7.8: Maintenance Phase and Relapse Prevention

Maintenance Phase

When planning to change our behavior we cannot lose sight of the fact that eventually, we will obtain our final goal. At this point, the target behavior is now occurring habitually or without conscious effort, or due to the use of the many strategies we selected. Once this occurs, we need to transition from the treatment phase to the maintenance phase. The strategies used during the treatment phase cannot remain in effect for the duration of our life, so we must phase them out…well, most of them. Some strategies you will want to keep in place. Outside of noting that, a more exhaustive discussion is beyond the scope of this book.

As with all things in life, we hit bumps in the road. We hit them when planning our behavior modification plan, likely hit a few as we employed the treatment, and even in the maintenance phase, we may hit some. In fact, there are two types of issues we may encounter during the maintenance phase:

• Maintenance Problem — Though we have gone to great lengths to ensure our target behavior stays at our desired level, based on the final goal, at times we falter. This is not necessarily due to a return to a problem or undesirable behavior, but maybe just a loss of motivation for walking your dog every night, reading at bedtime, going to the gym, drinking water, studying more regularly, etc.
• Transfer Problem — Recall that we want to generalize our new behavior beyond just training situations/environments. If we establish good study habits when in our dorm, we want to do the same when studying in the student union or in the library. If we go to the gym regularly while at school, we want to do so at home on break. Or maybe you are studying well in all places, but this positive behavior only occurs for classes in your major. In all other classes, your poor study habits have not changed. So, you are performing as well as you want to in some instances, but not in all instances. The desirable behavior has not transferred or generalized as expected.

Relapse Prevention

Before understanding how to prevent relapse, we have to distinguish the terms lapse and relapse. Simply, a lapse is when we make a mistake or slip up. Consider the expression, “Having a lapse in judgment.” This implies that we generally make sound decisions but in this one instance we did not. We made a mistake. What we do not want is an isolated incident becoming a pattern of behavior. When this occurs, we have a relapse. Do not beat yourself up if a lapse occurs. Our problem behavior will inevitably return at some point. We just do not want it sticking around for the long term.

There are people and things that tempt us and situations or places that lead us to temptation more than others. To avoid a lapse turning into a relapse, take special note of high-risk situations and environments, and the people who are present when we cave into temptation. Keeping good records of the ABCs of behavior, and your journal, will help you to identify these situations and people. Then you can develop new plans to deal with them or to re-establish old ones.

For more information on relapse and how to prevent it, see Module 14 of the behavior modification textbook.