Relapse Begins Long Before You Pick Up: Understanding the RELAPSE Acronym
One of the most important things I have learned in 25 years of working with people in addiction and eating disorder recovery — and in my own recovery — is this: picking up the drink, the drug, or returning to the eating disorder behaviour is not the beginning of relapse. It is the end of it. The relapse was already well underway, sometimes weeks or months earlier, in the internal world of the person long before any substance was touched or any behaviour resumed.