Empathy is defined as the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, an important quality for healthcare providers. Medical disorders with overt physical symptoms – those of a heart attack or broken bone, for example – engender these feelings.

Unfortunately, medical disorders with emotional or behavioral symptoms are often not seen in the same light. Psychiatric and substance use disorders are typically relegated to clinicians who have specialized education, training and experience enabling them to help compassionately. But, even for these experts, a patient’s relapse can be challenging.

Dr. J. Craig Allen, medical director of Rushford, says this struggle is understandable.

“You develop a relationship and a treatment plan where the most obvious goal is sobriety,” he says. “A patient’s return to drug or alcohol use, accompanied by the associated actions and behaviors, can feel like a betrayal to the clinician or, worse, a personal failure. A clinician feeling helpless, hopeless and even angry at the patient is not unheard of. Yet this is when the patient is most vulnerable and needs the clinician most. This period can be an opportunity for learning and developing a more solid recovery plan.”

It’s important for professionals with a patient who has relapsed to:

  • Focus on the disease. Addiction changes a person’s brain function impacting decision-making and behaviors. Relapse is just another symptom of that underlying disease.
  • Focus on the chronic disease model. A relapse is unwanted but not unexpected, like a hyperglycemic episode in someone with diabetes.
  • Review the precipitants. This is an opportunity to explore triggers such as people, places or things that may have led to the slip.
  • Remember, abstinence is not the only treatment goal. Developing conflict resolution skills, sober living skills and harm reduction are important tasks as well. Relapsing in a therapeutic relationship that allows for a quick return to treatment and recovery-oriented action avoids a “run” of harmful, even deadly, use.
  • Develop a safety plan. This can include specifics on how the patient will manage high-risk situations in the future and how they want their clinician and other supports to help them manage those situations.
  • Keep it professional. Feelings of disappointment are natural, but a clinician’s responsibility is to help the patient. Conveying hopefulness and having a positive, productive approach is what is needed.
  • Always remember that your patient feels worse. People who relapse experience hopelessness, helplessness and self-loathing, sometimes to the point of suicide.

“Empathy is key to maintaining trust and improving communication,” says Dr. Allen. “It’s vital to the success of our clients that we maintain an empathetic role, particularly during a relapse when they need us most.”

Seeking recovery services for alcohol or opioid addiction? Learn more about MATCH here.