Relapse is very dangerous. However, relapse can be a symptom of the disease. Sometimes there are multiple relapses before you get sober and stay sober.
Interpretation
Relapse is a common part of the recovery process and should be understood as a symptom of addiction rather than a failure.
David Sheff highlights the challenges faced in the journey to sobriety, emphasizing that relapses can occur multiple times and should not be viewed solely as setbacks. Instead, they are indicative of the complex nature of addiction, showing that recovery often requires perseverance and understanding of the disease.
In practice
In a support group, someone might use this quote to remind others that setbacks are part of the recovery process.
If you subscribe to the idea that #β addiction is a disease, it is startling to see how many of these children - paranoid, anxious, bruised, tremulous, withered, in some cases psychotic - are seriously ill, slowly dying. We'd never allow such a scene if these kids had any other disease. They would be in a hospital, not on the streets.
If you love someone who's an addict and their use is life-threatening, you don't wait until they hit bottom because that can mean that they're going to die. You have to do everything you can to get them in treatment.
This stigma associated with drug use--the belief that bad kids use, good kids don't, and those with full-blown addiction are weak, dissolute, and pathetic--has contributed to the escalation of use and has hampered treatment more than any single other factor.
Anyone who has lived through it, or those who are now living through it, knows that caring about an addict is as complex and fraught and debilitating as addiction itself.
Through Nic's drug addiction, I have learned that parents can bear almost anything....I shock myself with my ability to rationalize and tolerate things once unthinkable. The rationalizations escalate....It's only marijuana. He gets high only on weekends. At least he's not using hard drugs.
Along with the joy of parenthood, with every child comes a piercing vulnerability. It is at once sublime and terrifying
People think you get tired quickly when you are a diabetic. But I have taken about 190 wickets in One Day International matches after I was diagnosed for diabetes, and lots even in Test cricket, and never got tired.
If you can stand up for your faith when you're on top, you can stand up for it now that you're at the bottom.
When I look back at what I had to go through in black baseball, I can only marvel at the many black players who stuck it out for years in the Jim Crow leagues because they had nowhere else to go.
When Harvey Weinstein threatened to sue me, it was like the scene in 'Harry Potter' where an invitation to Hogwarts is coming in through every window and fireplace and every opening in the house.
Taking action is hard, but know what? Enduring a bad situation can be its own hell.
LGBT people are some of the bravest and most potent change agents and leaders I have encountered, and the most forceful defenders of the vulnerable and voiceless, because they know what it's like to be there.
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