If you're in recovery from addiction, you know relapse can hit you randomly, and unexpectedly, seemingly for no apparent reason. Relapse can attack and ruin your recovery like the bullets from a drive-by shooting.

The biggest problem about recovery is not getting sober. Anyone can do that, at least for a while. The difficult part to sober is staying sober. Fifty percent of all people who attempt recovery from addictive behavior relapse. How do you sustain sobriety? Thats the problem to solve and its a big one.

Even though you keep plugging away at your recovery plan, you notice things around you are shifting. People you care about resist relating to the new, sober you. They don't take you seriously about this recovery stuff and begin to innocently offer you your addiction of choice. Your kid says you lost the right to have authority over him when you were using. Your spouse says he or she liked you better the way you used to be, drinking or using. You've lost the old people and places and have not yet replaced them. Loneliness, self-doubt, confusion, craving and stress repossess you.

Then it happens. When you least expect it, relapse bullets come straight at you and you have no protection. You relapse or change to another addiction. Perhaps you stop the addictive behavior once again, but your recovery is hollow, white-knuckle sobriety. You worry when you will lose sobriety; you wonder where is the joy and serenity you had been promised? Dodging relapse bullets can be exhausting and self-destructive. You need a bulletproof way to stay with recovery and prevent relapse.

Here are five tips that work for my clients and their sustained recovery:

1. Anything you can do to reduce chronic anxiety will increase the odds of staying sober longer. Chronic anxiety is a matter of life style, your regular living habits. Take fewer risks, drive the speed limits, meditate, do body work, talk slower, give up the belief faster is better, live within your means.

2. Watch the words you use. Want success with sobriety, use success words. Relapse prevention is not a phrase about success. Sustained sobriety is. Ill try to stay sober, is not a success phrase. I am sober, now, is.

3. Be realistic with expectations. Is it realistic to think you can be sober for the day? Ok, then just get through the morning without using. Not so sure about that? Take it an hour at a time. Think you can go to that wedding and not use, a wedding where old using buddies will show up? Come on. I mean use if you must, but dont try to get yourself to believe it will be a snap to abstain.

4. Get yourself surrounded with people who know what successful recovery looks like and who will show you with their own personal example. No more talk. Show yourself the money, if you really mean to be successful.

5. The single most reliable predictor of sustained sobriety is the regular use of a sponsor or mentor for your recovery. This can be a 12 step sponsor, a coach, a counselor, or guru. But it needs to be a person of your same sex and one who walks the walk of successful, Bulletproofed Recovery.