If you’re an addict in recovery, you may have already noticed this. Those who are closest to you are the last to believe you’re changing. Your wife, your husband, mother, father, children, close friends, don’t get as excited as you do when you celebrate one week clean, one month clean, or one year clean. They’ve heard it before. They don’t want to hear it again.

You feel offended. You wish they trusted you, believed in you.

Well, it isn’t just you. This is a universal phenomena. Your loved one is acting as your lookout. This is a good thing.

Your addiction was custom-made just for you or you would not be subject to it. It sneaks up in your blind spots. If you could see it coming, it never would’ve gotten you. It fits you like a glove. When anyone is tricked by your addiction, it tricks you first.

If you’re in a close relationship, you have a resource that others don’t have. You have a lookout. Your addiction was not custom made just for her (or him). It doesn’t sneak up in her blind spots. She spots it coming before you do. She can see through the deceptions more easily. She has a vested interest in keeping you safe from relapse. She could warn you that it’s approaching, if only you will listen.

It takes hard work to cover from addiction and eternal vigilance to keep from using again. Relapse can be expected. It takes an average of seven real attempts before recovery feels solid and, even then, you won’t know if you’re going to need eight. Moreover, addiction of all kinds will often go into hiding when it feels threatened, so that what appears to be recovery is really a more pernicious hidden phase of the same madness that troubled you before.

Paid professionals can help, they have the knowledge, they have the objectivity, but they don’t have the access your partner has. They don’t see you on the weekends and at night when triggers often strike. They do not have as much at stake.

Far too many people fail to use their lookout. The lookout sees the relapse coming and they argue with her, deny it’s happening, get defensive. This is a mistake. It’s as if a lookout on a ship, up in the crow’s nest, saw an iceberg up ahead, and the captain yelled, “You’re crazy, I’m not going to hit an iceberg. You never trust me. I’m going to do what I want. Get off my back.” It would not be good if a captain did that.

To be sure, many lookouts don’t execute their role too well. When they see relapse coming, they often make accusations, rather than observations. It’s as if the lookout, up in the crow’s nest, called out, “You’re hitting an iceberg again! Don’t you care about me?” They should just warn you that there’s an iceberg. You might be tempted to dismiss their warnings as crazed paranoia. It would not be good if you, or any captain, did that.

However, you’ve got to realize that you’ve hit a few icebergs in your day, already, and your lookout should be excused if she gets excited when she sees another one.

There’s a few things you can expect from a good lookout. Don’t be surprised when you see them.

· A good lookout doesn’t resign.

If your partner comes down from the crow’s nest and tells you that you’ve got to look out for your own addiction, you can figure that next she’ll be going off in a lifeboat. True partners do not resign as lookouts, unless they’re about to leave the relationship, or they’re a damn fool. She has to be a lookout, if only to guard her own interests.

· A good lookout stays awake.

She doesn’t watch like a hawk in the beginning and then forget about it later on. If it’s months or years since madness last struck, don’t be surprised if she still on the lookout. She has to be. That’s her job.

· A good lookout scans the horizon.

She doesn’t keep looking in the same place. The main thing to look out for is the way the madness arrived in the past. It is likely to come that way again. If, for instance, Christmas is a difficult time, then she should be especially on the lookout at Christmas time. But understand, the same difficulty can come wherever there is busy-ness, family contact, alcohol use, overeating, darkness, or an imperative to be merry.

· A good lookout is not deceived.

Addiction arrives in disguise. No one starts off drinking three six packs a day just to feel normal. No, they start off with a glass of wine at dinner, a beer during the game, or doing a shot with a friend. These things are all good things, there is nothing wrong with any of them in themselves. They are only evil because of where they lead. A good lookout sees through the disguises. She knows the masks that your addiction wears.

· A good lookout is jumpy.

She’s got to be vigilant. If you keep driving by that place where you used to score drugs, she should be seeing red flags. This may very well be the way relapse creeps up innocently.

· A good lookout raises the alarm.

If she sees relapse coming, she should say something, not keep that information to herself. You need to know it. She may not want to do it, no one wants to be the bearer of bad news, but this is what lookouts are for. If the addiction has given the two of you a lot of trouble in the past, she might not want to believe it’s back. If the addiction has already taken you over, she might get an argument.

· A good lookout keeps her eye on the hazard.

If your lookout spots a relapse approaching, she should keep her eye on it, even if you say it’s nothing. Don’t be surprised if she looks for confirmation in the form of a home drug or alcohol testing kit to eliminate suspicions. She may want to get a second opinion from a professional; sort of like calling in another lookout and asking what he sees.

· A good lookout keeps herself safe.

She shouldn’t be so busy being a lookout, watching out for your relapse that she gets overcome by her own kind of madness. Yes, everyone, even your partner, has her own kind of madness.

· A good lookout has someone looking out for her.

Be your partner’s lookout, just as she is yours. Watch each others’ backs. You can see her madness more clearly than she can her own. If your partner has been dealing with your addiction for a long time, she’s probably worked very hard to keep herself strong. Someone in the house had to function. The laundry, the cooking, the kids, the relatives, the shopping, and going to work don’t get done by themselves. She may not be accustomed to relying on you for anything; you just haven’t been reliable. That’s going to have to change. She needs a lookout, too.

If you’ve ever complained that your partner doesn’t trust you, let her be your lookout. This is how she learns to trust you again.

All this reading about substance abuse and recovery may have given you the wrong impression. You may think that it’s hard to stop using drugs. Maybe it is, but nearly everyone who has experienced both addiction and recovery say the same thing: recovery is far easier than addiction.

You’re accustomed to all the work it takes to keep up an addiction, so you might not notice it anymore. You’re not accustomed to the work it takes to recover. It seems hard to decline your first impulse, to be honest with yourself, to go to meetings, and to open yourself up to healthy influences; but, in almost every case, you will wonder why you put it off so long. It’s not hard, it’s just different.

Let’s look at all the work involved in keeping up an addiction. You’ve got to get the drug. It’s rarely cheap and often involves going to a bad neighborhood and dealing with unsavory characters. You often get ripped off, run legal risks, and have to act secretly.
Then, you’ve got to use the drug. It sometimes involves the fuss of cooking and the pain of needles. It tastes bad, makes you cough, or gets you dizzy. You’ve got to stand out in the weather or hide yourself in the bathroom. You sometimes have to use it, even when you don’t crave it; like when you pull out your cigarettes before going into a movie theater because you won’t be able to smoke till the end.

Finally, you have to recover from it. There’s the hangovers, of course, the withdrawal, the delirium tremors. You’ve got to deal with the fallout from your spouse, the disappointment from your children, the criticism from your parents. There are lies and excuses you have to think up, and then remember what you said to whom. There are health issues. You’ve got piss tests at work and teachers looking closely at your eyes at school. Judges and probation officers don’t take kindly to chemical use and neither do old friends who know how you used to be.

Oh, there’s also the phenomena of increased tolerance. The more you use the drug, the less effective it’s going to be. You chase that first high and never experience that delight and wonder again. It gets to be that you can’t even get high anymore, but you use only to feel normal again.

People in the beginning and middle of addiction seldom think of all the costs involved. All those kids, smoking in front of the school are not saying to one another, Look at me, I’m starting a habit that going to cost me thousands of dollars a year, will make me stink, cause me to be socially ostracized, discriminated when I apply for insurance, give me cancer and heart disease, and bring me to an early grave. You think that’s what they’re saying to one another? No, they’re talking about how cool they look, how grown up they feel, and how no one else understands.

Let’s take a look at the decisions involved when you make the choice whether to use drugs or not. You probably use in response to a distress of some kind. It may only be the distress of the craving, itself; or you may use drugs as a way of coping with some anxiety or depression. Either way, you experience distress and assume you’re going to continue to experience distress unless you do something about it. The situation is depicted in this graph.

The vertical axis represents the level of distress, the horizontal axis, the passage of time. Your distress grows over time, until it gets to the point where you are now. You imagine that it’ll just get worse. You feel you have to do something fast.

What do you do? If you’re an addict, you use your drug.

Your distress level plummets pretty fast. You think, it’s a good idea you drank, shot up, or smoked, then.

But, there’s one problem, you don’t know what would have happened if you didn’t use your substance.

I’ll tell you what would have happened. What would have happened is what always happens. Things regress to the mean, people get used to anything, thoughts end, feelings go away, you get distracted. If you don’t do anything, it looks like this:

If you knew this, you’d feel like a fool, using drugs. All that cost, all that risk, all those consequences, all to get exactly where you would have gotten if you did nothing.
Well, if you feel like a fool looking at that graph, then look at what happens when more time goes by and all the costs, risks, and consequences of using drugs play out.

How do you like them apples?

This same graph works just as well with almost all kinds of distress and other things we do to intervene: shopping, getting in a fight, avoiding issues, hurting yourself, or killing yourself. We rarely know what the consequence of doing nothing is because there seems to be an imperative to always do something to relieve distress.

I used to advise people to learn to sit with feelings. If you feel angry, sad, nervous, or scared, see what happens if you do nothing. Study the feeling, contemplate it, and experience it before you act on it. You’ll find that, whatever feeling you had just went away and didn’t stick around long enough for you to study anything. So, I don’t say sit with your feelings because your feelings don’t sit. They travel. Watch them go by.

It’s easier than you might believe.

A recovering alcoholic goes to a party in which there’s alcohol being poured. He’s determined to stay sober, but he doesn’t want to stop going to parties. All his friends are going to be there. They’ll be watching the big game on the big screen. It’s bound to be a great time.

He does all the things to ensure that he’ll stay sober at that party. He has good reasons to stay sober. They’re all written down on a laminated index card he keeps in his pocket. He brings someone who will support his sobriety. He has an alternative beverage. He has some lines worked out in his head to say if someone offers him a drink and some more lines if they persist. He parks his car so he can make a quick getaway if he has to.

Chances are, that person is going be successful at staying sober at that party. But, chances are, two days later, he’ll relapse when the pressure is off and he has no reason whatsoever to drink. I’ve seen it happen a hundred times.

What is going on?

Drinking alcohol got in his head. Not the alcohol, itself, but the idea of it. A lot of times, that’s all you need.

A recovering drug addict drives to meet a prospective customer on the far side of the city. On the way, he passes by the abandoned building where he used to score dope. He’s not going there to get dope, he’s just driving by. He has no interest in getting high. He’s been there before and doesn’t want it again. Things have gotten much better for him since he began his recovery. He has this job, for one. He’s back with his old lady. His kids are talking to him. Using drugs again would be just crazy.

But then, as he drives by the old drug house, he gets this funny feeling. Something tightens up in his chest. His stomach goes queasy. You know what? He gets a little high. He hasn’t done anything more than drive by the old drug house, but that’s all he needs to do. He doesn’t get as high as in the old days. It’s not like that; but the excitement is still there.

You know what he does? He goes on to his meeting. If he tells anyone about his drive past the old drug house, he tells them about how he was able to pass by, without relapsing. His old lady congratulates him on his success. He’s feeling pretty good about himself.

A week later, he drives by again. This time, it’s not really on his way. The same thing happens. He gets a little high; and, just like before, that’s enough.

A week after that, he drives by again. This time, he pulls over and has that feeling a little longer. You guessed what happens eventually. As they say in the meetings, if you keep going to the barbershop, one of these days you’ll get a haircut.

This is what’s known as a contact high: the high you get when you’re in the vicinity of your drug. The term is sometimes mistakenly used for the high you get when you imbibe second hand smoke or handle a drug with your hands so that it passes through your skin. You can get high by imbibing secondhand smoke and handling drugs with your bare hands, but that’s not properly called a contact high. A contact high occurs psychologically, not physiologically. It’s all in your mind.

We shouldn’t be surprised by this. It’s related to the placebo effect. When scientists are researching a new medication and want to test it, they will give the new medication to a group of people and study the effects. They’ll take a second group of people and give them a pill that looks just like the new medication. They will tell them it is the new medication, but it’s really just a sugar pill. The sugar pill is called a placebo. Then they’ll study the effect of the placebo.

Placebos always are effective to some degree. For instance, when they conducted the trials for Prozac, a popular and important anti-depressant, the placebo was effective in about half the cases. Prozac was effective in about two thirds of the cases. That’s not a huge difference, but I guess it was enough to say that Prozac works. Still, when Prozac works, it’s a pretty good chance that it works because the patient believes it will work, rather than because of some physiological effect.

People who believe that everything comes down to cells and chemicals are mystified by the placebo effect, but the phenomenon has been used and abused by both healers and charlatans, for good and ill, for centuries.

Words are the most powerful drugs used by mankind. Kipling

I once had a client who was very anxious. Nothing seemed to help her and the medicine she was taking for it was actually harming her. Her doctor hatched a scheme. He told her they had discovered a new, very powerful medicine. He would put it on her and discontinue her old medicine. The new medicine was a placebo, but he went through the usual song and dance doctors go through, describing all the side effects. He was making them up, but he needed to make it believable. She took the new medicine.

A couple weeks later, she saw her doctor again. All her symptoms of anxiety had disappeared, just like he said they would, but she was also getting all the side effects. She couldn’t tolerate the side effects, in fact. She refused to take any more of the medicine.
Here’s another story. I once worked nights selling drinks at a teenager’s nightclub. We had no alcohol there, of course; it was all just sodas and juice; but, one week the owner had gotten a couple cases of non-alcoholic beer.

A few of the kids were pretty excited to see the beer. They either didn’t hear or didn’t understand that it was non-alcoholic. It looked like beer. It tasted like beer. They started drinking it, pounding it, really; just as hard as their big brothers might at a frat party. You know what? They got just as drunk as if they had been drinking real alcohol. They would have passed a breathalyzer test, but wouldn’t be able to drive real well. We actually talked them into surrendering their keys and calling their parents. Boy were the parents mad when they thought we had been giving beer to their children.

So, you see, it is not necessary to actually use a drug to be effected by a drug, and it’s possible to relapse without ever actually touching the stuff.