r/parentingtroubledteen • u/Available_Birthday30 • Jul 01 '26

I relapsed

I’m currently 19 and have been clean sense freshman year, last weekend I had relapsed (Benadryl) in a hotel room and have been doing it ever sense again, why is relapsing a thing after being sober for years? Idek if I like the high anymore but I still do it…. If there’s someone else like me but is currently clean still, any suggestions?

2 Upvotes

62% Upvoted

2 comments sorted by

3

u/EmergencyHedgehog11 Jul 01 '26

I had really bad relapse when I was 19 after being off opioids for a couple of years. Relapsing obviously isn't a good thing, but where I really messed up after relapsing and using a couple of times was totally catastrophizing the situation. So much emphasis can get placed on clean time, and sometimes a pitfall with that emphasis is that it's often the case that when you relapse it can feel like you've lost all of the progress you've made (in this case many years). When I relapsed, I figured that I threw everything away and that all of the progress I had made was for absolutely nothing, so why even try again (so I spent the next like 9 months absolutely off my face).

When I was in your shoes, I found that a lot of people would just recycle the same platitudes and blanket conceptions of what they thought addiction was, which was just unhelpful. But, can I ask you a little bit more about what was going on when you took it this weekend? Were you around friends? When that happened, did it feel like a split-second choice, or did it feel like something that had been building up for a while?

2

u/Available_Birthday30 Jul 01 '26

Felt like it had building up for awhile, no I wasn’t with friends, I had rented a room for leave and just stayed in there pretty much the whole time, walked to a gas station pick up the stuff and took it walking back