Recovery Compass: A Free Values-Based Addiction Recovery Tool
Recovery plans built entirely on willpower and shame tend to hold until the first hard week. Plans built on values, specific trigger knowledge, and a rehearsed response hold longer, because they give you something to move towards rather than only something to avoid. This free companion maps your triggers, the function the substance or behaviour serves, the values you actually want to live by, and a concrete plan for high-risk moments.
Every addiction is doing a job
Substances and compulsive behaviours persist because they work at something — shutting off sensory overload, quieting an inner critic, making social contact bearable, ending a night of insomnia, muting a trauma memory. Recovery that removes the behaviour without replacing the function leaves the original problem fully intact. Naming the job is not an excuse; it is the part that determines what needs to be built alongside stopping.
Triggers are specific, not general
"Stress" is not a trigger you can plan for. "Sunday evening, alone, after an unresolved argument, when the house is quiet" is. The companion pushes for that level of specificity across internal states, times, places, people, and transitions, because a plan can only be attached to a situation you can see coming.
Neurodivergence and substance use
Autistic and ADHD adults have elevated rates of substance use, frequently as self-medication for sensory load, executive dysfunction, insomnia, or social anxiety. Recovery approaches that ignore this tend to fail, because the underlying load returns immediately once the substance is removed. Sensory and executive supports are part of relapse prevention, not a separate issue.
Lapse is data, not verdict
The abstinence violation effect — treating one lapse as proof that the whole attempt has failed — turns a single event into a sustained return. Planning in advance for what you will do in the hour after a lapse, and writing it down while calm, is one of the highest-value things a self-help tool can offer.
How to use this tool
- Name the function: what is the substance or behaviour actually doing for you?
- List triggers with time, place, person, and internal state.
- Write the values you want to move towards, in your own words.
- Write a lapse plan before you need it. Everything stays in your browser.
Common questions
- Is this a substitute for addiction treatment?
- No. It is free psychoeducational self-help. Withdrawal from alcohol, benzodiazepines, and some other substances can be medically dangerous and requires professional supervision. Use this alongside treatment, not instead of it.
- Why focus on values rather than consequences?
- Consequence-focused motivation fades as the consequence recedes, and it runs on shame, which is itself a common relapse trigger. Values give a direction that remains meaningful on ordinary days.
- What should I do straight after a lapse?
- Follow a plan you wrote while calm: contact one named person, remove access, eat and sleep, and record what preceded it. The critical window is the hours immediately afterwards, when a single lapse either stays a lapse or becomes a return.
Where this fits
This companion is free psychoeducational self-help. It is not therapy, diagnosis, or crisis care, and it does not replace a licensed clinician. Everything you enter is stored locally in your own browser and is never transmitted to a server.
It lives inside FeelingsHelper Adults Mode, alongside more than sixty other free companions for autism, ADHD, PTSD, and trauma.
Related free tools
- Ikigai & Purpose — A worked ikigai process built for monotropic focus and fluctuating capacity.
- Costs of Addiction — An honest cost-benefit sheet you can read back at the moment of craving.
- Gratitude Journal — Small, specific, honest entries — no forced positivity.
- Positive Gratitudes — Notice it, stay with it ten seconds longer, then tell someone.
- Purpose & Meaning (Teens) — Values as directions you can act on today, not job titles.