For a long time I told myself a story that isn’t actually true. I said I tried treatment seven times and failed six of them.

I don’t tell it that way anymore.

What actually happened is I needed seven exposures before recovery could progress. Not six failures and one lucky win. Not ‘the wrong treatment program’, more was needed. 

Each one building on the one before it, whether I could see it happening at the time or not.

If you’ve watched your loved one go through treatment more than once, I already know the sentence sitting in your head. “We tried that. It didn’t work.”

I wish we’d all stop saying that. 

I want to offer you a different way to hold that.

Nothing learned in attempt one disappeared when attempt two started. It was still there. Stacking. A coping skill from the first program. A piece of honesty practiced in the second. A relationship repaired a little in the third.

None of it gets erased just because the outcome isn’t consistent yet.

Recovery almost never arrives in a straight line. (Addiction didn’t either.) It arrives in layers. And most people can’t see the layers building until they’re far enough away to look back and count them.

I couldn’t see mine building either. Not at the time. My family certainly couldn’t. From where they stood, it looked like round after round of the same disappointment. It took years before any of us could look back and see it for what it actually was.

Here’s where you actually have power in this. Your response to a relapse can help you and can help your loved one. Your understanding of the disease can help you both.

What if, instead of “you failed again,” the response became “okay, something else is needed, we’re needing to look closer at what’s missing”?

Not “you failed.” Rather say “What’s missing.”

That one shift changes everything about what happens next. “You failed” ends the conversation in shame, and shame is exactly what the disease feeds on. “What’s missing” keeps everyone looking forward, together, at the actual problem to solve. It’s the difference between closing a door and starting to look for the next one.

Why does this matter so much? Because “it didn’t work” leads us to give up. “What’s missing” leads us to stay in the process, and to keep doing our own work in the meantime; this is very often the piece nobody tells you about.

Your work doesn’t wait for their next attempt to be the one that starts recovery. It runs alongside it, the entire time, building your own stack while theirs builds too.

Speak soon,
Kate

P.S. If you’ve lost count of how many times you’ve tried, that’s not a reason to feel behind. It’s a reason to talk to us. Book a connection call with our team here: Book here.