Addiction Treatment | The Illusion of Safety

The Illusion of Safety

Filed Under Beating Addiction |

margin of error
Photo by _gee_

My friend Trent over at the Simple Dollar website just reviewed a book called “Margin.” It’s a personal development book that explores typical problems that people have, how creating margin can fix those problems, and what the outcome of doing so is:

Lack of time — create time margin — enjoy more free time — less stress, etc.

Money problems — create financial margin — emergency fund — less stress, etc.

Physical health — create fitness margin — exercise, eat healthier — less health problems.

Emotional health — create margin — cultivate meaningful relationships and mend broken ones — less emotional turmoil.

This is an awesome concept, and a great way of framing things in your mind. One word that comes to mind is “cushion.” The goal is to take each area in your life and create some degree of cushion. This is obvious with money–simply build up a savings account for an emergency fund, and the money will be there when you are in a crunch, greatly reducing the stress of the situation. The idea of using margin to create time-freedom is also an interesting way to alleviate stress. Instead of a hectic, rat-race of a chaotic life, the goal is to create enough leisure time to do the things you really want to do, without having to sell your soul into slave wages for the rest of your life.

So you get the idea: margin is “cushion.” Creating margin gives you breathing room.

But now here is the million dollar question:

How does the concept of margin relate to recovery from addiction?

Here’s how: You don’t get a margin in recovery. Why not? Because you can’t “bank” your sobriety. It doesn’t accumulate in the same way as, say, your educational efforts do. Someone with 20 years of education has accumulated a certain amount of knowledge, and taking a few years break will allow that person to retain almost all of that knowledge.

Recovery is different. Someone with 20 years of solid sobriety is 5 seconds away from picking up a drink. Relapse can potentially happen at any moment. And if it does, it absolutely destroys 20 years of sobriety in an instant. In fact, alcoholism still seems to progress even during long periods of abstinence. People who relapse  repeatedly say that they actually “picked up right where they left off,” and then got a little bit worse.

Margin in recovery: merely an illusion

Most of us are familiar with the concept of margin, even if we don’t think about it much. For example, we all know that we have financial margin if we’ve saved up a lot of money in our savings account. But in recovery, we only have the illusion of margin. There is no margin because recovery is an on-going, creative process. We have to keep creating a positive life for ourselves as we continue on in our recovery. Continuous effort. That is the only defense against relapse–constant progress and vigilance.

Your 20 years of sobriety doesn’t buy you any extra margin….you still have to make it through today–all day!–without taking a single drink.

So remember: in recovery, you don’t get a margin. You have to keep striving each and every day.

Ask yourself: Am I still pushing myself in recovery, or have I become complacent? There is no margin.

Comments

2 Responses to “The Illusion of Safety”

  1. Lee on March 18th, 2008 12:28 pm

    “Alcoholism has been proven to progress during abstinence.” — interesting concept. Any facts to back this up?

  2. Patrick on March 18th, 2008 3:38 pm

    Good point, Lee. I don’t have any facts on that one, and all the evidence I’ve gone by has been anecdotal and based on my personal experiences. Thanks for pointing that out….I went ahead and changed the wording, because as you pointed out, there really is no “proof” of that concept yet.

    At the very least, we do know that periods of sobriety don’t buy back any degree of control or “normalcy” to someone’s drinking patterns.

    Thanks for your insight on this….

Leave a Reply