448 How To Come Back After A Relapse

What happens when someone with more than two decades of sobriety, thirty years as a trauma therapist, and a book in progress about her own healing finds herself in a hospital bed with a yellow wristband that says Fall Risk?

Today I sit down with Lisa Arrigo, a licensed clinical social worker who has been in private practice for over thirty years specializing in complex trauma, Internal Family Systems, and somatic work. She is also a woman in long-term recovery who relapsed in 2022 after twenty-two years sober. She was not white-knuckling it. She was getting her makeup done before a fundraising event when someone offered her a couple of lines of cocaine, and a part of her that she had stopped paying attention to said yes before her thinking brain could get a word in. Three months later she overdosed.

Lisa gives the clearest explanation of relapse I have ever heard, and then she shows us the way back.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why all addictions begin as coping strategies, and how that changes the question from what is wrong with me to what happened to me

• How epigenetics, in-utero stress, and early attachment wounds wire a nervous system for survival long before the first drink

• Why trauma does not know time, and how memories surface as panic and sensation with no story attached

• What emotional relapse looks like from the inside, and the warning signs Lisa missed in herself

• Why shame, not the substance, is what keeps people from coming back, and how to step out of the shame bath

So without further delay, please enjoy this episode, and let me know what you think!

SHOW NOTES:

Guest Website: https://lisaarrigo.com