Have you ever heard someone quote some sobriety statistics about how many people stay sober in recovery and how many people relapse?  It is usually a pretty depressing figure and people who quote it are usually looking for the shock value in it, or they are trying to scare people into motivating them to do what they need to do to stay sober.  The fact is that the relapse rates are pretty bad in recovery, regardless of how you measure them.

You might hear that 5 percent will stay sober for a year.  You might hear only 3 percent, or you might here as high as 50 percent.  For example, Alcoholics Anonymous claims that “of those who really tried, half of them stayed sober without any problems (I’m paraphrasing here), and about a quarter of them stayed sober after some struggles and some relapse, and another quarter of them were a lost cause.”

Now you will notice that they threw in a qualifier there, being those that “really tried.”  Well this is just about useless.  Who is to determine that?  We can look back at those who relapsed and say “well obviously, they were not really trying!”  Therefore, everyone who “really tries” will stay sober using AA.  The qualifier sort of makes the statistic completely useless.

Now, had they said instead “out of every 100 people who come to AA for at least 30 days, half of them stay sober, a third of them do this….” etc.  That would have been much more meaningful.  But their subjective qualifier has muddied their message to the point where it is useless.

So what is the message here?  What is the bottom line?  Is it that the relapse statistics for sobriety are all grim, and they are all accurate, and that the wild optimism of AA should be discarded?  Not really.   The message is all in AA’s subjective qualifier: “Those who really try.”  If you can really try in recovery, you will do well.  What does it mean to “really try” though?

In my experience, it means you have to take massive action.  You have to take tons of action.  You can’t just make a modest effort or even a strong effort.  No, in order to stay sober for the long run, you have to go way above and beyond what you believe to be necessary in recovery.  This is the path to sobriety and it is the level of change and the level of force that is needed to succeed.  That is how you “really try.”