A note before anything else. If you have just had a drink, just smoked, just eaten the thing you swore not to eat, and you are reading this — you are not failing. You are doing exactly what the fellowship asks. You are turning toward the work instead of away from it. Many members never had the kind of recovery that did not include this moment.
Here is what to do, in order of how much courage each step requires.
1. Stop, now, where you are
The single most useful thing is to stop the slip from becoming a relapse. A slip is one instance — one drink, one cigarette, one packet of cookies. A relapse is when the slip becomes the new normal. The difference between them is what you do in the next hour.
If there is more of the substance in front of you, get rid of it. Pour it out. Throw it away. Put it in a bag in the bin and take the bin to the curb. Do not "save it for later." There is no later. The substance is the substance; it does not get more spiritual if you wait.
2. Tell one person, today
This is the hard one. Almost nothing in the recovery instinct is louder than the voice that says don't tell anyone, just start over quietly. The voice is wrong. Slips kept secret almost always grow into full relapses, because the privacy is the soil they grow in.
Tell your sponsor, if you have one. If you don't, post in the AWNA WhatsApp group. You don't have to write a confession. I slipped today is enough. The responses you'll get will not be what you fear. Members have, almost without exception, been here before.
3. Get to the next meeting
Do not wait for the next "good" meeting. Go to the next one. The schedule is here; the next one is probably within twenty-four hours. Sit through it. You do not have to share. If you do share, you can be brief: I slipped yesterday. I'm here. Today is Day 1. That is the entire share. The room will hold it. Members will text you afterward.
The fastest way to undo the work of a slip is to skip the next meeting because you feel too ashamed to be in the room. The room is, specifically, for the people who feel too ashamed to be in the room.
4. Look honestly at what happened
Once a day or two has passed and the worst of the shame is moving, sit down with a sponsor or a fellow member and walk back through the slip. Not to assign blame. To learn.
Members find some version of these questions useful:
- What was happening in the day or week before the slip? What had I let go of?
- Where had I become complacent? Was I going to meetings, or had I cut back?
- Was I in contact with my sponsor, or had that gone quiet?
- What feeling was I trying to change with the substance?
- What is the smallest, simplest practice I can put back tomorrow?
For most slips, the answers are not surprising. The slips that come out of nowhere are very rare. Most are preceded by weeks of small slippages — fewer meetings, less honesty, more isolation. The slip is the last domino. The fellowship calls the early dominos dry slips — abstinent days where the program quietly stopped being practiced. The work is to notice the dry slips before the wet one.
5. Begin again, ordinarily
Day 1 starts again. You do not have to do penance. You do not have to "earn back" your time. The clock resets, and that is all the clock does.
Some members count their abstinence in continuous days from their last slip. Some members count from the first time they tried. The fellowship does not adjudicate this. What matters is that today is sober.
If you had ninety days and lost them, the ninety days are not gone. The work that those ninety days did in you is still in you. What is gone is the number. The work is not.
What the slip is not
It is not proof that you are unrecoverable. Members with twenty years of sobriety have slipped and come back. Members who slipped repeatedly in their first year now have decades.
It is not proof that the program does not work for you. The program is not a vending machine. It is a practice. You can have a practice and still have a bad day. The bad day does not invalidate the practice. The practice will hold the bad day, if you let it.
It is not a moral failure. We do not get sober because we are good people. We get sober because the program works, and because we let it. We slip because we are people. Both can be true. Both, in AWNA, usually are.
How to make slips less likely
The fellowship's accumulated wisdom on this is unromantic. The members least likely to slip in any given month tend to be the members doing the most ordinary things: going to meetings regularly, calling their sponsor, working a step, helping a newer member, getting enough sleep, eating actual meals at actual times. Recovery is not advanced practice. It is the basics, repeated.
The members most likely to slip are the ones who stopped doing those things, often because they felt better and concluded they didn't need to anymore. Feeling better is not the end of the program. Feeling better is one of the things the program produces, and the program produces it by being practiced.
Come back.