The reason that friends, clients, family members - or even you - relapse back into active addiction after various periods of sobriety can pose a good many personal and professional challenges. Traditional recovery wisdom suggests that "all addicts relapse for exactly the same reason - to change the way that they feel." When attempting to build strategies for interrupting a relapse process however, of fundamental importance is to understand the dynamics associated with "Time Travel".
Time Travel refers to an emotional stressor that can occur on the road to relapse into active addiction in which uncomfortable emotions are intensified by previous life experiences. When time travel occurs it will diminish one's ability to cope with the challenges of present day situations or relationships.
The notion that feelings never know what time it is, is more than a light-hearted reference to the tendency for us to feel bombarded by the emotional memories of prior life experiences. Feeling-memories of the past can flood our current reality and generate or reinforce our perception that a trusted friend or loved one is trying to hurt us in some way.
A Time Travel experience is an emotional flashback. When you are Time Traveling, you are emotionally reacting to a present life situation or event as if it contains the same elements of an earlier time in your life. This emotional flashback that occurs during Time Travel can cause you to view the behavior of others in their current experience as being more than just "similar" to the actions of someone from the past. During Time Travel, you react to a person in present time as if the person was the individual that you had actually struggled with in past.
A Time Traveler will imagine that a spouse is their mother or that a friend is an enemy from the past. Additionally, feelings from one's past seem to influence the physical reaction they are having to a present day stressor. In the midst of a quiet disagreement with someone, we can begin to feel physically threatened and develop a sense of danger, which is actually rooted in some past memory having nothing to do with the person we are frightened of. The memories of physical threat that we feel can cause us to view someone as dangerous when in fact they do not pose any real threat to us in the moment.
Feeling-memories are more readily accessible to us than the factual details of the events that are related to the flashback recall we are experiencing. The visual memories or pictures of the events in question can be the most difficult to retrieve. This phenomenon is particularly disheartening for many of us because we tend to mistrust our feeling-memories and require picture proof of the authenticity of the feelings we are having or a living witness to the event to testify to the validity of our feelings. When the barrage of feeling-memories is positive, like the anticipation of returning to a favorite vacation spot, the round-trip journey from present to past is a pleasurable one. It is unlikely that others will be hurt or feel rejected by our euphoric recall related to an enjoyable vacation experience even when packing and commuting hassles were lost in the recall processes.
When the journey from past to present is unpleasant; it generates what I like to call "dysphoric recall". Dysphoria is when we might feel particularly hopeless, uncomfortable, or unhappy. "Dysphoric recall" can precipitate or exacerbate a sense of being in danger or unsafe. It is important that each of us learns to detect when Time Travel is negatively influencing our perception of reality.
Shawn Leadem is an LCSW and CSAT therapist at Leadem Counseling and Consulting Services located in Toms, River, New Jersey. He is also the Co-Author of "Ounce of Prevention: A course in relapse prevention" that will soon be released by Leadem Counseling.
The preceding excerpt is a partial description of the one of the seven phases of relapse described in "Ounce of Prevention". The task-orientated course in relapse prevention is well suited for use with individual clients and small group workshops or intensives. For information about advance order discounts please contact us by email: lccs@leademcounseling.com or phone by calling 732-797-1444.
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