Okay, I’m about to give you the sagest relapse prevention advice you don’t have to spend $10,000 on professional addiction treatment to hear:

The craving will pass, whether you act on it or not.

I’m not sure where I first heard that bit of wisdom. It might have come from my own addiction therapist. Every time I’ve repeated it to my clients, they’ve come back and reported how shockingly true, and shockingly helpful, it turned out to be. How repeating it over and over to themselves gave them the faith they needed to not use their drug.

Because the thing about being in the midst of a craving for your drug is that it feels intolerably interminable. You feel like you might combust if you don’t get it, or worse, like you’ll be stuck in some intensely itchy craving purgatory — forever. So to hear a voice of reason telling you, fear not, dear child, this too shall pass! is often just what you need. It can be the saving grace that allows you to stick out that craving for five more minutes, or even five more hours, until it abates.

The craving will pass, whether you act on it or not is reassuring in a way that another popular get-through-the-craving expression, you can always use tomorrow, doesn’t quite pull off. Let’s face it, a lot of us would jump at the chance to use tomorrow, and we’d spend the rest of today in obsessive anticipation. That’s the kind of promise an addict simply doesn’t forget!

Even when you’re willing to take the leap of faith of actually believing that the craving will pass, whether you act on it or not, it still begs one critical question. What in the hell are you supposed to do until the craving DOES pass?

SOBER breathing is a relapse prevention exercise I learned about back when I was a rookie addiction therapist, trying to help people on probation stop smoking weed so they could pass their drug tests. “SOBER” is an acronym that can help you remember the five parts of the exercise.

STOP

OBSERVE

BREATHE

EXPAND

RESPOND

❤️

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