CrownCounseling                                                                                               An Evidence Based Psychotherapy Practice                   

Relapse Prevention Therapy (RPT)

Relapse Prevention Therapy can prevent relapse or help get you back on track.  Relapse prevention intervention strategies can be grouped into three categories: coping skills training, cognitive therapy, and lifestyle modification.  Coping skills training strategies include both behavioral and cognitive techniques. 

Coping skills training forms another cornerstone of RPT, teaching clients strategies to: Understand relapse as a process, Identify and cope effectively with high-risk situations, Cope with urges and cravings, Stay engaged in treatment even after a relapse, and to Learn how to create a more balanced lifestyle. Importantly, coping skills training helps you implement damage control procedures during a lapse to minimize its negative consequences.

Cognitive therapy procedures are designed to provide clients with ways to reframe the habit change process as learning experience with errors and setbacks expected as mastery develops, and to help clients understand how thinking can help or deter their progress. Finally, lifestyle modification strategies such as meditation, exercise, and spiritual practices are designed to strengthen a client's overall coping capacity.  In clinical practice, cognitive therapy forms one cornerstone of RPT, teaching clients strategies to:  Recognize erroneous thinking, Recognize justifications that sustain addictive thoughts and actions, Reframe negative thinking, Challenge self-defeating thinking, and Recognize how thinking supports or deters the cycle that leads to relapse or uninterrupted recovery. 

Look on the "Links" tab for an article on Addiction is a Brain Disease. This is interesting because it focuses on a central principle--at a certain point there is a shift in the alcholics physical nature that makes it impossible to go back to social drinking.  This scientific evidence is contrary to what many alcoholics think.  Alcoholic thinking is a system of beliefs--such as the illusion of control--maintained through denial and rationalization that holds together the idea in the alcoholic's mind that he or she can continue drinking without consequence.

The link is by the  Director of National Institute on Drug Abuse: Addiction is a Brain Disease

Below are select quotes from the article:

"...once addicted, the individual has moved into a different state of being.  It is as if a threshold has been crossed. Very few people appear able to successfully return to occasional use after having been truly addicted.

"…the evidence suggests that those long-lasting brain changes are responsible for the distortions of cognitive and emotional functioning that characterize addicts…

"Addiction begins with the voluntary behavior of using drugs, and addicts must participate in and take some significant responsibility for their recovery.

"We know that, contrary to common belief, very few addicts actually do just stop on their own.

"…having this brain disease does not absolve the addict of responsibility for his or her behavior, but it does explain why an addict cannot simply stop using drugs by sheer force of will alone.