Relapse isn't just a sign of failure—it's often a nervous system event fueled by shame, and that's the heart of what we're diving into today. In Episode 5 of The Pocket Recovery Show, Vance Hansen breaks down three specific shame architectures that can lead to relapse in addiction recovery: the addict label, social hiding, and the painful shame of lost years. He shares a personal story about his own relapse, illustrating how shame can create a suffocating loop that drives individuals back to substances instead of towards healing. We also tackle the crucial distinction between shame and guilt—where shame says, “I am bad,” guilt focuses on the action and can actually lead to repair. By exploring the mechanisms to break this shame-relapse cycle, including safe disclosure and body-first techniques, we aim to equip you with practical tools to navigate this challenging terrain. So, let’s get into it and shine a light on the shadows of shame together! In the latest episode of The Pocket Recovery Show, Vance Hansen digs into the murky waters of shame and its profound impact on addiction recovery. He argues that shame is often the unsung hero of relapse, with three specific forms creating unique challenges for those on the path to recovery. Vance highlights the addict label, which can feel like a badge of honor within recovery circles but becomes a source of stigma in the outside world. He also discusses the exhausting toll of living a double life, hiding the truth from loved ones while maintaining a façade, and the crushing weight of guilt over lost years—time that can never be reclaimed. Vance’s personal story adds a powerful dimension to this discussion. He recounts the moment he relapsed while driving home from his second treatment, triggered by feelings of anger and jealousy sparked by alcohol advertising. His narrative serves as a reminder that relapse is not merely a lapse in judgment but often a reaction to the overwhelming load of shame and dysregulation. The episode also introduces the critical difference between shame and guilt, showing how guilt can actually motivate repair and healing, while shame leads to withdrawal and further substance use. Vance emphasizes the importance of safe disclosure in dismantling the shame-relapse loop and shares practical tools for listeners to apply in their own lives. With an engaging mix of humor and heartfelt honesty, this episode is a must-listen for anyone navigating the complexities of recovery.

Takeaways:

• Relapse isn't a sign of weakness; it's often driven by the overwhelming load of shame we carry, especially in addiction recovery.
• Shame and guilt are not the same; while shame makes us feel like we're broken, guilt can lead to repair and connection with others.
• The shame-relapse loop is dangerous because it creates a cycle where shame drives us to hide, making the urge to relapse even stronger.
• Practicing safe disclosure with one trusted person can significantly help in breaking the cycle of shame and relapse, allowing for healing and connection.

Links referenced in this episode:

• PocketRecovery app

Welcome to the Pocket Recovery Show.

I'm your host, Vance Hanson.

Each episode, we dive into the raw real causes of fear, anxiety, and addiction.

We give you the exact biohacks needed.

To break the cycle, quiet the internal.

Chaos, and regain control of your life.

Thanks for hitting play.

Now let's get started.

Take a breath.

Let your shoulders drop.

A lot of recovery content doesn't cover relapse.

Honestly and candidly, let's change that.

Relapse is not proof you can't recover.

It's not proof you're weak.

It's not proof you're hopeless.

Here's what it actually is.

When the shame gets bigger than the nervous system can handle, that's when people go back.

Not because they failed, but because they were carrying more than their biology could hold.

Study after study shows that shame prone people in recovery are significantly more likely to relapse.

Shame doesn't prevent relapse.

In many cases, it causes it.

And that's what today is about.

We've talked about shame before.

Episode three covered the general shame around the freeze response.

Today we're going somewhere more specific.

The shame that belongs only to addiction.

The shame of the label, the shame of the double life, the shame of the years you can't get back, and the shame that drove me personally back to drinking after I left treatment.

I'm Vance Hansen.

This is episode five of the Pocket Recovery show.

And today we're talking about the shame spiral in recovery.

Before we go into the three shame patterns specific to addiction, I want to say one more thing about relapse.

If you are in that place right now or you're thinking about it, if you've relapsed and you haven't told anyone, this episode is for you specifically.

Stay with me.

We covered shame in episode three, the double hijack.

How self contempt creates a second nervous system threat on top of the first.

That content stands.

But the shame of addiction is a different animal.

It's not just shame about something you did.

It's shame about something you are.

And that changes everything.

How the nervous system handles it, what it costs you, and what it takes to break out.

There are three specific shame patterns that show up in addiction that you won't find anywhere else.

One of them is yours.

The first is the addict label.

And I want to be careful here because this one means two completely different things depending on where you're standing inside the rooms.

In AA NA and the other AA programs in any recovery community built around honest self disclosure, saying, I'm an alcoholic or I'm an Addict is not shameful.

It's courage.

It's the hardest kind of honesty there is.

I say it myself with pride, because getting to the place where you can say it honestly means you survived something that nearly killed you and then did the work to understand it and overcome it.

Inside the rooms, that label is a badge.

But here's what happens when you take that same label outside the rooms.

The broader world doesn't read it as courage.

It reads it as criminal, untrustworthy and broken.

It can cost you a job, a custody case, a relationship, the quality of the health care you receive.

The same two words that produce belonging inside the rooms produce exclusion everywhere else.

That's the dual reality in the attic label, inside pride, outside stigma.

And carrying both of those truths at the same time is a nervous system burden most people that aren't in recovery can't imagine.

The shame I'm addressing here isn't the pride you feel telling your story in a meeting, the pride that's been converted into something healthy through the work.

What I'm addressing is the cost of carrying that same truth into a world that still sees addiction as a character flawless.

That external shame doesn't go away when you get sober.

It requires something more specific.

And we'll get exactly into what that is in Section five.

The second pattern is one that does the most long term damage.

And most people in recovery are living inside of it right now without recognizing it as a nervous system problem.

This is the shame of the double life.

The people who know and the people who don't.

The face you put on at work, the face you show at home, the version of you your family believes in and the version of you you know is actually true.

Here's what maintaining that double life costs your nervous system.

Your brain is a pattern recognition machine.

When you're hiding something, when there's a constant background check running for who might find out, your amygdala is running a low grade threat scan underneath every social interaction.

Not because there's a predator in the room, but because there's a secret in the room and the nervous system treats those the same way.

Every hug, every handshake, every I'm so proud of you.

Every one of those moments is simultaneously a performance and a threat.

Because connection could lead to exposure.

And exposure, your nervous system has decided, means losing everything.

Are you hiding it from people at work?

From your family?

From people who would be devastated to know the truth?

Do you feel like you have to manage what everyone thinks of you at all times?

That's not just exhausting that's your nervous system running a survival protocol 24 hours a day.

Brene Brown's research says it simply shame needs three things to secrecy, silence, and judgment.

Every time you hide, you give it all 3.

The secret keeps the shame alive, and the shame keeps driving the behavior that created it.

The third pattern is the heaviest one.

And it's the only kind of shame that has nowhere to go.

You can make amends for things you did.

You can apologize, you can change the behavior.

But you can't get the years back.

I talked about my daughter in episode three, the Concert, her entire high school band career.

I shared that thought through the lens of the freeze response.

How shame about missing those things kept me missing them more often.

Today, I want to revisit through a different lens what I felt about those lost years.

Wasn't just freeze.

It was specific, suffocating shame of something that can't be fixed.

Those years are gone.

Those conversations that didn't happen are gone.

The person my daughter became while I was too dysregulated to be present, I wasn't there for that.

That doesn't come back.

And shame about something that can't be repaired is one of the most dangerous patterns in addiction recovery.

Not because it's the loudest, because it has no obvious solution.

A shame that has no solution will keep reaching for the substance every time it services.

Do you carry something like this years?

You can't get back a relationship that changed permanently, A moment you can never redo.

That is shame.

And it requires a specific kind of processing, which we will get to.

Let me tell you about the second time I left treatment.

I felt great walking out.

Better than I had in years.

I had the tools, the knowledge.

I'd done the work.

I felt confident.

Maybe too confident.

What I didn't understand was that my nervous system had been regulated in a safe, controlled environment for weeks.

It hadn't been tested yet.

I had about a thousand miles to drive home.

And that's when it happened.

I was driving past a restaurant, a family chain, the kind you see everywhere.

The windows.

They were covered in alcohol.

Promotions, happy hour ads, drink specials.

There were only two signs about food and at least a dozen about drinks.

I felt anger.

Not irritation.

Deep physical anger.

The kind that makes your body feel like it has to do something.

I pulled into the parking lot to process it, but the longer I sat there, the worse it got.

I kept thinking, how could you do this?

You're supposed to be a family establishment, and you're nothing more than a glorified Bar.

I now know what that anger actually was.

It was jealousy.

Jealousy that I wouldn't be able to eat there or at any place with a bar for some time.

I was looking at a life that suddenly had a lot of restrictions in it, and my nervous system was responding to that loss.

I left the parking lot, but I didn't leave the thoughts behind.

How many places sold alcohol.

How many ordinary situations were I going to have to navigate differently?

What was my social life going to look like?

By the time I reached the next town, my nervous system had made a decision.

A decision that my logical brain barely participated in.

I bought a pint of vodka.

Just one.

One last time.

A farewell drink.

And I drank it.

I stopped three more times to get alcohol on my way home.

What happened next is what this whole episode is built to explain.

I didn't tell anyone.

I couldn't.

The calculation my nervous system was running was simple and brutal.

Disclosure means loss.

If they know, they leave.

If they leave, everything I just did disappears.

My nervous system wasn't wrong about the sticks.

It was wrong about the only solution.

So I carried it.

And here's what carrying it did to me.

The shame.

It didn't stay the same level.

It grew every day I didn't tell the truth.

The secret got heavier.

Every time someone said they were proud of me.

The gap between who they thought I was and who I knew myself to be, it got wider.

And a nervous system carrying that kind of chronic shame does what it always does and looks for relief.

I started feeling so uncomfortable at home and at work that I began drinking in the morning again.

Not because the craving had come back, not because I was triggered by an external event.

Because shame had become more unbearable than the sobriety.

And the only thing that had ever reliably quieted the shame, even temporarily, was alcohol.

That is the shame relapse loop in its most complete form.

And I was right back where I started.

What happened next is what this episode is built to explain.

Most relapse prevention focuses on external triggers.

People, places, and things.

Those are real.

But what my story shows is that one of the most dangerous relapse triggers isn't external at all.

It's the shame about the previous use.

The shame that grows into silence between who you are and who everyone thinks you are.

Here's how that loop works.

Shame drives hiding.

Hiding grows the shame.

The shame dysregulates the nervous system.

The nervous system reaches for the only relief it knows, and the loop completes itself.

The substance was never the problem.

It.

It was solution to the shame load that had no other way out.

Which is why addressing the shame directly and not the behavior or the craving, but the architecture of the addiction.

Shame is the most important intervention in recovery.

And it's one most programs address.

Last, there are two emotions that most people in recovery treat like they're the same thing.

They are not.

Those two emotions, shame and guilt, both feel terrible.

Both come from knowing something went wrong and that you were part of it.

But they work completely differently in the brain.

One of them drives relapse, while the other one can actually drive recovery.

Here's the difference.

Shame says I am bad.

It's about self and it's global.

It turns the behavior into an identity.

I can't be trusted.

I am someone who fails.

People can't love me.

I am broken.

When the self becomes the problem, the nervous system can't move towards repair.

Because repair that would require believing that a different version of you is possible.

Shame doesn't believe that.

Guilt, on the other hand, says what I did was bad.

It's about the action.

It's specific.

It separates the behavior from who you are as a person.

I did something harmful to the people I love.

I made a choice that cost them something real.

That separation self from the action is what creates the possibility of change.

Because the action can change even if the self stays the same.

Here's the research.

Study after study shows that shame prone people in recovery are significantly more likely to relapse where guilt prone people are more likely to repair.

Shame doesn't prevent relapse.

In many cases, it causes it.

Agne's research is direct Shame drives hiding and withdrawal.

Guilt drives repair and disclosure.

Those aren't just emotional differences.

Those are completely different nervous system states.

Guilt activates the area of the brain associated with empathy and understanding other people's experiences.

Shame makes you think about yourself.

You, Guilt makes you think about the people you harmed.

And thinking about the people you harmed is what creates motivation to do something different.

One path leads to hiding, the other leads to repair.

They are not the same emotion.

Here's how it shows up in real life.

When the thought comes, and it will come, that says, I'm an addict and I will always relapse and this is just what I do.

That shame.

That thought is not a fact about you.

It's your nervous system responding to a perceived permanent threat to your identity.

The correction isn't to argue with the thought.

It's to change the frame.

Not I am bad, but I did something harmful.

Not this is who I am, but this is something I did and I can do something different.

That's empowering.

The shift is not minimizing what happened.

It's not an excuse.

It's neurologically accurate.

You are not the addiction.

The addiction was your nervous system's most efficient solution to a dysregulation problem.

It didn't have the tools to solve any other way.

And the nervous system that built that addiction can build a solution.

However, if you can't get out of the shame and into guilt, that is the only thing that can separate yourself from the behavior long enough to ask what do I want to do to repair?

Welcome back.

Let's talk about how to get out of it.

The loop is designed to be invisible.

Shame tells you to fix yourself quietly and alone and without anyone knowing how bad it actually got.

And the instruction fix it alone is exactly what keeps the loop running.

Here's why.

Shame is a social emotion.

It evolved in the context of the group.

It's something that's usually given to you, which means it can only be resolved in the context of a group.

You cannot process shame alone.

Your nervous system physically cannot do it.

What that means is simple.

The thing shame is telling you to avoid being seen being known.

Telling the truth is the only thing that capable of releasing it.

You can't think your way out of shame.

You have to be witnessed out of it.

I oftentimes tell my clients that your mouth is a weapon.

Demons can't hide in the light when something is going on up here in the shame spiral, the quicker you find somebody and you share it with another individual, the quicker your nervous system begins to process it.

This is one of the biological reasons that the AA steps work.

It's the room, the community.

12 People who know what you did are still there.

The nervous system registers that as the counter experience to everything shame predicted.

And that counter experience repeated consistently is how shame begins to lose its hold.

The shame predicted, if they know, they leave the room, says they know and they stayed.

That contradiction experienced in the body is more powerful than any insight the mind can generate.

Safe disclosure doesn't mean telling everyone.

It doesn't mean posting about your relapse or confronting your entire family at once.

It means telling one person, one safe, regulated, honest person, the truth about where you actually are.

Here's what happens physiologically when you do that.

The constant low grade monitoring your brain has been running always Checking, always scanning for who might find out, starts to release your amygdala, that tiny little cashew shape that is your danger alarm.

It's been treating the exposure as a survival threat.

Well, now it gets some new information.

The information is I told the truth and I wasn't rejected.

The prediction was wrong.

For a nervous system that's been organized around the belief that truth means loss, the experience of truth without loss is one of the most regulating things that can happen.

Brown's research shows it.

Clearly shame loses its power the moment it's spoken.

To someone who responds with empathy instead of judgment.

That's not philosophy.

That's your nervous system receiving the one counter experience it has been waiting for.

Do you have a person like that?

One person who can know the truth and stay?

That's where you start.

Not a full disclosure to everyone, just the truth.

The one safe person.

Now let's talk about what to do in your body when the shame arrives before you can get to that person.

Those somatic tools from episode three apply directly to shame.

And here's how to match them to what you're actually dealing with.

When the addict label hits, when identity level shame arrives and you can't separate yourself from the behavior, reach for the butterfly hug.

Cross your arms over your chest.

Fingertips on alternate collarbones and slow taps.

Left, right, left, right.

What it's doing is helping the two hemispheres of your brain begin to process the overwhelming material.

Instead of being imprisoned by it, the grip of I am this begins to loosen.

Are you stuck in a shame thought right now?

Try it.

Cross your arms, tap slowly and let the thought exist while you tap.

Not fighting it, you're processing it.

When the hiding shame activates, when the anxiety of the double life spikes, the physiological sigh is the immediate interrupt.

Double inhale through the nose.

Long exhale through the mouth.

Twice.

It won't solve the secret, but it will drop the activation to make a real decision rather than a survival decision.

When the year's lost shame arrives, the one that collapses you inward because there's nothing to fix it, Vu breathing is the right tool.

Three resonant vu sounds from the chest, sustained in the exhale.

Then the orienting response.

Slow scan of the room, eyes wide.

Your nervous system is being told that it needs to come back online now.

Back to right here.

Not to a past it can't change.

And before any of these tools, before the butterfly hug, before the sigh, before the vu, one thing first.

Name it.

Dan Siegel at UCLA showed that labeling an emotion in language, saying out loud, I Am feeling shame about.

This activates the prefrontal cortex and reduces amygdala firing.

You're not analyzing the shame.

You're naming it.

And naming it reduces its grip before anything else can work.

Name it.

Breathe it.

Tell one safe person.

The loop doesn't break all at once, but it begins to break.

Welcome back to the Final Stretch.

I'm Van Tanson.

Let me acknowledge what we've covered today.

Three shame patterns unique to addiction.

The label, the hiding, and the years you can't get back.

The full story of what happened on my drive home from treatment the second time.

And what the homecoming cost me.

The shame relapse loop.

And why shame not craving drove me back.

The difference between shame and guilt and why one sends us back to using and the other can drive our repair.

And the three ways to start breaking the loop.

Safe disclosure, the biology of being witnessed, and the body.

First tools match to the specific shame states.

Natural.

Odd.

Let me give you just one thing to do with it this week.

But before I do, one more thing about what I shared today.

I've never told that story publicly.

The second treatment.

What happened on the drive home.

What it felt like to get the congratulation knowing what I had already done.

I told it today because the shame around relapse stays dangerous precisely because nobody talks about it honestly.

If this gives one person permission to tell the truth to one safe person instead of going back to using a loan, it's worth every word.

Here's your assignment for this week.

Find the guilt moment.

Find one moment this week where the guilt moved you towards repair instead of shame pulling you towards hiding.

Not a big moment, not a breakthrough.

Just one moment where something in you reached toward the person you harmed or the relationship you damaged instead of away from it.

Notice the difference between those two directions.

In your body.

Shame collapses inward.

It tightens the chest.

It wants to disappear.

Guilt reaches outward.

It has a quality of wanting to do something, to move forward.

Find the moment where you felt that outward reach, even briefly and even if you didn't act on it.

Then I want you to write it down.

One sentence is enough.

What was the moment?

What were you reaching towards?

You're not solving the shame this week.

You're learning to tell the difference between the two emotions in your body.

Once you can feel that difference, once you know what reaching toward feels like, you have something to work with.

That's the whole assignment.

One moment named.

If you want to go further.

Tell one safe person the truth about something you've been carrying.

Not everything.

Not the full story.

One true thing to that one safe person.

Notice what your nervous system does when the secret leaves your body.

Does the weight shift at all?

Even slightly?

That shift is a co regulation beginning.

That's the shame loop starting to break.

I want to close this episode with something I've been building toward since episode one.

The reason the shame is so heavy isn't that you are uniquely damaged.

It's that you've been carrying a biological burden in isolation.

The label, the secret, the years you can't get back without the one resource capable of metabolizing it.

Another human being who knows the truth and stays.

That resource exists in every honest conversation you haven't had yet.

In every room where people are telling the truth about where they actually are.

In every moment you choose to be seen instead of to hide.

The shame didn't make you less.

It made you human.

And humans were never designed to process their most painful experiences alone.

We never were.

Episode six is next, and here's what I want you to hold going into it, you now have the biology.

You now understand why you freeze, why you used, and why the shame made both worse.

What you don't have yet is the daily architecture that holds all of it.

The body first routine that makes regulation the default instead of the emergency response.

That's episode six, the season finale, and it's the most practical episode we've built yet.

Everything you've learned becomes daily practice.

Thank you for being here on the Pocket Recovery Show.

I'm Vance Hansen.

Breathe slow, stay grounded, and I'll see you right back here next time.

That wraps up today's episode of the Pocket Recovery Show.

Remember, change doesn't happen in giant heroic leaps.

It happens in the tiny invisible spaces between a trigger and a reaction.

Every time you choose a deep exhale or a somatic reset instead of running for an escape hatch, you are rewriting your nervous system.

If these strategies brought you some clarity or relief today, please hit subscribe, leave an honest review and share this episode with just one person in your life who always seems to be running on empty.

Let them know they aren't broken either.

For real time support and the daily tools we talked about today, head over to PocketRecovery app.

Your scaffolding is waiting for you there.

Until next time, keep your friends feet on the floor, listen to your system, and be remarkably gentle with your biology.

We'll talk soon.