You’re mindful of your food choices, counting calories, and seeing positive changes in your lifestyle. Abstinence can take various forms, with alcohol abstinence being one common example. At its most basic, this involves refraining from consuming anything containing alcohol, but a person might also choose to avoid situations that could involve alcohol, like Sober living house going to nightclubs or bars.

Overcoming the Abstinence Violation Effect:

Typically among those mechanisms are negative emotional states like shame, misunderstanding, and blame. People may sometimes feel that relapse is an indication of an inherent flaw or an entirely uncontrollable aspect of their disease, causing them to experience cognitive dissonance and feel ashamed, hopeless, or unable to combat relapse. It has also been used to advocate for managed alcohol and housing first programs, which represent a harm reduction approach to high-risk drinking among people with severe AUD (Collins et al., 2012; Ivsins et al., 2019). Because relapse is the most common outcome of treatment for addictions, it must be addressed, anticipated, and prepared for during treatment.

Is abstinence a decision to avoid risk behaviors?

Hopefully, one does not lose all the knowledge and abstinence violation effect experience gained along the journey. That said, the effectiveness of abstinence can depend on the person’s own self-efficacy, their reason for abstaining, their support system, and various other factors. This can have treatment implications for people living with substance use disorders.

Addiction Programs

• Abstinence can take various forms, with alcohol abstinence being one common example.
• It often takes the form of a binge following a lapse in sobriety from alcohol or drugs, but it can also occur in other contexts.
• It doesn’t seem logical that we would still experience cravings when we were only just recently hurt by a relapse.
• For Jim and Taylor, this might involve acknowledging the months of sobriety and healthier lifestyle choices and understanding that a single incident does not erase that progress.

Giving up on sobriety should never feel like a justified response to vulnerability. The abstinence violation effect (AVE) describes a common response among people practicing abstinence when relapse occurs. It often takes the form of a binge following a lapse in sobriety from alcohol or drugs, but it can also occur in other contexts. For example, someone who has been on a diet might have a small slip-up and then binge on unhealthy foods. Similarly, someone trying to quit smoking might smoke a whole pack of cigarettes after just having one.

Moving Forward in Recovery After AVE

One day, they feel overwhelmed by stress and turn to binge eating as a coping mechanism, consuming large quantities of food in a short period. Following this binge episode, they experience shame, guilt, and self-criticism for “falling back” into old patterns. They may engage in compensatory behaviors like strict dieting or purging to counteract the perceived failure.

Recognizing the factors that contributed to the lapse, such as stressors or triggers, helps individuals to develop strategies and techniques to navigate similar challenges in the future. In the multifaceted journey of overcoming addiction and living a healthier life, individuals often encounter a psychological phenomenon known as the abstinence violation effect (AVE). Those who drink the most tend to have higher expectations regarding the positive effects of alcohol9. In high-risk situations, the person expects alcohol to help him or her cope with negative emotions or conflict (i.e. when drinking serves as “self-medication”). Expectancies are the result of both direct and indirect (e.g. perception of the drug from peers and media) experiences3. In both examples, the abstinence violation effect manifests as an intense emotional response to a perceived lapse in recovery efforts, leading to further distress and potentially harmful behaviors.

• Life situations, relationships, and commitments all have to be parsed through carefully and continually evaluated for balance and harmony.
• They may engage in compensatory behaviors like strict dieting or purging to counteract the perceived failure.
• The AVE was introduced into the substance abuse literature within the context of the “relapse process” (Marlatt & Gordon, 1985, p. 37).
• Self-efficacy is defined as the degree to which an individual feels confident and capable of performing certain behaviour in a specific situational context5.
• Set realistic expectations for your recovery journey, understanding that progress may not always be linear.

Learning to recognize and manage this effect is crucial in eating disorder recovery to promote self-compassion, resilience, and sustainable progress. The AVE is a complex interplay of cognitive, emotional, and motivational factors that contribute to intense negative reactions following a perceived violation of self-imposed rules or goals. Understanding the underlying mechanisms can help individuals in recovery develop strategies to manage the AVE effectively and promote resilience in maintaining their desired behaviors.

It can also support the development of healthier attitudes toward lapses and the possibility of relapse at some point in time. One of the most critical predictors of relapse is the individual’s ability to utilize effective coping strategies in dealing with high-risk situations. Coping is defined as the thoughts and behaviours used to manage the internal and external demands of situations that are appraised as stressful. A person who can execute effective coping strategies (e.g. a behavioural strategy, such as leaving the situation, or a cognitive strategy, such as positive self-talk) is less likely to relapse compared with a person lacking those skills.

Changing how recovery is viewed

These properties of the abstinence violation effect also apply to individuals who do not have a goal to abstain, but instead have a goal to restrict their use within certain self-determined limits. The limit violation effect describes what happens when these individuals fail to restrict their use within their predetermined limits and the subsequent effects of this failure. These individuals also experience negative emotions similar to those experienced by the abstinence violators and may also drink more to cope with these negative emotions. Another possible outcome of a lapse is that the client may manage to abstain and thus continue to go forward in the path of positive change, “prolapse”4. Many researchers define relapse as a process rather than as a discrete event and thus attempt to characterize the factors contributing to relapse3.