients that I'm dealing with, if they've come to me for sobriety coaching, they're probably at a month, 2 months, um, maybe a 90-day, um, cycle of from one relapse spiral, from one relapse to the other, right? Um, and so what happens is we easily get Amnesia. We forget from one day to the next, um, or we lose track of time. So we think, wow, it's been so long since I've watched porn, and it's really been 3 days, you know. And so when you're tracking it and you're putting it down on paper, you can physically see, wow, that was only 3 days ago. Um, and then you also can plot out The ebbs and the flows within the spiral, because you're, you're gonna, you're gonna go up, you're gonna go— so what happens visually with that too is that your ebbs and flows emotionally and getting closer to relapse, you kind of go up, down, up, down, up, down, up to relapse, right? And then what happens? That's, that's what happens with, with the triggering behaviors. And you'll see once we— well, kind of once we get into the worksheet. So what I do is I have a living, breathing document that my clients and I fill out together. So I'm wasting time. Let me get to it. Okay, so relapse spiral tracking. Okay, so using your journal. I, if you're a client of mine, I strongly encourage you to use a journal. I never say you have to do anything, but using a journal has been the key for me to defeat depression, to get out of relapse, and understand myself in a very intimate way. So, but using the journal also helps you remember these dates. Now, I have some clients who just can't get themselves to journal. They will text me every day to say, this is the behavior that's going on, this is what I did last night. So, and I'll fill it in On the spreadsheet. So we take a beginning date, which would be, you know, the date of the previous relapse, and then the ending date of when the next relapse happened. So in this spiral, it could have been 2 months, could have been 3 months, could have been 6 months, you know, and that's fine too. But so we'll— whatever span of time it is, this is what we're looking at here. And then we dissect it. It's kind of like an autopsy in the— I think in the drug treatment world they call it that. So we're going to put in an approximate date. Let's— for this, let's just say 1/2. The behavior— okay, 1/2/24. Okay. And let's say the behavior was Um, I downloaded Grindr and scrolled mindlessly for hours. Okay, and so we're going to ask, is this a future self or a past self behavior? Is this who you want to be? And if it is, that's fine, there's no judgment here. You want to be somebody who downloads Grindr and scrolls mindlessly, that's fine. However, most of my clients, if you have been on crystal meth, you know that Grindr is typically the gateway to crystal meth. So obviously, if you downloaded it, it's something you don't want to have. So we're going to say a past self so we can delineate. And what you can do in that case is when we get to the action plan Is ask yourself, you know, when you are engaging in these behaviors, is this future self or is this past self? And that helps you make a decision a little easier about, do I proceed or not? Was this a trigger or yes or no? In this case, it's probably going to be yes, right? And so I'm going to ask you what your thoughts were. And typically, you know, it could be something like, I've done so well for so long. I can handle getting a little grinder, right? That's usually, you know, your addiction talking and telling you that you're okay, you can do this, you're a big boy. And it really has nothing to do with how mature you are or what a big boy you are. It just has everything to do with You know, behaviors that get you closer to relapse. Emotions. You know, sometimes there aren't any emotions. There could be an emotion like you were feeling elated over being sober for 3 weeks or whatever, right? Sometimes it's, I was feeling no emotions, right? Because sometimes when you're engaging in these kind of activities, And these behaviors, you are blocking out all emotions and all rational thought because you want to do what you want to do. And you know that if you listen to the angel on your shoulder, you're going to have to stop doing what you're doing, right? And so once we plot this out, and then if you have a journal, it's not going to be hard for us to date and, you know, fill this out and really see what— so if you downloaded Grindr and it's also related to a day where you were extremely happy or you were extremely triggered, then we can narrow down kind of, all right, in this event, why did it lead to Grindr? We can begin tying these behaviors to events in your life and/or also we can tie it time frames. So we can look on your journal and say, oh, every 4 days or every 14 days I'm getting back on Grindr. So we can put a safety plan in place in that 14-day range to make sure that doesn't happen, right? So we then— we're going to color code these as yellow or red. And sometimes green, if you would just want to put like a positive behavior in there, that's fine too. So this is a yellow behavior. And so when, when I'm with my coaching clients, that's kind of the, the, the lingo we'll use is, is this a yellow behavior or a red behavior or green behavior? It's just easier to say it that way. Okay, so then you go down here and you start to put the behaviors in their category. So here's the yellow behavior, and we're going to create a mantra, a phrase, something that you can say to yourself that's natural, rolls off the tongue, it means something, and powerful enough to center yourself and snap you out of what you're doing, right? So, and of course the client will come up with it. So a mantra could be, um, I love myself enough to stay off of Grindr because I know where it has led me in the past. Right, something easy, something that you can remember, an action step. So if you find yourself down on the grinder, what are the action steps? It could be call a coach, right? Um, meditation, meditation, go for a walk. So anyway, so you have this document here, and so you can actually Use it as a reference. Okay, I'm downloading Grindr. I'm scrolling my— I'm downloading Grindr. I'm going to scroll mindlessly for hours. What are my mantra? And then what do I do now? And we'll do the same thing for red. So these questions here will be when we're doing the quote unquote autopsy after the fact. So what were the most positive side effects of the experience? We want to we want to make sure that we are being very. Mindful of putting a positive, growth-oriented spin on this experience. Relapse is not a negative experience. It's a learning time, right? So what were the most positive side effects of this experience? And it could be a lot of things. It could be I learned something about myself, or the relapse was not— it was very mild. And there's positive side effects that could come. I, I was able to say no when I typically said yes or something like that. And then what were my, what were my most impactful learning points? Right. So that is, I can't be around a certain person, or I learned that I need to put a block on my phone for Grindr, you know. Something like that. Something that was impactful and that you can take with you. And then my favorite question when it has to do with relapse is, how could this have been the best thing that's ever happened to me? And when you ask the question that way, you tend to frame the relapse process in a way that makes it a, a stepping stone in your sobriety journey and not a stumbling block. You use this experience to become stronger in your sobriety journey. So that's, um, that's not the be-all end-all for relapse, but it has been very effective in allowing my clients to see visually and to work with a document as we go. And they learn quite a bit, quite a bit about themselves. themselves that they really didn't know before. So if you are interested in this document, I'm well— I'm happy to send it to you. Just let me know in the comments and I'll send it to you for free. If you want to schedule a session to fill it out for you, I do offer a 1-hour free session for anyone who is interested. I'm happy to to do that for you. And of course, if you want to work with me, I'm, you know, available. I'm accepting clients as well. But that's just a certain example of what we do together. So that being said, I'm going to put a link to a meditation in the, in the description here. The meditation is called Meet Your Addiction, and it's a first step in detaching yourself from your addiction patterns so that you aren't identifying with them anymore. Same thing with relapse. When you say, I relapsed, that attaches your identity to what happened. But when you say, parts of me relapsed again, part of me relapsed, part of me is still in the addiction cycle, that sets the tone to let your nervous system know that you aren't that, right? It lets the, you know, the universe know that you aren't that because you aren't your addiction. You aren't the relapse. Parts of you relapsed. So this meditation is kind of a first step to allow you to separate yourself from the addiction And then begin to observe it and create a relationship with it. Same thing we can do with relapse as well. I'll probably come out with a meditation for that too. So if you're interested, everything will be in the description. Hope that helps somebody out there and have a great day.