Sometimes I struggle with the terms addiction and recovery. Firstly, some people don’t need or want to ‘recover’, they just want to make some changes. But even for people who choose to commit to recovery, I feel like labels can add to the pressure of making change. We don’t go from one to the other overnight.

 What about the space when we’re trying to make change…? The space where we’re recovering.

The language we use is important. Setbacks don’t mean that you’ve “failed”.

I hear people say all the time that they’re back at square one. That they’ve failed and are starting their recovery again. I don’t see it that way. I see it as being in the process of recovering.

If someone has been using every day, and then managed to only use for 5 out of 10 days, have they failed? I don’t think so. I think they’re learning what they need to do, and if that ends up being 20 days out of 100, that’s not failure either. They’re not back at square one. They’ve made some pretty great progress.

I remember wishing that I could just get one day up. To get 5 out of 10 would have been a miracle. Over time we figure out what we need to do. We figure out what works and what doesn’t. There’s no silver bullet with this stuff, no miracle cure. There can be a perception that if someone goes to detox and rehab that they’ll be cured and never use again. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The reasons we end up living lives where drugs and alcohol are an issue are different for all of us. The changes we need to make to our lives and the solutions we need to find are different. This takes time to understand and work through, and some things are far from overnight fixes. Drugs and alcohol have become a solution for us, but they’re not the solution we need. We need to work on the things that keep driving us back to using and stay focused on recovering, not expect that we’re going to get to recovery overnight… and we need the people in our lives to understand this too.

Remembering that there’s a difference between lapse and relapse is important. People are quick to say that they’ve relapsed, but they haven’t. A lapse is a slip-up, a one-off or maybe a couple of days, but getting on to it quickly, stopping, and getting back to doing the things that work. A relapse is when you've fallen back into the same old patterns and it's all become part of life again.

I remember getting so frustrated when people said that lapse and relapse are part of the process because all I wanted was to be free and in recovery. I thought it was such a cliché and just giving me an excuse, but it’s not. It was hard to accept when I was going through it though. Try to remember that it’s okay to be in the space where you’re recovering, and that’s how you’ll get to recovery. You’re not failing if you look for the lessons. Look at why it happened. Ask the questions. Try and understand it and work out what you can try to prevent it happening the same way again. And if it does, go through the same process, but don’t give up on yourself.

I tried to make change so many times. I'd stop for a few days, weeks, or months, but always find myself in the space of full relapse again with trapdoors that took me deeper. Eventually I went to rehab and it worked for me, but part of the reason it worked was because of all the mistakes along the way.

Rehab isn’t the answer for everyone though. There’s so many options available and it takes time to figure out what’s right for you. It might be a drug and alcohol counsellor, GP, psychologist, psychiatrist, SMART Recovery, 12-step program, day program, detox at home or at a service, or something else. It might be a combination of options. Just keep trying until you find what you need.

Rehab worked for me because it gave me three months out of life to focus on what I needed to focus on. I was also lucky that through circumstances that aligned, I was able to take that time. It’s not possible for everyone to take that time away from their usual lives.

I remember thinking after being there for a month that maybe I’d done enough and would be okay if I left… but I’d been in that headspace before, and deep down I knew it would be a mistake.

There was also something that a counsellor said over and over again that really got into my head. I need to be clear that this was just one of his sayings and that it’s not an evidence-based figure. It's not exact. He always used to say that addiction was 15% chemical and 85% life issues. I realised that I could detox for seven days and get the chemical out of my system, but that was only a small part of the process. I needed to figure out, understand, and focus on what life issues kept driving me back to relapse.

It's one thing to stop using, but it's another thing to maintain the change. Everyone's life issues are different and require different solutions. It takes time to figure out what they are, and that’s why we have lapses or fall back into a relapse along the way. Whether it’s trauma, homelessness, pressures at home or work, relationship troubles, mental health, loneliness, isolation, anxiety, depression, or whatever else, drugs and alcohol become part of our survival and coping process. They don’t help in the long-term though, and we need to find solutions that do, That’s how we keep recovering.

You don't just learn to deal with this stuff overnight. When you're making changes like this, learning new ways to live, there's bound to be stumbles… but that doesn't mean you failed. You're not back at square one. You’re recovering. You’re learning what you need to do to get to where you want to be.

I've even heard people who've been in recovery for years and lapsed or relapsed say that they’re back to square one, but they're not. They know what they needed to do to make it work. They might need to tweak some things, but that’s a long way from being back at square one.

Don't give up. Just keep learning. If something's not working then change it, tweak it, or stop doing it and try something else.

If you stumble, learn from it. Instead of describing yourself as in addiction or recovery, maybe you can say that you’re recovering and learning what you need along the way.

Like I said at the start, sometimes I struggle with the terms addiction and recovery… just keep recovering.