The Truth About Addiction

Your Relapse Is A Nervous System Story with Lisa Arrigo

Lisa Arrigo · April 8, 2026

Author · Wellness · Life Coachin

Interview with Lisa Arrigo

Your Relapse Is A Nervous System Story with Lisa Arrigo

Podcast: The Truth About Addiction

April 8, 2026 · 1 hr 20 min

Send us Fan Mail Your relapse story might not be about “lack of willingness” at all. It might be your nervous system doing its job the only way it learned how: pushing you toward anything that creates a fast hit of safety. I’m joined by Lisa Arrigo, a New York licensed clinical…

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Your Relapse Is A Nervous System Story with Lisa Arrigo

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Key topicsI thought I had healed until my past came looking for meAfter more than 17 years of sobriety and decades working as a trauma therapist, Lisa experienced a cocaine relapse that nearly cost her life and left her waking in a Manhattan hospital unable to remember how she got there. That experience forced her to confront something professional knowledge alone could not protect her from: survival patterns can remain quietly active long after we believe we have healed. In her forthcoming teachable memoir Fall Risk, Lisa explores the uncomfortable space where resilience and fragility coexist, and how recognising the patterns beneath our behaviour may allow us to intervene before a relationship, addiction or crisis becomes our wake-up call.Your body remembers what your mind has learned to forgetTrauma has become part of everyday language, yet Lisa believes much of the conversation still leaves people confused about why they react the way they do and risks pathologising normal adaptations to difficult experiences. Drawing together the neurobiology of trauma, human development, attachment, generational patterns and the story of her own life, Fall Risk explores how experiences beginning before we can consciously remember them can shape the way we attach, protect ourselves, manage emotion and move through relationships decades later. Lisa gives listeners a framework for becoming curious about those patterns rather than simply labelling them, and for asking a more useful question than “What is wrong with me?” - what did my mind and body learn to do in order to survive?The most dangerous thing I carried into that hospital was shameLisa knows both sides of shame: the clinician helping people understand trauma and addiction, and the woman staring into a hospital mirror after an overdose thinking she had destroyed everything she had spent decades rebuilding. Her own relapse challenged the idea that healing means reaching a point where we are somehow immune to old wounds, and showed her how secrecy and self-condemnation can deepen the very patterns we are trying to escape. Through Fall Risk, she opens a more human conversation about addiction, mental health and recovery -one that replaces judgement with curiosity and asks what becomes possible when we stop treating our most painful experiences as evidence that something is fundamentally wrong with us.View all topics →

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.

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About this episode

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Your relapse story might not be about “lack of willingness” at all. It might be your nervous system doing its job the only way it learned how: pushing you toward anything that creates a fast hit of safety. I’m joined byLisa Arrigo, a New York licensed clinical social worker, psychotherapist, trauma specialist, and recovering addict, for a candid conversation about what changes when we stop treating addiction like a moral problem and start treating it like a trauma-informed, nervous system problem.

We talk about why AA and 12-step recovery can be lifesaving for community and structure, and why it can still fall short for people living with complex PTSD, dissociation, and deep attachment wounds. Lisa breaks down how the brain and body respond to threat, what the window of tolerance looks like in real life, and why “knowing better” isn’t enough when the prefrontal cortex goes offline. We also dig into shame as a physiological experience, how it gets wired early, and why compassionate curiosity paired with radical responsibility can change the relapse loop.

You’ll leave with practical, simple somatic tools you can use immediately: feet-on-the-floor grounding, posture and breath cues, hand-on-heart support, and orienting to present-day safety. We close by naming a truth many of us avoid: healing happens in relationship, and real recovery includes learning how to stop outsourcing safety while still letting safe people in. If this helped you, subscribe, share it with someone who needs it, and leave a review so more people can find trauma-informed addiction recovery.

For more about Lisa:

https://www.lisaarrigo.com/

To book a FREE discovery call with Dr. Sam:

https://calendly.com/drharte/free-discovery-call-w-dr-harte

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