Relapse! It’s a frightening word for many addicted people and those who love them. It is especially terrifying for people who have established what they believed to be a stable recovery and the suddenly, for reasons they don’t understand, start using alcohol or other drugs again.

My name is Terry Gorski and I work at Challenges in Fort Lauderdale as the Director of Relapse Prevention Services.  We see people in this dilemma every day.  The recovering person thinks everything is going well, then things just start going bad.  Old problems come back and the harder they try to fix them the worse they seem to get. The pain and problems become so bad that nothing seems to help.  This sets the stage for the addictive thinking and craving.  “Alcohol and other drugs can fix my problems and make me feel better.  I want5 relief real bad and to get relief I need my drug of choice.  The craving grows until it seems unbearable.  Then the person gets into a high risk situation where alcohol and other drugs are available, people will support their use and there is no one around to support their sobriety.  So, in a moment of weakness, they give up and start drinking and drugging.

I have been working in the substance abuse field for almost forty years.  During that time, I have seen many people recover from addiction.  Tragically I have also seen many people relapse. Some of these people who relapsed died as a direct result of returning to their addiction.

These deaths affected me deeply. It seemed to me, as a young man and a new counselor that more could have been done.  The problem was, we didn’t know what to do.  As a result, early in my life, I made it my primary mission to help suffering addicts, their families, and their communities.  I was determined to find more effectively ways manage addiction and its related problems.  I committed myself to develop new and more effective systems for promoting recovery and preventing relapse.  In this series of blogs I want to share with you some of the key aspects of what I learned.

In the next blog I’ll continue sharing with you what I’ve learned.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 11th, 2009 at 3:03 pm and is filed under Relapse, Relapse Prevention, Terence Gorski. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.