After years of sobriety, or mere months and weeks, why do alcoholics relapse? Jowita, mother and alcoholic, doesn’t believe in “slips”. Instead she experienced relapse as a “fuck it” moment immediately preceding a conscious decision to ‘let go [of AA] and let Smirnoff’. Condemned to the purgatory of lying about drinking while occasionally attending meetings, it was the mental dissonance, born of dishonesty that finally proved unbearable for her. Recommitting wasn’t easy but she eventually embraced those elements of the program that sensibly enabled her to build her sober life within and without AA.

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