Most relapses don’t begin with a drink, a drug, or a destructive behaviour.
They begin quietly, internally, long before anything external happens.
A thought drifts in. A feeling follows. A familiar internal conversation starts up again. The body tightens. The mind offers a solution. Relief appears to be on offer.
By the time the substance or behaviour enters the picture, the real decision has already been made long before.
This explains why relapse prevention is not primarily a behavioural problem. It is a problem of perception, identification, and response.
What follows is not a programme, a rulebook, or a silver bullet. It is a simple framework drawn from lived experience, Hindu philosophy, and long-term recovery. It rests on three capacities we already possess, even when addiction convinces us otherwise:
- Intuition
- Intention
- Action
Underlying all three is a subtle but crucial shift in perspective: moving from Participant, to Addict, to Witness.
Your intuitive sense of right and wrong
Most human beings possess an intuitive sense of right and wrong. While we may not always act in accordance with this intuitive sense, we typically recognise it when we’ve crossed a boundary. Guilt is unpleasant, but it is also evidence that something in us still knows better.
Addiction complicates this. Over time, the guilt signal gets drowned out by noise.
Rationalisation multiplies, and consequences are minimised. Short-term relief becomes more persuasive than long-term happiness.
We eventually realise that our addiction is wrong on every level. Although it may have served some dubious purpose at some time or another, when we survey the wreckage that wanton pleasure seeking causes, we can’t justify continuing on our path of destruction.
If recovery were as simple as following our intuitive sense of what’s right, rehabs and 12-step groups wouldn’t exist.
The reason recovery is so difficult is because the problem isn’t a lack of values or awareness. The problem lives in the mind. Faulty thinking weaves itself into the fabric of addiction, drowning out sound judgement with a relentless internal noise that kicks in the moment relapse is even considered.
The difficulty is not a lack of intuition. The difficulty is that addiction operates in the mind, and an addicted mind is exceptionally effective at talking us out of what we already know.
The Participant: trapped inside the mind
Active addiction and early recovery are characterised by participation and identification with an addicted mind.
We accept thoughts without question. Feelings are treated as instructions. Cravings feel personal, urgent, and non-negotiable.
The internal dialogue is relentless:
- ‘I need a drink after the day I’ve had…’
- ‘It’ll be ok this time…I’ve learnt my lesson after last time…I will control it…’
- ‘You deserve it…go on…treat yourself…’
Being an addict often feels like having an evil salesperson living rent-free in your head. One who knows your weaknesses intimately and never takes a day off.
While you remain a Participant, these thoughts don’t appear as thoughts. They appear as truth.
And arguing with them rarely works.
Addiction is a mind problem, not the true Self
For a long time, I thought relapse meant I wasn’t trying hard enough. That if I could just be more disciplined, more determined, or more “serious” about recovery, things would finally stick.
They didn’t.
What I came to understand was that I wasn’t failing because I was weak. I was failing because I had mistaken the mind and its cravings for who I was.
Every thought about drinking felt personal. Every urge felt like my urge. I engaged with the internal debate as if it mattered, as if I could out-argue something that had been rehearsed thousands of times before.
I kept trying to win the argument.
The real shift didn’t come from winning it.
It came from stepping back and refusing to participate at all.
When you stop getting involved in the mind’s sales pitch and simply watch it unfold, something changes. A small but crucial gap opens up between the urge and the action.
Inside that gap, there is choice.
This is the movement from Participant to Witness.
You are not the addiction.
You are not the craving.
You are not the thought promising relief.
You are the awareness in which all of these thoughts and urges arise. From a Hindu perspective, addiction sits in the mind, not in the true Self, or Brahman.
The Bhagavad Gita and addiction
The Bhagavad Gita uses the battlefield as a metaphor for the inner conflict of human life. Arjuna’s paralysis is not physical. It is psychological.
He is overwhelmed by competing impulses, fear, desire, duty, and identity confusion.
Krishna’s response is not moral condemnation or motivational rhetoric. It is a radical reframing of identity.
Again and again, the Gita points to the same insight: suffering arises when we mistake the movements of the mind for the Self.
Desire, attachment, and aversion are described not as sins, but as forces that cloud discernment. When discernment collapses, action follows blindly.
From this perspective, addiction is not a personal failing. It is a predictable consequence of identification with craving.
The Gita’s solution is self-mastery, not through repression, but through clarity. Through seeing the difference between witnessing the mind and participating in it. This is achieved by acting in alignment with what is right, avoiding becoming entangled in the emotional noise of the moment.
A three-step framework for overcoming cravings
Once you can witness how the mind constructs a relapse narrative, you can intervene earlier in the process.
This framework is simple by design. Complexity becomes an enemy during moments of craving.
1. Intuition
If you are contemplating a relapse, you will almost certainly feel it as wrong.
Before my relapses, I often experienced a churning sensation in my stomach. The feeling was a mixture of fear and excitement. Fear because I knew exactly where this path led. Excitement because oblivion was being offered as a temporary escape.
The gut is not a poetic metaphor. It is neurologically significant. Through the vagus nerve, more information travels from the gut to the brain than the other way around.
That uneasy feeling is not weakness. It is information.
Your intuition already knows the outcome.
Listen to it!
2. Intention
Intuition alone is not enough. Once the mind starts negotiating, it will override vague good intentions.
This is where setting a firm intention comes in.
An intention is a clear, simple commitment to the next right action, stated without debate.
Examples might include:
- “I will call my sponsor and tell the truth.”
- “I will go to the next meeting.”
- “I will not drink today. I will get to bed sober.”
The key is not to argue with the mind. Don’t attempt to convince yourself. Don’t rehearse consequences. Don’t negotiate.
State the intention and move.
In the early days of my recovery, when cravings felt overwhelming, I would set myself a simple intention: I will not drink for the next hour. Focusing on a short window like this helped contain the urge. Cravings do pass, as long as you don’t get involved in them.
3. Action
Setting an intention without backing it up with action rarely ends well. If you tell yourself you’re going to a meeting but stay on the sofa watching Netflix instead, the relapse usually isn’t far behind, no matter how sincere the intention felt.
There’s often a certain energy that comes with setting a clear, positive intention. If you act on it quickly, that energy can carry you to the right action. If you don’t, it tends to dissipate, and the old patterns creep back in.
Action is the backbone of recovery. You can reflect, plan, and understand yourself endlessly, but nothing changes unless you do something different. This is true in recovery, as it is in life.
Acting “as if” is one of the most effective ways of identity shifting, or changing from the inside out. If you want to be someone in recovery, you have to behave like someone in recovery. Go to meetings. Get a sponsor. Engage in therapy. In other words, live as if sobriety matters.
Over time, those actions reshape your sense of who you are. After nearly twenty years without a drink, picking one up no longer feels like an option. It simply doesn’t fit my identity anymore. I’m someone who doesn’t drink.
Remembering who you are
A relapse usually starts with a single thought. That thought is picked up by the addicted mind, which is very good at selling the benefits of taking the first drink or drug, while quietly omitting the damage that always follows.
If those thoughts go unexamined, they gather momentum. The mind begins to plan. It looks for justifications, loopholes, and excuses. One I used to return to repeatedly was the idea that I needed to be absolutely certain I was an alcoholic. That maybe I needed one more experiment to prove that it really was the first drink that got me drunk.
That kind of thinking is insanity.
My real problem wasn’t the thoughts themselves. It was that I identified with them. I treated them as me, rather than seeing them from the perspective of the Witness.
Relapse prevention isn’t about fighting cravings harder or trying to overpower the mind. It’s about seeing the process clearly as it unfolds.
The Participant is lost inside the mental debate about whether to drink or not. The Addict is pulled by the raw urge to escape discomfort. From the perspective of Hindu spirituality, the Witness, the Self, Brahman, whatever language you prefer, is the awareness in which both of these states appear.
Freedom from cravings doesn’t come from winning arguments with the mind. It comes from realising you are not the thoughts making the argument.
Intuition lets you know when something is wrong.
Intention sets the direction.
Action brings it into reality.
You don’t need to perfect this framework. You only need to remember it when it matters.
Recovery isn’t about becoming someone new. It’s about remembering who you are beneath the noise.
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