How To Come Back After A Relapse
Lisa Arrigo · September 17, 2026
Interview with Lisa Arrigo
Podcast: The One Day At A Time Recovery Podcast
September 17, 2026 · 1 hr 16 min
What happens when someone with more than two decades of sobriety, thirty years as a trauma therapist, and a book in progress about her own healing finds herself in a hospital bed with a yellow wristband that says Fall Risk? Today I sit down with Lisa Arrigo, a licensed clinical…
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About Lisa Arrigo
Psychotherapist and Clinical Social Worker Specializing in Trauma, Attachment, and Addiction
25+ years Experience serving LGBTQ clients2 University degrees: BS & MSW4 Specialist certifications & training milestonesLicensed Clinical Social Worker New York
Lisa Arrigo has spent more than three decades helping people understand what trauma leaves behind long after the original danger has passed. A New York Licensed Clinical Social Worker and psychotherapist, her work sits at the intersection of trauma, attachment, addiction, neurobiology, shame, and the deeply human ways people learn to survive.
Her perspective is powerful because it comes from both sides of the therapeutic relationship. Lisa has devoted her career to helping others heal, while also confronting the impact of trauma, addiction, relapse, and recovery in her own life. After more than 17 years of sobriety, she experienced a cocaine relapse that nearly cost her life and left her waking in a Manhattan hospital unable to remember how she had arrived there. That experience challenged everything she thought she understood about healing and forced her to confront a difficult truth: we can have insight, language, and years of recovery behind us and still carry survival patterns that remain active beneath the surface.
That lived experience now sits alongside decades of clinical training. Lisa earned her BS from Trinity University and her MSW from Fordham University School of Social Work, followed by post-graduate study at the Westchester Institute for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy.
About this episode
What happens when someone with more than two decades of sobriety, thirty years as a trauma therapist, and a book in progress about her own healing finds herself in a hospital bed with a yellow wristband that says Fall Risk?
Today I sit down withLisa Arrigo, a licensed clinical social worker who has been in private practice for over thirty years specializing in complex trauma, Internal Family Systems, and somatic work. She is also a woman in long-term recovery who relapsed in 2022 after twenty-two years sober. She was not white-knuckling it. She was getting her makeup done before a fundraising event when someone offered her a couple of lines of cocaine, and a part of her that she had stopped paying attention to said yes before her thinking brain could get a word in. Three months later she overdosed.
Lisa gives the clearest explanation of relapse I have ever heard, and then she shows us the way back.
In this episode, you'll learn:
• Why all addictions begin as coping strategies, and how that changes the question from what is wrong with me to what happened to me
• How epigenetics, in-utero stress, and early attachment wounds wire a nervous system for survival long before the first drink
• Why trauma does not know time, and how memories surface as panic and sensation with no story attached
• What emotional relapse looks like from the inside, and the warning signs Lisa missed in herself
• Why shame, not the substance, is what keeps people from coming back, and how to step out of the shame bath
So without further delay, please enjoy this episode, and let me know what you think!
SHOW NOTES:
Guest Website: https://lisaarrigo.com
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Guest: Lisa Arrigo
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