Relapse Isn't "Failure"

The term relapse has a negative connotation. It kind of conotes failure that you were doing well and now you have fallen down fallen off the wagon so to speak which is a you know common term. In the AA program uh you could have 10 years of sobriety and if you go out and drink you start your day count back at one. In the harm reduction model

we look at it differently. We look for any evidence of progress not perfection. If somebody uh has a drinking episode after a period of sobriety or a period of marketkedly reduced use where they're moderating and then all of a sudden they have an intensive drinking episode, we look at it as a bump in the road. We

look at it as simply a hurdle to be gotten past. We focus on the progress not at the on the setback. We don't term it relapse as I said before and we encourage the person to learn from that experience and and move on. For decades,

the uh addiction treatment field has been dominated by uh the traditional abstinenceonly approach based on the disease model of addiction of alcoholics anonymous. The disease model says that if you have developed a serious problem with alcohol that you are somebody who is quote constitutionally incapable of controlling or moderating your drinking within safe limits and that if you've already developed that problem, it's a one-way street. the best thing for you is to stop drinking and stop drinking for good, ideally for the rest of your life. So, AA and the 12step program is

an abstinence-based program. Uh, which started in the 1930s, by the way, and uh the early treatment programs that developed on the heels of that, of course, naturally became abstinence-based programs based on the AA model of alcoholism as a disease. That is, alcoholism was seen like pregnancy. you either have it or you

don't and there's no in between. There were no shades of gray. The idea that um there would be a program to try to teach people how to moderate their drinking was out of the question. It was

absinence or nothing, all or nothing. In recent years, uh another model of treatment has developed, another model of addiction, actually a way of looking at alcohol and drug problems, and it's known as the harm reduction model. And the harm reduction model says that uh there are many different types of drinking problems that they are problems that lie on a spectrum from mild to moderate to more severe problems that they're not all in they don't all neatly fall into one category.