Creating a Relapse Autopsy
Guidance on Running a Relapse Autopsy Following a Slip or Lapse
Slips and lapses in your sobriety are not uncommon. In fact, research shows that 85 percent of people relapse within the first year of their recovery. If this happens to you, take action to prevent a full-blown relapse where you become re-addicted to the substance. Conduct a relapse autopsy.
A relapse autopsy clarifies your thoughts and feelings immediately preceding a lapse. You can discover the events that compromised your recovery, applicable triggers, emotions, and warning signs that relapse was imminent. Then, you can put together a relapse prevention plan to get back to sober living.
Icarus Behavioral Health can help you walk through the process of conducting a thorough audit of your lapse with a relapse autopsy. Keep reading to learn more about how this tool can help shape your first steps into recovery.
What Exactly is a Relapse Autopsy for Substance Abuse?
The idea of an autopsy often brings to mind images of death, but it can be a helpful tool when it comes to relapse prevention. The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) classifies substance use disorder as a chronic, relapsing disorder. This should help take away some of the stigma and shame.
Conducting a relapse autopsy with your therapist or clinical team can yield some significant benefits when it comes to future relapses. Though painful, it’s ultimately clarifying.
A relapse autopsy is a way for you to reflect on the exact actions and emotional situations that led you to use substances again. This might be a mandatory part of your treatment if you are still in an intensive outpatient center, but it can really be done at any time.
Most of the time, people believe that their slips are completely random or that increased cravings will overwhelm them. However, the autopsy process frequently shows that there was an emotional relapse long before you picked up a bottle of alcohol, pills, or whatever your drug of choice may be.
There are unique stages of a relapse autopsy that can help you point to the moments that led up to your lapse in judgment.
Get Effective Detox And Rehab Options at Icarus – Call Now!
Emotional Relapse Often Comes Before Substance Abuse
You might not be thinking about using drugs or alcohol again at this stage, but your body is preparing for it. This is the time when you may let your guard down and get a little loose with your recovery plan. Something major might have happened in your life that left you feeling off-kilter.
The result is that your meticulous coping skills established in rehab and therapy might start to fall apart. If you’re a faithful attendee of Twelve Step meetings, you might start to avoid them. If you always work out to manage cravings, you might stop going to the gym.
It’s the little things that contribute to your relapse, even before you might be aware of them. This gradual process is so subtle that it sometimes takes emotional excavating to unearth the real reasons.
Mental Relapse and the Need for Relapse Prevention
Once you soar past the emotional relapse, you might find yourself firmly entrenched in the cravings that you thought were a thing of the past. Because your cravings can be strong at this stage, you may have a harder time remembering why you chose sober living in the first place.
This is the time when you should double down on your efforts to stay sober. Attend more meetings. Reach out to your therapist or counselor for helpful tips or to talk through why you want to use drugs and alcohol again. Maybe you even enroll yourself in an intensive outpatient program to get support from Icarus Behavioral Health during the day.
During your relapse autopsy, this is the moment that you will realize that you made a decision to give in to the cravings before it impacted your physical health.
What Happens Immediately Following a Mental Relapse?
For many people, the decision to turn to substances occurs immediately after this mental relapse. It will move from the mental battleground to the physical one where your body cannot resist the feeling for longer. All of your choices contributed to this one moment when you faced a decision: to use or not to use.
There are various aspects of a physical relapse that bear mentioning. Some may use drugs or alcohol only once and then get back on the straight and narrow. This is a slip that can be expected from time to time when in recovery. While concerning, it doesn’t necessarily have to mean you’ll fall back on patterns.
However, some people relapse to the point that they again face active addiction to the substance and must start from the beginning with detox, residential treatment, and eventually outpatient care.
How to Conduct a Relapse Autopsy
Avoid repeating the mistakes of the past by completing your own relapse autopsy. With this simple framework, you could dive deep into your psyche on your own or fill it out with the help of a trusted counselor. It could be the first step back toward sobriety.
What Compromised Your Recovery?
The first question you have to ask yourself is what compromised your commitment to sobriety in the first place. Was it a stressor at work or an argument with your spouse? There are no wrong answers about what led to increased cravings. What impacts one person may not influence another.
Identify key scenarios that led directly to your lapse in recovery, whether emotional or physical. Get to the bottom of where you were, who you were with, and the setting of your relapse.
What Were Triggers Present?
In addition to knowing exactly where you were in time and space, you should also perform a deep dive to see what was going on behind the scenes. Did someone say something that reminded you of alcohol or drug use, triggering a craving? Were there specific events that led up to the moment?
Gather the evidence now so that you can be better prepared when those triggers strike again–and they likely will come again at some point.
What Emotions Were You Feeling?
Behaviors are typically preceded by emotions, especially when it comes to addiction and relapse. Take time to investigate the deeper emotions that made you feel like using substances was the right thing to do at the moment.
If you had a specific thought or feeling that stood out to you, write it down so you can examine it with your therapist and devise a plan when you have that feeling again.
What Were Your Warning Signs?
Whether you started to sacrifice self-care or other forms of your treatment, there were likely some signs that you were going to give into temptation. Take careful inventory of your behaviors and actions to see if there was one point in the process where you could have put a pin in things and turned away from the relapse.
How Can You Plan for the Future?
Once you identify how your behaviors got to the point of relapse, it’s crucial to evaluate what you can do differently moving ahead. This might mean you need to add more coping skills to your toolbox, go to more recovery meetings, increase the number of therapy appointments you have each week, or find a safe person to talk to about your feelings.
Relapse prevention is the best thing you can do to maintain your sobriety and walk back into recovery with confidence.
Up To 100% of Rehab Costs Covered By Insurance – Call Now!
Get Our Full Support at Icarus: Find Recovery After a Relapse Today
Whether you need help with addiction for the first time or the fifth time, Icarus Behavioral Health in New Mexico is here to help you maintain your sobriety. We offer an entire continuum of care with our medical detox to an intensive outpatient program. Our clinical team will meet you wherever you are right now.
Let us help you assemble a relapse autopsy and recognize the warning signs of an impending slip. A quick phone call to our enrollment team will answer your questions, verify your insurance benefits, and put you on the path to healing.
References
- Sinha R. (2011). New findings on biological factors predicting addiction relapse vulnerability. Current Psychiatry Reports, 13(5), 398–405.
- MacKillop J. (2020). Is Addiction Really a Chronic Relapsing Disorder?: Commentary on Kelly et al. “How Many Recovery Attempts Does It Take to Successfully Resolve an Alcohol or Drug Problem? Estimates and Correlates From a National Study of Recovering U.S. Adults”. Alcoholism, clinical and experimental research, 44(1), 41–44.
- Melemis S. M. (2015). Relapse Prevention and the Five Rules of Recovery. The Yale journal of biology and medicine, 88(3), 325–332.
